Can and will WebCT meet the "wants" of higher education technology builders? The proof will be in the pudding, as they say, when during the first week of April, according to Vallone, WebCT rolls out a "controlled release" of its new platform, currently codenamed "Cobalt" and soon to be announced to the public as "WebCT Vista." The new platform will be launched with a select group of customers who have already committed to Cobalt.

With the new platform, WebCT basically has three generations of products: WebCT Standard Edition, WebCT Campus Edition and Cobalt/WebCT Vista. The Standard Edition, however, is being phased out, and a similarly priced special version of Campus Edition, tentatively called "Focus," will be made available to small institutions.

Standard Edition users who are thinking about upgrading to the new platform are being advised to migrate to the Campus Edition as soon as possible in preparation for eventually migrating to Cobalt’s set of enhanced features. According to a white paper currently available at the WebCT website, "the process of migrating to Campus Edition . . . lays the technical foundation for the smoothest, fastest migration to Cobalt . ."

"The interfaces that are in Campus Edition in terms of APIs and integration with back-end systems - all of that will run very similarly as it will in Cobalt," says Vallone. "Anybody who is scaling, integrating, building out content and focusing on student performance should get Campus Edition now and start building out their integration. They should start building out their content, and then they can migrate easily to Cobalt." Vallone adds that during a Cobalt migration institutions will be allowed to run parallel systems until moving over completely without being charged additional fees for running two environments.

In the meantime, a new version 3.7 of Campus Edition was officially announced on March 4. V3.7 comes with a new Equation Editor function and, according to company press releases "significant enhancements to overall performance and scalability, and expanded support for IMS standards."

This past November, Alan Swarts, director of academic computing services at Johnson County Community College (JCCC), reviewed an early version of Cobalt. JCCC, which is the third largest provider of higher education in the state of Kansas, selected WebCT in the summer of 2000 for both its web-enhanced and fully online courses. "I was extremely impressed by the new system," Swarts says about the preview. "It is a different interface but a lot cleaner, a lot more powerful, a lot more scalable."

In particular, Swarts likes that the new platform will allow users to post changes to an online course in one place, at one time, and make it effective in any additional sections of a course. "One of the limitations of most course management systems today is if you are teaching multiple sections of a course, the content has to be in two different course components," he says. "With the new version, there is shared content between sections."

Nonetheless, JCCC won’t be upgrading to Cobalt, at least not in the immediate future. "We are going to wait," Swarts says. "There is a sizeable price between our current Campus Edition and the price quotes we are getting for the new version," he says, adding that state budget cuts are having a negative effect on his department’s purchasing power.

The University of Central Florida (UCF) - one of the original users of WebCT, going back to 1996 when it came out of the University of British Columbia under WebCT founder and Professor of Computer Science Murray Goldberg - also won’t be buying into the new platform immediately.

"We have had briefings," says Joel Hartman, UCF vice provost for information technologies and resources. "We are currently running the Standard Edition (which has been licensed statewide through the Florida Virtual Campus). For next year we are evaluating Campus Edition and are looking to become a beta site for Vista."

Regarding the pricing of Cobalt, WebCT Marketing Communications Director Lisa Philpott, at press time, said there would be six pricing tiers that are based on FTEs. The lowest range accommodates schools with less than 2,500 FTEs, and the highest range is for schools with over 25,000 FTEs. Cobalt will be offered on an annual subscription basis. Exact figures were not available.

So what, more precisely, should WebCT customers expect to see in Cobalt? "It’s a whole different level of framework, architecture, integration, scale; and in terms of features, we have added quite a bit of extensions on the features set," says Vallone, who calls the new system more of an "academic enterprise system" instead of a CMS.

"Cobalt architecture is designed to allow for integration of all kinds of technologies, from back-end systems to front-office applications," she continues, adding that institutions have been pushing for a product and service that can seamlessly and more easily integrate with their current investments in technology.

Another area of keen interest relates to content management and what Vallone refers to as "strategic academic advantage," or helping institutions attract and retain students by improving the overall online learning environment. In the area of content management, she says Cobalt will allow users to build, tag and store content objects and modules for sharing between courses and programs, as well as between institutions within consortiums or other special partnerships.

Content management also deals with providing academic publishers with a WebCT distribution channel to distribute digitized course materials. WebCT currently has more than 1,100 "e-Packs" that are WebCT compatible course materials, such as video animations, sample syllabi, lecture notes, quiz and test banks, and glossaries, that have been digitized by many of the major academic publishers. These e-Packs are sorted by topic, publisher and author and searchable by title or keyword. Faculty can search through a "content showcase" and evaluate e-Packs for free. When an e-Pack is finally brought into a WebCT-driven class, students purchase an access code either online by credit card or at their campus bookstore in order to obtain the digitized material for use inside their online class.

Vallone also talks about "student performance management," whereby Cobalt will allow institutions to focus on key trends within their programs. "You can track and monitor where the student goes, how long they stay there, and what kind of information they access," she says. "You can literally on a day-to-day basis see how your student is doing and provide remediation early on, right within WebCT." Student performance can also be tracked in aggregate form, "so that you can understand how your students are doing overall and then you can understand the profile of the optimal learner within your campus setting," she adds.

Another relevant piece of the CMS puzzle has to do with software standards and conformance, in particular IMS and SCORM. "The point of our Cobalt architecture is to really focus on tiering down from the institution level down to the section level, down to the department level, and doing it in a standards-based way so that you can use content that is from a variety of sources as long as you are adhering to open standards," Vallone says. "IMS and SCORM are two initiatives that we track and follow. We are involved in tracking, monitoring and actually participating in a way where we lead some of the subcommittees around these standard initiatives."

Finally, EP asked Vallone about some nasty rumors we have heard repeatedly about the company’s financial status. "We have the healthiest balance sheet of any company in the market, and we are the only company that I know of in the e-learning space that blew away their financials last year," she claims. "We have capital that takes us through cash positive into profitability. We don’t need to raise any more money. Our customers are very clear about our position; they are very clear about our financial stability."