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How can we, as faculty, develop a more personalized course structure for our classes at WIT? WebCT is one way to fulfill that function. As a new faculty member in the Department of Architecture (Fall 2005—basically, the last 3 weeks), I took on the challenge. In a very short time I have already learned some of the benefits (and difficulties) of WebCT. (Don’'t worry we can overcome the difficulties...more on that later.)

First of all, I should tell you a little bit about myself. I am not a computer whiz. In fact as I was in the middle of celebrating my new position at Wentworth, I immediately began to panic. How was I going to learn all I needed to know in such a short time frame? I needed to prepare the content for my courses. Simultaneously, I was being sent materials from WIT about the new course management system, WebCT. I thought to myself - great - I need to learn that too? I contacted the LTS staff and began learning about the tools available to me for teaching. As I became aware of the possibilities of WebCT, I realized it could become a great learning tool for students. I mentioned to LTS that I would use this course management system in my spring courses, but not in the fall. The LTS staff convinced me not to wait, but to plow ahead. They guaranteed that they would be there to bail me out of potential problems. With their help and expertise I was willing to recommend to my faculty colleagues that we should use the webCT for our fall course.

My fall courses are for the sophomore students in the Architecture department. They are required to take two interrelated courses: ARCH235: Materials and Methods I (lecture course) and ARCH245: Design Studio. These two classes are part of the curriculum redesign that the Department of Architecture has undertaken in the last two years. Besides successfully incorporating laptops into the design studio, we have also challenged ourselves to rethink how we teach Architecture with these new tools. This new vision of architectural education is the main reason why I was very excited to become a new member of the WIT Architecture Faculty.

The lecture course, ARCH235: Materials and Methods I, has approximately 200 students divided into two equal sections. I am teaching this lecture class along with Professor Ann Pitt and Professor Kevin Benham. We are each responsible for a third of the lectures. Our lectures consist of many images of buildings that demonstrate the topic of the lecture. Because all lecture images are in a digital format, we can “"easily"”post these on webCT. This was an ideal situation for ARCH 235. Currently, there exists no textbook that really works well for our vision of the course content. Therefore, after each lecture we post our digital slides to the WebCT site. This allows students to study from their notes while simultaneously viewing the exact images that they saw in our lectures. We plan on adding a self-assessment quiz for each lecture in the future. This way the students can take a quiz, correct it themselves, and contact us if they are having problems with a concept. By making the course content so accessible to the students, the large lectures become more intimate.

If you have noticed above, I put the word easily in quotation marks when speaking about posting content. There have been some kinks to work out with the system for our course. But that is to be expected. It is still a learning process. I have learned in these last three weeks that there are many ways to do the same thing - that is - how to post the image content of our lectures. We as faculty need to communicate our goals clearly to LTS. Then they will be able to help us devise procedures that save us time. Better direction will come if we are able to explain the goals of the course's WebCT site. For example, how should the student interact with the content? If more than one faculty member is teaching the class should the content appear in the same format? Should all the content be web-based only? Or should we post information in a form that allows students to download content onto their laptops? We are still addressing these questions with ARCH235. With student input we will also be able to understand what is effective in helping them learn the material.