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WebCT Policies
Background: WebCT, an automated course management system, has been supported by Information Technology Services since the fall semester, 2001. Due to the increased use of WebCT, the need to establish guidelines for access to and usage of WebCT has been developed. There is also a need to clarify expectations regarding service levels from  Information Technology Services.

Purpose: The purpose of this policy is to establish criteria for access to the WebCT course management system and to establish expectations regarding the usage and service levels to be supported by the office of Information Technology Services.

Students automatically receive a WebCT username and password authorization when they first register for courses at Lycoming College.  The username is always the same as their Lycoming e-mail account username. Their default (initial) password is the last six digits of the student's Social Security number.

Faculty automatically get a user account when they request a WebCT course.  Faculty username is always the same as their Lycoming e-mail account username.  Their default (initial) password will be emailed after the course is created.

Policy and Procedure Guidelines:

  1. Requirements for Access to WebCT
     
    1. All requested courses must be officially recognized and appear in the Student Information System database. Access to WebCT will be granted only for official courses.
    2. All instructors, teaching assistants and secondary designers must have and IT Services supported computing account (e-mail/Novell).
    3. IT Services is responsible for ensuring that students are loaded into the WebCT database. Students are loaded automatically into WebCT courses only if they are enrolled AND the student has an IT Services supported computing account (e-mail/Novell).
    4. Students in "audit" status will be granted WebCT access only if: they are enrolled as regular students in other courses, their status is reflected in the student information system, AND they are eligible for an IT Services supported computing account (e-mail/Novell).
       
  2. Usage
    1. IT Services will support a maximum of 3000 seats (i.e. 1 student in 3 classes = 3 student seats).  This is not calculated based on the # student ID's on the system, but rather student associated with a class. These limits will be reviewed periodically.
    2. The constraints identified in Paragraph IIa may be binding.  If so, requests will be added to a waitlist until such time as service limits allow for their fulfillment.  IT Services will prioritize the requests for courses according to the following ranking scheme:
       
      1. Same course number and instructor from the immediately previous semester, or from the previous term that the course was offered (this includes, for example those courses that are only offered in fall or spring semesters).
      2. Continuation of course from the immediately previous term, i.e. the second semester of a two-semester course.
      3. New or previous course from a prior academic year with an experienced instructor.
      4. Same course number with different instructor from a previous term.
      5. New course with new WebCT instructor
         
    3. Returning course designers are required to identify themselves as such no later than the textbook adoption deadline for the semester in question in order to guarantee themselves space on the WebCT server.
    4. WebCT course requests by first-time designers will be honored on a first-come first-served basis after all returning course designers' requests have been fulfilled, up to the maximum service limits set by IT Services.
    5. Disk storage space is a scarce resource.  IT Services will work with instructors whose courses use more than 650 MB of storage to reduce server utilization, if necessary.
    6. When necessary, faculty are requested to submit Perl or CGI scripts through the designer tool as opposed to adding custom scripts to the WebCT server.  Users may link to such resources on other servers from WebCT.
    7. While the use of multimedia elements is often beneficial to teaching and learning, IT Services strongly discourages the uploading of multimedia files to the WebCT server. Such resources should be placed at other locations and linked to from WebCT.
    8. Course designers are strongly encouraged to maintain their own course backups using WebCT's built-in Course Backup tool.  Copies of these backups can be downloaded to your Lycoming home directory and kept indefinitely.  All backup files and zipped (.zip) files (created when instructors backup their own courses) are automatically eliminated from the WebCT server after fourteen days. 
       
      1. Course designers should be aware of all relevant copyright and fair-use guidelines prior to providing access to course content via WebCT. If you are unsure, we suggest you contact an Instructional Services librarian at the Snowden Library for assistance.
         
  3. Service Levels
     
    1. Access to concluded courses by authorized instructors and students ends  the last day of the first week of the following semester.
    2. On the first day following commencement each semester, IT Services will archive all existing WebCT courses, from the concluding semester, and store them for one year.
    3. WebCT course archives will be retained by IT Services for one year after the conclusion of the course, after which time the archives are deleted.  Designers will not have access to IT Services archived materials after this point unless specific prior arrangements have been made.

October 19, 2005

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