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WebCT Procedures

General:

The student maintenance programs (those programs that process adds/drops, etc.) for WebCT have been rewritten to be more tightly integrated with Banner, and thus consequently are more automated. Because of this, only officially registered SUU students will have a WebCT account. It has become prohibitive to manually manage accounts for non-students. If they aren't a registered student for the current semester, then they won't have a WebCT account. Faculty/Instructors can still have generic WebCT courses that are not associated with a specific course and section, but it is their responsibility to add/drop students from their course list. However, you must contact Mark Walton if you have one of these courses. The automated process may remove the student from this special course since it is not an "official" course.

During the first three weeks of the semester, the system will process adds/drops every hour at the top of the hour. After the first three weeks, the system will process changes once a day at 6:00am in the morning.

Student Accounts:

Every registered student will now have a WebCT account, regardless of whether or not they are actually registered for a course that utilitizes WebCT. Network resources for students (access to campus computer labs, access to email, a WebCT account) are granted the day after a student officially registeres for classes. For example, if a student registered for Fall classes back in May, then the networks accounts were created back in May when that student registered.

Access to the actual WebCT courses for which a student is registered will NOT be available until the first day of the semester. If an instructor wants to grant early access to a course, they can do so manually if they know the username of the student(s). However, early access may be broken by the automated processes up to the first day of the semester, and uninterrupted early access cannot be guaranteed.

Student access to courses will be removed the day after final grades are due.

Reminder: Because the WebCT accounts are tied to the network accounts, a student's username/password are the exact same as what they use to access the campus computer labs and their e-mail. If a student does not know his/her username, there is a link on the WebCT home page where they can go to look it up. If a student does not know his/her password, there is a link on the WebCT home page where they can go to change it. Also, any lab technician should be able to help with username/password issues.

Instructors:

Even though student access is removed the day after final grades are due, the student data (grades, discussions postings, etc.) will reside in the course until the instructor resets the course in preparation for the new semester. If an instructor does not reset the course and the new semester begins, then the incoming students will be added to the old student data.

How do I reset a course?

A course must be registered with Mark Walton through an online form to have students placed in it, and to prevent the course from being deleted (see below). An instructor can begin registering his/her courses for the upcoming semester beginning on the first day of finals. Just because an instructor has requested the creation of a course shell within WebCT does not imply that the course has been registered. Each course must be registered through the online form each semester to enable student access for that semester.

How do I register a course?
How do I check to see if my course is registered?

All WebCT courses will be archived one week following the due date for submission of final grades. If you wish to have all of your student data included in the archive, do NOT reset your course until after the archival date. Course archives will be kept for one year before they will be deleted.

WebCT courses for the just ended semester will be deleted one week following the due date for submission of final grades (after archival), UNLESS the instructor has registered the course as explained above for the next semester. If an instructor will not be teaching that class for the next semester, but will be teaching it in the future, then register the course as if it was going to be taught, and enter an explanation in the Comments field. If an instructor is not scheduled to teach the same course again, but wants to keep the course available for possible future use, then the archive can be provided to the instructor for safekeeping. If the course is needed in the future, the archive can be uploaded again to the WebCT server.

Because every student will have a WebCT account, instructors can add their own students, TA's, and Designers. Simply go to the appropriate screen and enter the WebCT ID which is the same as their campus username.

How do I add a student?
How do I add a Teaching Assistant (TA)?
How do I add a Designer?

How do I remove a student?
How do I remove a Teaching Assistant (TA)?
How do I remove a Designer?

In each course the instructor needs to add Term, Section, and Status columns. The Term column will be updated with the current term of the registered student. The Section column will have the section the student registered for. This will allow instructors that combine sections into one WebCT course to be able to know what section a particular student is in. The Status column will have the enrollment status, "E" for enrolled and "D" for dropped. Again, a dropped student's data is not automatically removed from the course. It is the responsibility of the instructor to remove any dropped students from his/her course.

How do I add a Term, Section, and Status column to the gradebook?

Course backups of active (current semester) courses are made nightly and available for six weeks. If you have a problem, we can go back as far as six weeks for a restore. This is a course-wide backup. I do not have the ability to restore a single student if accidentally deleted. I would need to restore the entire course.

Because courses are deleted or reset at the ending of each semester, it is highly recommended to make a backup of the gradebook if the gradebook is being used.

How do I backup up the gradebook?

Reminder: Faculty support for the use of WebCT (how do I add content, how do I use the gradebook, etc.) is provided by the IMIC, imic@suu.edu, 586-1994. They have some good tutorials on how to use the various WebCT tools. For technical issues related to the server, course backups, etc., you can contact Mark Walton, walton@suu.edu, 586-7919.

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