Online classes offer convenience and more alternatives
What if a person is working full-time and wants to go to school? What if they are trying to save money on gas? What if they want to sleep all day and go to school all night? There is another way to take classes without having to go to physical classrooms at MHCC. WebCT is the way teachers teach students outside the classroom. According to Cat Vogt, the Distant Learning Program Specialist at MHCC, there are approximately 2,000 students who are using WebCT for web-enhanced or web-based courses. Vogt also said there are 20-40 web-based classes and 5-30 web-enhanced courses a term. Some of the web-based classes include math, writing, English, history and health. HD100 and some economy classes are web-enhanced. There is an additional fee of $20 to use the online-only classes. WebCT classes are often taught by use of instructor-made videos, short readings and presentations. Assignments are to be completed on the computer and, depending on the instructor, sent to the instructor though the internal messaging system or in the discussion board. Students can take tests and quizzes online through the software. They can also read the course’s syllabus by going through the WebCT orientation. WebCT makes it so the student doesn’t have to be at the campus quite as frequently. But in the long run students can save money by using less gas to get to the school or buying fewer tickets from TriMet. Some of the features on WebCT include a calendar, an internal personal messaging system and a discussion board. The default password is your birth date, so there is no special password. However, for security reasons, it’s recommend that students change the default password to something else by accessing the settings on the initial screen. WebCT requires a broadband (DSL or Cable) connection, a newer version of a web browser (Mozilla Firefox, Safari, or Microsoft Internet Explorer) and a newer version of Java from Sun Microsystems, which can be downloaded at www.java.com.
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