A tracking feature built into WebCT allows instructors to monitor student use of their course's page, unbeknownst to many students and even some professors. With the introduction of an updated version of WebCT at Brown next year, instructors' capabilities for surveillance will become even more extensive.
Of the professors and teaching assistants who take advantage of this tracking feature, the majority uses it simply to assess WebCT as a teaching tool. However, a small minority of instructors has used WebCT to evaluate their students' level of commitment and class participation. On rare occasions, professors have even used WebCT tracking to help determine a student's grade.
According to Stephanie Birdsall, lead communication specialist at Computing and Information Services, course instructors can track student use of WebCT in a section called "Manage Course." There, they can see the first time a student logged in to that course's WebCT page, each student's most recent time of login, cumulative hits and the number of times he or she has posted on the discussion board or read other students' posts. However, instructors cannot track the exact pages a student has navigated to on the web page.
Currently, the only way an instructor can obtain more comprehensive information about each student's use of a course's WebCT page is by setting up a content module, a more complex process that few professors have shown interest in. Once a professor or TA creates a content module, he or she can see how many times a student has clicked on every page within a WebCT site, the average amount of a time a student has spent viewing each page and the total time spent on each section of the site.
The upcoming version of the WebCT software, which will be introduced at Brown in Fall 2006, "apparently allows for much more extensive tracking," Birdsall said. With the new software, all course instructors will easily be able to track exactly which pages a given student has viewed, and precisely how much time students have spent on every section of the site.
Georgy Artemov, a graduate student in economics, said that WebCT's tracking feature is an extremely useful tool, but expressed concern about it being used as a method of grading. "I would not think anyone could use it in grading or student evaluation explicitly, as it's easy to manipulate the numbers," Artemov said.
"On the other hand, when I have a concern about a particular student, I do look at his or her access statistics. That couldn't influence the grade, but it might make some difference in borderline cases," Artemov added.
Ross Cheit, an associate professor of political science and recent recipient of Brown's "Best of WebCT 2004" award, does use WebCT's tracking feature, and in rare cases has used the feature to help determine a student's class participation grade. "I know there is some concern about this feature," Cheit said, stressing that he only uses it in moderation.
In Fall 2004, Cheit's first semester using WebCT as a teaching aid, he monitored whether or not students viewed the "Question of the Day" he asked them to ponder before class. He did this primarily to assess WebCT as a teaching aid, but admits that he also looked at each student's aggregate number of hits when assessing class participation. However, this figure rarely made or broke a student's grade, as "it only came into play for those with unusually low usage," Cheit said.
This semester, Cheit is using WebCT to conduct virtual sections. "I have told the class quite explicitly that I can and will look at how many times they posted, and that I will look at that when grading them for participation," Cheit said. However, he will only mark down those who did not meet the minimal standards, which are clearly described on the site.
But most professors with WebCT course pages do not extensively monitor student use.
"I might check periodically now and then, but I have other ways of evaluating student understanding and participation," said Caroline Karp, senior lecturer in environmental studies, who is teaching ES 141: "Environmental Policy and Practice" this semester.
Kerry Smith, associate professor of history, was also skeptical about WebCT's tracking feature. "My goals with WebCT do not require that level of surveillance," he said.
Although CIS teaches course instructors how to use WebCT's tracking features during regular WebCT training sessions, CIS does not explicitly state that these features could be used for student evaluation. "Most faculty find (the tracking features) interesting, but they are interested more in the potential to evaluate the usefulness of WebCT as a teaching tool than in using these features to grade students," Birdsall said.
WebCT is a commercial product used at many colleges and universities, and these tracking features are most useful for schools that rely exclusively on distance learning as a teaching method, where professors never see their students in person, she said.
However, "it is good for students to know that, in general, any kind of Web-based environment has the potential to be tracked," Birdsall said.
