commercial course management software and Russian

[Lynne deBenedette]

Many thanks to all who have written me to describe how Blackboard and
WebCT have worked on their campuses.  To follow up on my question to
the list, here is a summary of replies:

USERS
Most respondents using either program were in fact using it only for
courses taught in ENGLISH, and so the character-set issue did not
arise.  A few reported that while they were able to use the
commercial software in connection with their English-lang. course,
they could not use it with any course requiring Cyrillic.  No one was
happy with either program's in terms of courses taught in languages
other than English.

BLACKBOARD (Bb)
Most of the respondents were on "Blackboarded" campuses.  The
consensus seems to be that Bb is utterly unsuited to working with
other character sets, and several commented that Bb has problems with
customizing generally (i.e., beyond  the character-set issue).  There
were those who found it convenient to use with courses taught in
English, and for limited functions related to language learning
(posting sound files, for example)--but one does not need Bb for this.

WEBCT
There were fewer replies about WebCT, so I hesitate to generalize.
However, it seems that there are the same sort of problems
customizing the character set choices, forcing those who use the
program to resort to PDF files to post class materials.

As marketed by the two companies, these programs purport to allow
something like  "one-stop shopping"  course management, meaning that
in addition to  posting class materials easily and coordinating
available resources (videos, texts, handouts, links to internet
sites, etc.), faculty can track student performance, allow student
work to be posted easily, offer online assessment (quizzes, tests,
etc.), run online discussion groups, maintain course email lists,
allow students to have their own discussion sub-groups, and other
things.  The absence of control over the character set means, of
course, that teachers of foreign languages would be unable to use
most of these functions, which is frustrating at best.

OTHER PROJECTS TO NOTE
At Harvard
Judith Frommer's Web-Based Foreign Language Authoring Tools for course websites
in foreign languages (hers designed for French, but other languages
theoretically possible).
She is at frommer at fas.harvard.edu

At CU-Denver
Filipp Sapienza is developing his own course management software using what
are called "open source" technologies (specifically, XML)

----------------------------------------------------
Lynne deBenedette
Senior Lecturer in Russian / Brown University
Department of Slavic Languages
Box E, 20 Manning Walk
Providence, RI 02912

Office hours Summer 2002 by appointment
tel: 401-863-7572  OR 863-2689 (dept. office)
fax: 401-863-7330
email: lynne_debenedette at brown.edu

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