Appendix IX
Council Meeting
October 22, 2010
Termination of WebCT OWL Report from meeting of Friday, October 15, 2010 Angelica Lucaci and Belinda Dodson attended a meeting in the Dean's Office on October 15th to learn more about the termination of Web CT and Western's plans for its replacement. The bulk of the meeting was a presentation by ITS. WebCT was acquired by a company called Blackboard in 2005. They will stop supporting the current version of WebCT as of January 2013 (there will be no fixes, updates, so on). Western cannot use a program that has no vendor support so a suitable replacement system must be selected. This could be Blackboard's own Blackboard Learn 9, another commercial product or an open source system like Sakai. A Project Team is in charge of implementing the so‐called "OWL Flight Plan". To assess campus needs and plan for the change, ITS is providing opportunity for input into the decision from across the campus community. Students, faculty and staff have the opportunity to get involved online by completing a survey and/or sharing ideas on a UserVoice forum. See http://webct.uwo.ca/owlflightplan/getinvolved.html on how to participate. To provide further information and solicit input from interested faculty members, the WebCT team is willing to schedule sessions with individual departments. Please let us know if you would be interested in participating in such a session. More information is available at http://webct.uwo.ca/owlflightplan/index.html. The attached PowerPoint presentation is also very informative on both the process and the context of this significant change to Western's online learning system. [Link to Powerpoint presentation] WebCT-OWL Termination mtg Report.doc
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