Penn wants to make online collaboration easier for students -- and a solution may already exist in the Wharton School.
The Blackboard Learning System is ready for an upgrade, according to Penn Library Director of Public Services Sandra Kerbel, and options range from purchasing more advanced Blackboard software to moving to an entirely different platform.
"I envision a system where a group of students can work together to edit a document or project online, without even having to make copies," she said.
It turns out that such a system has already been developed in part at the Wharton Computing and Information Technology Department.
While the library-run Blackboard system is available to all schools at Penn, the Wharton School chooses to use its own WebCafe software instead.
Based on the commercially available Documentum eRoom software, WebCafe is customized to meet the needs of classes taught at the Wharton School, according to WCIT Senior Director Kendall Whitehouse.
The system was originally developed in 1998, before the rest of the University adopted Blackboard. Since then, WebCafe has been extremely popular among Wharton professors and is now used in approximately 80 percent of classes, Whitehouse said.
"We never saw any need to switch to the Blackboard system used by the rest of the University," he said.
Although WebCafe already offers many of the collaborative features that the library is looking to incorporate into Blackboard, it is unlikely that the system will be adopted by other schools at Penn. This is partially due to the fact that some WebCafe features are synchronized with Wharton course enrollment.
"Part of the system is based on information that is only available in this school," Whitehouse said, adding that it would currently be impossible for a non-Wharton class to use WebCafe.
He added that the per-seat pricing model used by eRoom might make the system relatively expensive for larger schools like the College.
Kerbel said that though the library pays licensing and maintenance fees to Blackboard, there is no additional charge levied when the number of users is increased, making it more cost-effective for the University.
Despite their satisfaction with WebCafe, both Kerbel and Whitehouse said that they would be interested in learning from the experience of their colleagues in other schools at Penn.
Kerbel said that WebCafe is just one of the options as the library explores the future of its courseware system.
"We are trying to see what trends are in learning styles and what our colleagues at other schools are doing," she said, adding that another interesting possibility was the open-source SAKAI system developed by a coalition of universities across the country, including MIT, Stanford and the University of Michigan.
An open-source system is one whose code can be modified by anybody.
However, Kerbel said that it would be difficult to significantly change Blackboard due to work that professors have already put into customizing the system for their classes. More classes use the program every semester, and it is now utilized by most College and Engineering classes, Kerbel said.
"The problem is that so many courses are already built into Blackboard that exporting the data would not be trivial," she said. "Lots of professors would have to start over."
Additionally, many resources have recently been used to upgrade the stability of the existing system.
"Over the summer we swapped out half of the servers and put in a new architecture to deal with growth in scale," Mike Winkler, the library's Web Manager, said.
Kerbel said that one possibility would be to use a modular system based on Blackboard that includes components from other systems.
A modular system is one that can be expanded easily, as each individual component is separate but can be connected to the others.
Wharton and Engineering sophomore Kim Gallant -- who has used both systems -- said that she preferred WebCafe.
"WebCafe is better for group work," she said. "When you have projects, you can use it to share information."
She also said that it would be beneficial to incorporate the collaborative features of WebCafe into the Blackboard system.
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