Learning with limits: New faculty and course management systems

On her way back to her office, Julie passed the open door of a colleague who was spitting bad words through clenched teeth as he fought to import his beautiful Web pages into WebCT. For its business and technical writing service courses, her program uses a course management system developed by the publisher to accompany their in-house online textbook. For distance education versions of the service courses, her program was required to use the campus standard CMS, which is WebCT. When she told her student she had no horse in the course management system race, she meant it. She had come to academia fresh off a year in industry, developing Web-based training for pharmaceutical manufacturing using an impossibly clunky and cumbersome commercial content management product. After a year on a system that required 16 distinct keystrokes to insert a graphic onto a Web page, she never wanted to see the words "content" and "management" in the same sentence again. From her perspective, her course management system was a slight variation on a tool that was decidedly lacking in utility and slowed her productivity to a crawl. WebCT vs. her program 's in-house product? From her perspective, it was six of one, half a dozen of the other.