This is some follow up information relating a conversation that was had in IDEL a few weeks ago, where I said I’d find out for sure how long students have access to WebCT courses after the end of the semester in which the course was run. I thought others might also want to know.
Here is the definitive answer, from Information Services:
“registration on a course is permanent, so once a student is placed on a course access to it is retained as long as the username is still active. This is so that students can use “old” courses to revise for exams, and throughout their degree. Access to WebCT is removed along with access to all other services 150 days after the end of the student’s course teaching [ie: when you are no longer a registered student], as set by departments.”
thanks Jen, I was interested in this. But I have another question: could the ownership of this access be transferred to a staff account (this is a particular question for Edin uni staff). Would be great as part of the life long learning programme! A bit like emulating Pebblepad I guess…:)
hi Gina – I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I think it’s highly unlikely that such a thing could happen systematically (I don’t think staff and student EASE accounts have any way of knowing about each other). However, it might be possible for your tutor to manually add your staff UUN to the list of those with access to the course, thereby preserving your access for longer. No harm in asking!
Hi Jen. Thinking of the folders of course notes and xeroxed study-pack booklets that I kept from my old f2f courses, what provision is being made for students to keep copies of the materials they’ve been given, or created, as part of the course, within WebCT? Are they at least being warned of the implications of the 150d limit, and given some timely guidance and tools to save what they’re entitled to?
hi Richard – these are good questions – can any alumni share what advice they were given at the point of graduation about preserving access to course materials, etc?
I imagine the advice from Information Services will be to download any PDFs etc that you wish to keep, and archive any of the course discussion you want as well (you can do this by creating printable views of multiple messages).