RogBlog

This is a persistent blog entry that I’ll keep editing to collect examples of how terrible WebCT software is.  It also serves as a memory for myself (and perhaps an FAQ for other hapless faculty) as to how to work around WebCT’s innumerable gotchas.  Though it is useful for a few things — such as automatically communicating grades to students with proper privacy settings on a secure (hopefully!) website, the list of bad things about WebCT is so large that it stuns me universities pay money for this product.

• As a teacher, you can “hide” a column in a grade sheet.  This does not mean hide the column from the student’s view (the totally independent “Release to Student” setting is for that) — it means hide it from yourself!  Although there may be some good reason to do this, there is no excuse for the fact that it is hard to figure out how to unhide a column!  It turns out that unhiding a column cannot be done from the Column Settings page (where it would intuitively belong), but rather only from the Reorder Columns page.  Changing the “Release to Student” setting, on the other hand, can be done only from the Column Settings page, and not from the Reorder Columns page.  Go figure.
• WebCT is extraordinarily inconsistent as to what is required to save a change.  To take the previous example: on the Column Settings page, you change the Release to Student setting for a grade-sheet column by clicking on the current value of the setting; this switches the setting (Yes changes to No, No changes to Yes), reloads the page, displays the new setting, and the new setting is thereby saved.  On the Reorder Columns page, in contrast, a currently hidden column will have a Show Column button that you can click, and vice versa for a currently unhidden column.  As with the Column Settings page, clicking on this button will change the setting and reload the page with the new setting.  But you have to click on an unobtrusive Save button at the bottom of the page to save this change! Either behavior would be fine, but please make the behavior consistent!