D2L Blog

D2L vs. WebCT: First Impressions

So, I wanted to share some thoughts/impressions I have about D2L as compared to WebCT, while they are still fresh in mind. Having administered WebCT since it was first introduced on campus until just recently (ca. 1998-2006), and having used it from the perspective of a student, staff and faculty member, I think it is safe to say that I have a pretty good understanding of nearly every aspect of WebCT. While the same is not remotely true for D2L yet, I have learned enough from my committee participation and my sandbox course to share some initial impressions.

First of all, visually, D2L is an entirely-different experience than WebCT. Whereas the latter is very icon-driven and not terribly text heavy, D2L is designed more like a portal--see the myU portal [myu.usd.edu] for an example--and presents a lot of information in one place. This is perhaps easier to illustrate than describe:

Figure 1: Typical WebCT Course

Figure 2: WebCT Course After Conversion into D2L

As illustrated above, the D2L layout is very different than the WebCT course, but is it that much different? I think in some ways, it really is, but in others it is a bit nicer than WebCT. Here are my thoughts on that:

• Content is not as easy to get to in D2L, in my humble opinion. One has to click on the "Content" link on the black course menu bar—kind of hard to see on the screenshot in Figure 2, but it is the second one in. I also do not think that the content layout is as user friendly as it is in WebCT, but more on that in a bit.


• One nice improvement is the widget—what the little boxes are called in D2L—called 'Updates.' It allows students to instantly see how many new mail messages they have received, how many new discussion postings are awaiting, etc. Where this will save time over WebCT is that the student will not need to go to each individual tool to see if new messages, assignments, etc. are posted. As Borat would say, "Very nice!"


• Overall, as I stated before, D2L is more text heavy than WebCT. Whether or not that is a good or bad thing is very subjective, but in terms of ease of use for students, I still think, at least visually, WebCT has an edge. Kind of a sidebar to this: I recently upgraded my Treo 650 to an iPhone, which is Apple’s new foray into the mobile phone market--well, second if you want to count the largely unsuccessful ROKR built by Motorola. Both Palm and Apple are known for their ease of use and if one looks at both interfaces, they are icon driven in a very similar fashion to that of WebCT:
  
  

  Figure 3: Palm's Treo 650	Figure 4: Apple's iPhone

  
  
  I realize these are entirely different beasts—D2L is a web-based LMS and the Treo and iPhone are mobile phones—but as our society becomes more and more mobile, we will need to think about interface design for these devices. I have played with WebCT and D2L via Safari on the iPhone and in general, WebCT is much easier to use.

OK, enough about the interfaces, what about the tools? Well, the core functionality from WebCT exists nearly entirely in D2L. Discussions, mail and quizzes work almost identically, the latter remarkably so—D2L, in jest, did not like it when I said this. Rather than state what is the same, here are the major differences I noticed:

• Managing student enrollment and their grades in WebCT was done in the same place. Not so with D2L, which does make some sense (separating out the admin function from the instructional one). To manage enrollment--which, when all is said and done, will hopefully be done automatically by Datatel--one must click on the "Edit course" link on the far, right-hand side of the course menu. To edit grades, simply click on the "Grades" link in the left-hand course menu.


• While we’re on the topic of grades, another immediate difference between WebCT & D2L is that built-in assessment tools do not automatically have columns created in the D2L grade book like they do in WebCT. For example, if one creates a quiz in WebCT, a column with the quiz name is automatically added to the grade book. In D2L, one can create assessments without grades--which in some cases is nice--but if one wants it to appear in the grade book, one must manually create the associate, which is an extra step when compared to WebCT.


• Most all of the tools one would add to a WebCT course are already present in the course menus (e.g. discussions, mail, calendar, dropbox, quizzes, etc.). Again, this is the overall design differences between WebCT & D2L--the former is icon driven, the latter is much more menu/text driven.


• In D2L one has truer content management control. For example, when I edit the content of a particular announcement or page, I can easily add in links to any other content in the course from a dropdown menu. In WebCT this was difficult at best.


• In D2L there is one, and only one, place for course content.  If you look at Figure 2, in the course menu there is a link called "Content."  All course content must be placed in here--well, I suppose you could place some content in the announcements, but you will not be able to manage it as well--which is vastly different than WebCT, where content could be placed anywhere:  on your homepage, under a content module, etc.  The benefit of this is that no matter what kind of online course a student takes, he/she will always know the location of the course content.  For novice users, this is a very good thing; however, in terms of what could be done in WebCT, one does lose a lot of flexibility.


• One small caveat to the way we have implemented D2L at the SDBOR: we can only support one time zone. That being the case, all times listed in D2L will be US-Central.


• D2L has built-in rubrics. I have not yet had much of a chance to play with this tool, but I was able to create one and associate it with an assignment in my dropbox with relatively ease. The only caveat is that one must build the rubric from the bottom up (starting with the lower evaluation and working up to the highest).


• I am not so gung ho about the way the discussions are laid out. D2L uses a split screen view, whereas WebCT used pop-up windows. The latter could get you into trouble if you had a pop-up blocker installed, but I still think it was more readable, especially with longer messages, than D2L’s layout. I am sure, with time, we will get used to this, but I think it could use some work.
  
  
• Another caveat that has cropped up: one must be careful how many menu items places in the course menu.  On wide-screen monitors, this is not a problem, but on standard 4:3 monitors, if the course has too many menu items, the right-hand side of the banner is pushed off the screen rendering the pager and menu links such as "Edit Course" and "Logout" mostly useless as there is no way to scroll over to them.

So, to summarize things, there are quite a few nice new features in D2L, a lot that are the same as WebCT, and a few that are somewhat annoying, but WebCT had its annoyances too (e.g. shared designers do not have distinct IDs in places, etc.). In the end, though we will hits some bumps here and there on the way, I think the migration will go well and instructors be able to adapt to D2L without too much trouble, they may just need to change their thinking a bit, or find new ways of doing things.

Posted at 08:54AM Nov 15, 2007 by Eric James Mosterd in General  |  Comments[3]