Online Course Management System Gives Engineering Students One-Stop Spot For Managing Classes

Date: June 21, 2004
Contact: Chris Sutton (chris@ea.ucla.edu)
Phone: 310-206-0511

This spring quarter, the SEASnet Computing Facility launched a new course management system called CourseWeb, providing undergraduate engineering students and their instructors with an easy to use, convenient and dynamic interface for managing all of their engineering courses.

"We give students a one-look view of all their class information," said Rex Lorenzo, the programmer who developed CourseWeb. "Instructors and teaching assistants can easily post class materials, send group emails to students, get class rosters, make class announcements, manage class forums and link to other relevant web sites."

SEASnet was established in the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science in 1985 to support the computing needs of the students and faculty who teach undergraduate courses. This year, for the first time, SEASnet was able to develop a school-wide online course management system that enhances support for undergraduate class web sites.

"SEASnet did not have the resources prior to this past year to really put a major effort into a web project," said Greg Kitch, director of SEASnet. "But with funding from the School's Instructional Enhancement Initiative, we gained the ability to provide complete web support for undergraduate courses."

CourseWeb draws its inspiration from another web project begun in 2003. Last fall, the electrical engineering department launched a sophisticated web interface called EEweb that provides students, instructors and teaching assistants with easy, online access to course material and a full set of measurement tools to evaluate course performance. EEweb was created under the direction of Professor Ali H. Sayed, the department's vice chair of undergraduate programs.

"With EEweb there were quite a number of features that were extremely desirable for the whole school, not the least of which was the availability of ABET information," said Kitch.

ABET, Inc., is the recognized accreditation body for college and university programs in applied science, computing and engineering, which conducts periodic evaluations at campuses across the nation. ABET is next scheduled to assess UCLA's Engineering School in 2006.

Using EEweb as a guide, SEASnet programmers incorporated a similar design and many of the same features, while expanding the system and implementing a single login requirement that truly makes CourseWeb a one-stop information source for students.

"When a student logs in to CourseWeb, they're authorized to access the websites for any of their classes in the School of Engineering, and eventually they'll have links to the courses they take within the College as well," said Orachat Chieu, the SEASnet programmer who oversees the CourseWeb project.

For students this means no more memorizing a different URL for each class, no more navigating through wildly different course sites and no more multiple logins. "Everything is listed in this one place," said Chieu.

Instructors will also find that communicating with students is easier and more reliable. CourseWeb provides an email tool that allows them to email their class through a student's URSA account or SEASnet account or both - eliminating the extra work required to manage the class email list themselves, and lowering the chance that a student will not hear important updates about a class.

Course websites established using older utilities like WebCT were decommissioned before spring quarter began and all undergraduate engineering course website information now resides on CourseWeb. According to Kitch, standardizing the computing tools and utilities students and instructors use is an important goal.

"We have a responsibility to use resources effectively," said Kitch, "and to the degree we are successful at standardizing these utilities on campus, we improve our ability to maintain programs like CourseWeb at a more efficient cost and still increase the overall quality of the product we provide the student."

Learn more about CourseWeb at http://courseweb.seas.ucla.edu.