Is WebCT practical or not?

Today we live in a world filled with daily interactions between computers and other personal technologies.  The internet is one of the key components for these technologies we use that make virtual storage, emailing and accessing any form of information simple and limitless.  As a SFU Surrey TechOne student, all lecture notes, assignments and professor contact information for any courses are accessible online.  In most cases these information can be found through WebCT.  

WebCT is a webpage that SFU students go to for downloading/submitting assignments, checking marks and other course related matters.  This is a good webpage for organizing and obtaining all information relating to the courses that the student is taking.  However, it is not convenient to some of the students when four out of eight of their courses do not utilize this webpage.  This displays that some professors may not like to use WebCT, but instead they prefer to customize their own course webpage or not even use a homepage for their courses.  Of the student’s four courses viewable on WebCT, all the different course information was easy to find.  On the other hand, if WebCT went down during times of exams or submitting an assignment, it can be extremely frustrating for the users.  Since the other remaining three courses use their own individual domains and are not a part of the WebCT network, these pages could be viewed online without any problems.  A drawback of these individual webpage’s is that a student must remember the URL by memory or search for it in Google, if they have not bookmarked it.  In Tech 124, it did not have its own individual website or WebCT component, but instead used the SFU email system as a means to share a folder.  This shared folder required a confirmation email before being able to access the lecture notes.  

In conclusion, at SFU there are many different ways of obtaining course related information online.  As a SFU student I believe having all these various information formats are not efficient use of time and should be able to access needed information from one source.  If more and more course webpage’s are created, it would make more logical and economic sense for SFU to group all the course webpage’s into one big database or into a newer and friendlier version of WebCT.