No One Mourns The Wicked!

In the stage play "Wicked" there is a song called "No One Mourns the Wicked" about the celebration over the death of the wicked witch of the west. I suspect no one will mourn the passing of WebCT. I have spent too much time this week with WebCT getting my site closer and closer to completion.

The week started last Saturday when I spent most of the afternoon taking a 126 meg video where I introduce the group project to the students and chopping it in half. I've been told we can upload up to 300 meg at a time, but every time I tried to upload this file WebCT would crash (even when I was using WebDAV). I ended up cutting the 16 minute video at the seven minute mark (it just made sense to cut it at that point) and make two videos. I then created two F4V files (from inside Adobe Encore) and imported links to the files to a Flash file. Once in Flash I was able to put two buttons on the stage to switch between parts one and two, and set them so only one worked at a time so hitting the wrong button would have no effect. I have link to the video if you want to see what I'm talking about.

Once that issue was solved I spent way too many hours on Monday setting up discussion questions, and unsuccessfully trying to create a link to allow students to sign-up for one of the groups in the group assignments. Creating eight groups of three students each with a sign-up option was easy, but then WebCT wanted to put the link on the course home page. Even though they don't sign-up until the second week (so it would make sense to put the link there), I never was able to figure out how to capture the address of the link (so I could make my own) or move the link from the home page. I finally let it live on the home page and I set it to "hidden" – knowing I can "show" it at the beginning of the second week. That was not what I wanted, but it will work, it just looks sloppy.

Wednesday night I spent making the intro into my screencast for the fellowship. I had an interesting idea of how to introduce the screencast and it took a few special video effects and audio tracks. I did manage to finish it by Thursday evening, so now all I need to do is the actual screencast – I'm waiting to hear how long (or short) it should be so I know how much detail to include.

Most of Friday afternoon I spent trying to upload homework solution podcasts to WebCT. The students will submit ten separate homework assignments using MS-Office and what I have done is to create a screencast for each assignment where I walk through the solution. Building the screencasts was easy – getting them to upload into WebCT (remember what I said about not mourning the wicked?) – ARGH. Typically I would start with WebDAV to upload the small support files (XML, JavaScript, HTML – those sorts of things). WebDAV would typically report an error uploading the MP4 files (the big one with the video inside). Once the error was reported I would use the built-in file manager in WebCT to upload the file using the Java applet. Several times that would also choke so I would have to use the single file upload (non-Java Applet) to get the file. Twice that even choked and forced me to restart my entire computer – ARGH! After trying all of the tricks (several times in some cases) I was eventually able to upload all of the files – now I have to link them into the structure of the course.

Even with all of the trials of this week, I am feeling hopeful since I think I have built just about everything that I need to offer the course. The next step is to start wiring up the content modules with all of this stuff and see if I remembered everything. I think I can see an end to this thing! Well, sort of an end – then I have to actually teach the course with all of this stuff – but that is for another day.

John