The University of Western Ontario wants your help in mapping out the OWL’s newest flight plan.
WebCT OWL, the popular online learning tool used by Western faculty and students since 1998, will be discontinued in January 2013. The vendor, Blackboard Inc., will provide no further updates/enhancements, no technical support, no security patches and no bug fixes. No further development will occur for this environment. Furthermore, updates/maintenance to local WebCT servers and databases could render an unsupported WebCT environment non-functional.
As such, Western views this as an ideal opportunity to review campus needs and plan for the future. The OWL Flight Plan Project, lead by Information Technology Services (ITS), has been initiated to evaluate Western’s requirements for the new version of OWL.
In order to make the best choice for the Western community, the OWL Flight Plan project team is looking for input and feedback from faculty, staff and students.
“This is your opportunity to provide input to the selection of the next Learning Management System (LMS) here at Western. The OWL Flight Plan selection committee will rely on our users to assist in making this very important decision,” says Kim Holland, Teaching Support Centre and OWL Flight Plan Faculty Advisory group member. “We need your opinions and observations about the current WebCT LMS and what has worked, and not worked for you.
If you have experience working with another LMS we would like to know the positives and negatives of that other system.”Please make your voice heard.”There are a number of opportunities to participate in this project all listed on the OWL Flight Plan project page, webct.uwo.ca/owlflightplan, under the “Get Involved” link.
These opportunities include:
• Faculty Information Sessions. The team will be visiting all faculties to introduce this project and invite feedback and suggestions. To find out when a meeting will be held in your faculty, please visit webct.uwo.ca/owlflightplan/calendar. If you are unable to attend the meeting time scheduled for your faculty, you are welcome to attend any other faculty session. There is no registration required to attend these meetings;
• Faculty/staff/student surveys. These anonymous surveys allows members of the Western community to provide feedback specific to their role(s) on campus;
• UserVoice. UserVoice, available to all students, staff and faculty who have a UWO account, offers an interactive way for users of WebCT OWL to share and vote on suggestions regarding the replacement for WebCT. The voting feature organizes suggestions according to popularity making it easier for the OWL Flight Plan Team to determine the best WebCT replacement for Western. To log into UserVoice, go to servlet-dev.uwo.ca/UserVoiceLogin and enter your UWO username and password. From there, you can make a suggestion and/or comment on other suggestions from by your colleagues.
Members of the university community can follow the progress of the project by logging onto https://webct.uwo.ca/owlflightplan/ and clicking on “Updates.”