NewsletterDetail

February 2007 Issue

A Move From WebCT

The biggest news in LTech is the upcoming switch from WebCT to Desire2Learn (D2L). We will be switching platforms both because of features and because of pricing uncertainties due to the Blackboard/WebCT merger.

We appreciate the dedicated service of those faculty members who tried out WebCT 6, Angel, and D2L. Angel and D2L were close. However, D2L gave us their learning object repository (a system whereby a faculty member can store files for all courses in a single area and can even share access to that storage areas with others) at a greatly reduced price, so we agreed that D2L was the better buy for us, considering both features and price.

Our plan is for LTech to work on making the “behind the scenes” changes, such as updating our 1700 archived courses, during this semester while continuing to maintain our WebCT system. Members of the LTech team and a pilot group of about 10 faculty will receive training at the end of this semester and will use D2L live in the 2007 Summer semester. All professors teaching online, web-supplemental, and blended with online classes will receive training during Welcome Back week in August; however, LTech will already have converted these courses from WebCT into D2L for the instructors. The training will enable faculty members to teach in their new D2L shells.

While the change will be a challenge, as these shifts always are, we are confident that D2L will enable OWC to offer a better online environment to students and faculty. We’re working hard to get ready for the change, and we appreciate your support!

URL? HTTP? WWW? Huh?

These days, most of us are at least pretty good at navigating the Internet. We see a word or phrase underlined and in blue, and we know we can click it to open another website or page. But what about all that "URL" stuff that gets typed in the browser's address field? Do we have to type the HTTP://? Do all web addresses need WWW?

Let's go over some basics, which will hopefully clear it all up for us.

Browser - This is the program that displays websites (shown at right). To most people, it is such a normal part of everyday computer use, that they don't even realize that the browser is a program. Most of us use the Internet Explorer browser from Microsoft, but many people use Firefox, Opera, Safari, and others.

URL - This stands for Universal Resource Locator, but all you really need to know is that the URL is the website address that you type into the address field of your browser.

HTTP:// - This stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. You really don't need to type this part into the address field of your browser; your browser knows to add it.

WWW - This stands for World Wide Web, of course, and it is usually, but not always, present in a web address. Technically, that part of the URL is a subdomain, and it can be named anything. You may have noticed that LTech's URL is ltech.nwfstatecollege.edu. If you were to add a www to the front of that string, you wouldn't get anywhere. That's because the subdomain ltech replaces the www.

We hope this little lesson has helped you so that the next time somebody says "Copy and paste the URL into an email message for me, will ya?" you'll know just what to do: highlight the address in the address field of the browser, copy it (Ctrl-C), and paste it (Ctrl-V) into a message to them so that they can go directly to the page that you want to show them.

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