University revamps course Webpages

During the summer, University officials made arrangements for every student to have his or her own blackboard, but they didn't have to buy a single chalk eraser.

A new online service — accessible from all the University's CourseInfo Webpages and unique for every student — contains links to all courses in which a student is currently enrolled, messages from professors about upcoming assignments and even a picture of the student.

My Blackboard is a feature of CourseInfo v4.0, a program that the University installed during the summer and used to create Websites for all this semester's undergraduate courses, approximately 950 in number.

The new sites — constructed at the request of Provost Jeremiah Ostriker — all contain general course information compiled from the Office of the Registrar.

"It was a big project, a big undertaking," said Serge Goldstein, the CIT director of academic services.

The week before classes began, Ostriker sent a memo to all University faculty encouraging them to develop their default CourseInfo Websites and incorporate them into their course curricula whenever possible.

While this is the first time the University has provided Websites for every course, the CourseInfo service itself is not new to Princeton. The University first began purchasing it in July 1999 from Blackboard, Inc., an Internet development company based in Washington, D.C.

But the service — which costs the University $5,000 per year — was not an instant hit with all professors, some of whom had already constructed course homepages using other applications, such as Microsoft FrontPage.

When the CourseInfo Webpages were first made available to professors last fall, only about 100 used them.

Goldstein said creating the default pages for this semester has somewhat increased CourseInfo's popularity among the faculty. About 300 professors currently are using the service.

He noted, however, that the process of creating all the basic Webpages was fairly time-consuming, requiring the use of a custom-written program. As a result, he said he and other University officials hope to see more faculty developing their CourseInfo pages in the future.

During the past few years, the CourseInfo service has grown rapidly in popularity among many institutions of higher learning across the country.

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According to Michael Stanton, the director of corporate communications for Blackboard, the company now has approximately 1,000 clients and services all the schools in the Ivy League except Brown University.

"They provide a means for conveying information that's hard to beat," Stanton said.

The basic CourseInfo Webpages constructed for Princeton professors during the summer are intended to act as templates that faculty can develop further to meet their individual needs, Goldstein said.

English professor Elaine Showalter said the CourseInfo service has been useful for sharing information with students in her class, ENG 351: Contemporary Fiction.

"In a class with so many students, with their pictures posted and the online discussion groups, it makes it a lot easier for me to get to know them," she said.

By the fall of 2002, CIT will have installed Blackboard's newest version of the program, called Blackboard 5.0. Goldstein said the Registrar's and CIT's eventual goal is to have course registration and precept scheduling all done over the Internet.

"It's a very user-friendly system, and so far the response from faculty has been very positive," Goldstein said. "This is a useful tool that we'd like to see be made available in all our courses."