| Welcome to the WebCT Tutorial!
WebCT is a course management system. It provides a space where you can read course materials, participate in discussions with your instructor and other students, submit homework assignments, participate in a chat, check grades, take quizzes and much more. By the end of this tutorial, you should know where to find everything in this course and be able to use the technology to become successful online students. It typically takes a week or so to get used to finding everything without using some of the cheat sheets that I've provided - for example the Course Geography handout. Be patient with yourself - it will happen. Rather than get frustrated, if you can't find something, ask questions in the Student Lounge on the Discussion Board. Helpful Hint: Some students prefer to copy the entire tutorial and follow the steps from a paper copy while experimenting online with WebCT. Others prefer to open two browser windows by selecting their IE icon twice and going to the course website twice. This allows you to read the tutorial from one window and experiment with the WebCT functions from the other window. Choose whichever method works best for you. How might the skills you learn in this Module help you become a more successful online learners? Online learning is new to most students. Many things about online learning take some getting used to. One of the goals of online teachers is to make the technology transparent. As soon as you learn how to get around WebCT and learn a couple of basic technology skills, you will be able to spend more time learning the course material. The goal of this tutorial is to give you practice using WebCT. In no time at all, you will be clicking around, finding what you are looking for with ease. On to the WebCT Module: In this module you will learn how to:
Each course is set up slightly differently. If you take another online course, it may have a different look or use different parts of WebCT. How to proceed: In each section, you will read an online mini-lecture, be guided through a step-by-step practice session. At the end of the module, you will take a quiz to test your knowledge. Don't panic. This is an open Internet tutorial. That means you can look back and find the answers. You are encouraged to retake the quizzes until you answer all questions correctly. One of the magical things about taking quizzes from within WebCT is that the results are scored immediately. You will find your results behind "My Grades" in the Course Menu. While we're at it, let's begin learning some WebCT terminology. Course Menu may look like this:
However, you can expand it by selecting the green triangle to make it look like this:
I will refer to this as the Course Menu. It contains a list of all parts of this course. If you leave it expanded, all parts of the course will be available to you from every page - that is, as long as you don't travel outside of WebCT. A word about how this tutorial is organized: There are links on the top of each page that allow you to go to any lesson. It is recommended that you finish the lessons in order, but you are able to skip around and customize the tutorial to meet your needs. There are 5 lessons. Each lessons contains several steps. Each step is listed at the top of the page. It is recommended that you progress through the lesson sequentially, but, again, you may jump to the sections that are of most interest to you. Each lesson is similarly sequenced. First you read, then you practice, then you do an activity. The skills you learn in this tutorial are most important for becoming an effective and efficient online learner. Once you have mastered the skills, you'll be one step closer to being comfortable in the online learning environment. Enjoy! You are now ready to go to Lesson 1
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