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WebCT
Issues How can an instructor display quiz results in both mean and median formats? How can an instructor link multiple words in the glossary? How can an instructor incorporate PowerPoint presentations into WebCT? Can an instructor or student logout of a WebCT course? Can an instructor or student use the Back Button of the browser window to navigate in WebCT? Can an instructor export the student grade-book from WebCT to an Excel spreadsheet? Are the responses from a survey tool anonymous? How can an instructor reset grades for all students? Sometimes a student cannot find a course in order to add it! Why does this happen? Can students print online quizzes from WebCT?
Faculty may choose to take a comprehensive WebCT workshop over a three-day period for 4 hours each day or attend short workshops on specific WebCT tools they want to incorporate into their courseware.
Where can I find information regarding online Degree Programs and course offerings? To find out about details on courses available at Texas A&M, you could contact the Admissions Offices at A&M. The directory inquiry number at A&M is (979) 845-3211. The web page on Prospective Students has important phone numbers that may be relevant sources of information. Please refer to the Texas A&M Distance Education website for more information on such courses and programs at http://www.tamu.edu/ode/disted/ In addition to this, you can contact Jan Richards, at the Office of Distance Education: jwr@DISTANCE-ED.TAMU.EDU for specific information. Here are some more useful links:
Texas A&M University web site: http://www.tamu.edu WebCT Issues Some students cannot access the WebCT Chat tool and sometimes the chat tool does not seem to connect to the server! This could be occurring because of the port from which Chat was attempted (port number for WebCT chat by default is set to 4445). Some companies may have disabled this port due to firewall security. More information on the port numbers and configurations for WebCT can be found out at: http://www.fau.edu/irm/aiss/i-n-r/ftg/disted/webct2.htm After posting a message using the "Threaded Discussions" tool in WebCT, an instructor sometimes cannot view the posting! After posting a message (which incidentally is marked 'NEW'), a 'Reload Frame' may be necessary to actually view this recent posting. How can an instructor assign grades to students who have submitted their quizzes through WebCT and Scantron? WebCT does not allow editing of the Quiz column under "Manage Students". To assign grades for any student who turns in an assignment through Scantron, an instructor needs to create another column for that quiz and enter in grades for all students in this column. The instructor will have to manually assign grades for those students who submitted their tests through Scantron and copy the WebCT-assigned grades for the remaining students who turned in their tests through WebCT. Lastly, the instructor will need to set the option such that only this column will be displayed to all students. For more details, please refer to the Assigning Grades handout. How can an instructor display quiz results in both mean and median formats? To display exam results in both mean and median formats, an instructor needs to create a column to handle each result format. If the instructor does not do this and enters all the Exam scores in one format and tries to convert to the other format, all the student data may be lost! For more details, please refer to the Assigning Grades handout. Students
cannot "View Results" after submitting a quiz for grading and see
the following error "Premature end of script headers /WebCT /WebCT_3.1.2
/webct /webct /courses / There could be several reasons why this error is encountered. Here is a listing: - Incorrect Quiz Settings If an instructor sets the option for allowing an "unlimited number of attempts" under "Quiz Settings" but leaves the field for "Minimum separation time of ___ minutes between attempts" blank in any quiz, then students may encounter the above script error while trying to submit their quiz for grading. Setting this field to a numerical value of either "0 minutes" or "1 minute" will solve the problem. - Partially Graded Quiz If any quiz has a paragraph type question (which needs to be manually graded by the instructor) but if the instructor has set the "Student Score Release" option to "Release Score Once Quiz has been Submitted" under "Quiz Settings", this will evoke the script error since WebCT will not be able to display the total score for a student's quiz in which one or more of the questions have not been auto-graded. Here's what the instructor needs to do to get around the problem: For a quiz that has some questions that need to be graded manually (for instance a quiz which contains paragraph type questions), an instructor would need to set the option for "Release the score once the quiz has been submitted and all the questions have been graded" under "Quiz Settings - Student Score Release". This way, when a student selects "View Results", WebCT will display a message "Scores not available" and these scores will become available only after the instructor grades the ungraded questions for all the students. If on the other hand, the quiz does not have questions that need manual grading, an instructor can simply set "Release the score once the quiz has been submitted"; WebCT would then display the score for all questions when the quiz is submitted. Here's some more clarification: A manually graded quiz would be one, which needs instructor intervention to complete the grading process; in a fully automated type, WebCT can complete the grading of all questions and give a total grade. - Email submissions A third possible factor that may contribute to the script error may be this: Under "Email submissions" on the quiz settings page, if anything is entered into the text field labeled "Send a copy of each student's submission via e-mail to ", a student may encounter the same error while taking the quiz. This could be occurring because the option of external e-mail may not have been enabled at the WebCT server. For more details, please refer to the Advanced Quiz Settings handout. How can an instructor link multiple words in the glossary? In the WebCT Glossary, multiple word links do not display in Netscape. The solution is to insert dashes/underscores to link multiple words so that they appear as a one-title word. For more details, please refer to the Glossary Keywords handout available. After making changes to any course page in a WebCT course and clicking "Update", an instructor may not always see the updated results. Page Refresh needs to be done explicitly by right clicking within the frame and selecting "Refresh" or "Reload Frame". Just using "Update" in WebCT does not always update the changes made to the screen. For more details, please refer to the WebCT Page Refresh handout. How can an instructor incorporate PowerPoint presentations into WebCT? First an instructor needs to save all the PowerPoint slides as HTML pages. Then these files will have to be zipped and the resulting folder will need to be uploaded to WebCT from the instructor's local computer into WebCT's myFiles folder. These files can be unzipped from within the myFiles folder. Now the "powerpoint_file.htm" file can be linked to any content page within the course. Students can click on this hyperlink to start off the presentation. Here's a word of caution though: The above process works only in an Internet Explorer browser and not with Netscape. This is because Netscape cannot interpret the HTML tags generated by Microsoft PowerPoint. Can an instructor or student logout of a WebCT course? There is no logout feature in WebCT. Once an instructor or student logs in, the only way to log out is to close the browser window. However, here's a good workaround for designers to maintain the student and designer view in the same browser window: To let WebCT distinguish between two persons add the login + password to the URL as follows (assuming PersonA/PasswordA is valid): http://PersonA:passwordA@webctaddress This will let you into your course immediately (without prompting for a login). The "webctadres" can be any page inside the course; it needn't be the home page. If you do not want to display the password in the URL field, you could then just supply the login name and you will be prompted for the password. Now simply bookmark each of the two URLs. If you are the designer, make four bookmarks for each one: one for the designer role and one for the student role. Can an instructor or student use the Back Button of the browser window to navigate in WebCT? Using the "Back" button of the browser menu can mess up the navigation in WebCT. It is recommended that an instructor or student use only the links on the homepage or the Navigation bar provided by WebCT. Can an instructor export the student grade-book from WebCT to an Excel spreadsheet? To export the grade book from WebCT to an Excel spreadsheet, an instructor needs to go into "Manage Course- Manage Students" and click on the "Download" button. Either a comma or a tab can be chosen as the separator. Then the "Download" button needs to be clicked. This file can be saved on the instructor's local computer. The file gets saved with a default file name of the form: "class_Date[number].txt.wct". Within Excel, when an instructor tries to open the file, Excel will open up a Text Import Wizard. The file type will need to be chosen as "Delimited" and the "Next". button clicked. Under Delimiters, the instructor can choose the type of delimiter that he wishes to use say for instance the "tab" delimiter. Then he needs to select "Next". For the next option, an instructor can leave it as default - "General" and click "Finish". Now he should be able to view the student records in the form of an Excel file. For more details, please refer to the Exporting Student Grades in Excel handout. Are the responses from a survey tool anonymous? Surveys are by default anonymous, but they do show who voted, and also how votes were cast, but they don't put these two together (that is, you can see that Susan voted and you can see that someone voted for choices 1, 2, and 3, but unless Susan was the ONLY one who voted, you wouldn't be able to put voter together with vote.) Also, by default, a "student" can only submit the survey one time, so can only vote once. How can an instructor reset grades for all students? In order to add a question to a Quiz that has already been taken by a student, an instructor needs to reset the results for all the students. This can be done by choosing "Manage Course - Manage Students" and selecting the relevant quiz. Click on the link for "Submissions" under the Quiz name and then under "Options" choose "Reset" after selecting all the students and click "Update". This should reset the grades for all the selected students. It may be a good idea to then "Update the Student View" by selecting "View Designer Map - Update Student View - Update" so that the changes will be reflected in the student view too. For more details, please refer to the Advanced Quiz Questions handout. Is it possible for instructors or students to forward their WebCT email to an external email address? The WebCT system-administrator can enable /disable e-mail forwarding and sending to external addresses from within WebCT. Both these aren't visible from designer options within courses because they have been disabled by the system-administrator for this University. However, they can be enabled via individual faculty requests. For more details, please refer to the Advanced Quiz Settings handout. Sometimes a student cannot find a course in order to add it! Why does this happen? If a student cannot find a particular course when he wants to add it, it may be because the course is listed under "WebCT Inactive Courses". If this is the case, the student needs to contact Jan Richards at the Office of Distance Education; her e-mail is j-richards1@tamu.edu. Can students print online quizzes from WebCT? Students can print quizzes off the WebCT course page. Unfortunately, any attempt to disable the Print option would be circumvented by students quickly. For example, if the Print option could be grayed out, all that would be required is alt-prtscrn (from Windows) or Shift-Apple-3 (from a Mac) to capture a graphical image of the quiz. This is true for any web page. As such, the WebCT quizzes are a great tool for increasing comprehension, encouraging folks to take part in the WebCT site, etc. They shouldn't be used unsupervised as a significant part of a course's grade, the same as any other online quiz tool. For more details, please refer to the Advanced Quiz Settings handout. In Content Pages, when the professor enables the note-taking ability on the content pages, can students print out the notes that they write? Is there a keystroke that they can use to print them out? To print out the notes on the content pages, right-click within the frame, and select "Print" from the browser menu options. This would send out the page displaying the Notes to the printer. Another way seems to be to simply hit Ctrl-P on that page (the frame displaying the Notes); this should invoke the browser print option. If just a section of that page is desired, a student can always select that text (by clicking and dragging over), and clicking "Copy" from the right-button menu as above (or hitting Ctrl-C), and pasting the text into Notepad or a text editor and print from there. Respondus How can an instructor gain access to Respondus? The campus-wide license Texas A&M University (College Station) has obtained for the Respondus 1.5 software is for the current employees, instructors, and teaching assistants of TAMU. If you are interested in obtaining Respondus, please email its@tamu.edu and follow the instructions that you'll be receiving via emai. Please do not let unauthorized persons use your copy of the software. Do not distribute your installation password. Contact Instructional Technology Services if you need any help or technical support. Instructional
Technology Services |