Why so many web sites?

Here’s a response that I wrote to an IS 6100 stu­dent this morn­ing. This stu­dent was pleased that I’m not using WebCT. Frankly, I share their joy! I think the university’s imple­men­ta­tion of WebCT is clumsy, awk­ward and slow, and I had hav­ing to log into Pipeline first.

How­ever, the stu­dent was also con­cerned about how to keep up with my announce­ments to the class.

Note: IS 7010 stu­dents can check http://billso.com/courses/7010/ for their announce­ments, and I’ll be set­ting up a new IS 7010 page soon, too.

Thanks for your ques­tions! They’re good!

As you noted, HPU’s imple­men­ta­tion of WebCT is not reli­able. For­tu­nately, I can use TurnItIn.com to man­age the assign­ments and post your grades. It’s much more secure than any­thing I could install on billso.com.

The orig­i­nal­ity checker is a nice bonus. It helps keep your assign­ments from being copied by other students.

I can under­stand your con­cerns about check­ing two addi­tional web sites! If you check http://billso.com/courses/6100 reg­u­larly, you shouldn’t miss any­thing. I would book­mark that web address if I were you!

Believe me, I work hard to man­age these sites and make them easy to use. So I will be phas­ing out my cur­rent page at http://hpu.sodeman.com/6100 dur­ing the next cou­ple of weeks. They are butt-ugly and dif­fi­cult to use.

I’m set­ting up a page on billso.com to post files for IS 6100. There will be a big announce­ment about it when I get it done.

Let me know if you have more questions!

William A. Sode­man, Ph.D.
Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Infor­ma­tion Systems

Tagged as: administrivia, WebCT