WebCt teaches the Internet a few things

By SUSAN FLYNN

News staff

LYNNFIELD _ Traditionally, if students wanted access to their professors outside the classroom they had to wait until the weekly office hours.

Now, at many campuses, the professors are just an e-mail away. They also post syllabi, lecture notes, and even quizzes and tests on the Web for their students' convenience.

"Students coming in are so technologically savvy now, they demand this," said Brian Morgan, a computer professor at Marshall University in West Virginia. "They want to be able to e-mail and contact their professors; they want their notes online."

One company that is meeting, in many ways defining, the demand for enhanced technology tools in academia is WebCt. The computer company with headquarters in Lynnfield and Vancouver, British Columbia, is positioning itself as the leader in the so-called e-learning market.

Today, WebCt is used by more than 148,000 faculty to teach 303,000 courses with more than 11 million student accounts at 1,578 institutions. Their products are used in 61 countries, from Iceland to Brunei to Hong Kong.

"We're changing the way education works," said Carol Vallone, WebCt's president and chief executive officer. "People feel very passionately about what we're doing."

In September, this emerging dot.com moved from Peabody to Lynnfield to accommodate its rapid growth. In fact, for about five months, WebCt rented out the second floor of the Peabody Marriott because its leased space in Centennial Park had grown too small. (They moved the queen-size beds out and the cubicles in.)

WebCt was founded in 1995 by Murray Goldberg, a professor at the University of British Columbia. He had received a grant to develop tools to teach courses on the Web. The product was so well-received by faculty that he decided to launch it commercially in 1997.

Why a company founded on the West Coast of Canada has headquarters on the North Shore is due to Vallone. The Manchester-by-the-Sea resident is WebCt's president and chief executive office.

In 1995, Vallone set out to start her own company by commercializing a product to teach courses online being developed by CAST in Peabody, a non-profit computer company.

Vallone, 43, has a background in marketing and sales in the technology industry and had founded a corporate training business in the past. In 1995, the Internet was becoming "very popular," she said.

In her first year, she received $220,000 from six angel investors to launch her new company, Universal Learning Technologies. But by the time her product was ready to launch in the fall of 1998, "everyone was talking about WebCt."

Vallone approached Murray about merging WebCt with her fledgling company, which happened in May of 1999.

"It felt great," Vallone said. "We went from last place to first place overnight."

She explained that her strength is in convincing investors to back WebCt while Murray is brilliant in the actual development of the product.

Nods to the company's Canadian influences are scattered throughout the WebCt office in Lynnfield, including a wooden Canadian mountie that Vallone's husband picked out when decorating the space. In her role as CEO, Vallone travels at least once every other month to Vancouver.

The company now has 280 employees, with about 150 working from the Lynnfield office, 100 in Canada, and the rest in sales offices scattered across North America.

In November, the company announced it had secured $70 million from venture capitalists, a significant increase over its last round of equity financing. Since 1995, WebCt has received $125 million through six rounds of funding.

Some of its investors include Andover-based CMGI, Chase Capital Partners, BancBoston ventures, Kestrel Venture Management and Duke Management, the investment arm of the Duke University Endowment Fund.

Vallone said the plans are to take WebCt public sometime next year, although a lot will depend on the market's appetite for IPO's, which at the time is not strong.

"We're at the point now that's a state of nirvana for a CEO," Vallone said, "but believe me I groveled for years."

A wide reach

To have access to WebCt, colleges and universities pay a licensing fee, which ranges from $335 for one course to $4,000 for multiple courses. Students and professors are then given a password to be able to access its tools.

The company, however, plans to soon launch a more comprehensive "campus edition," which will cost tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the size of the school, said Greg Jarboe, vice president of marketing for WebCt.

According to Jarboe, about 75 percent of their customers use WebCt as a complement to a traditional course, say by posting notes and listing homework assignments. The other 25 percent use WebCt on a "distance basis," which means courses are taught exclusively online.

Endicott College in Beverly started training faculty to use WebCt this semester. At this point, Kent Barclay, the college's distance learning coordinator said, professors are signing up on a voluntary basis.

As expected, Barclay said, some professors are more eager than others to embrace the possibilities provided by the new technology.

"There's a bit of trepidation on some parts. It's a new thing," Barclay said. "It's easy enough to use the product, and I think not as bad as some of them thought it would be."

In the initial phase at Endicott, WebCt is being used to allow professors to create Web pages to pose a syllabus online, and also to create links to other sites that could help students with research, Barclay explained.

The goal is to eventually enable professors and students to hold online discussion groups and to teach courses completely online. Testing could even be done on the computer using WebCt, Barclay said.

"It's rich with features," he said.

Marshall University in West Virginia began working with WebCt in 1996 and offers a glimpse of the product's potential. The public university now has 700 courses on its WebCt server, a number that increases 150 percent each semester, said Morgan.

Morgan, an assistant professor of integrated science and technology at Marshall, said professors use WebCt in a wide variety of ways.

For example, he personally posts all his lecture notes, gives tests and uses the "assignment drop box" for students to turn in homework online.

"That way I can tell what time they filed (their homework), instead of `I left it and it was stolen,'" Morgan said.

Some faculty use a single tool, such as the quiz feature with automatic scoring, or maintain an e-mail list to let students know about a canceled class, for instance.

He said faculty were skeptical of WebCt initially.

"It has taken 3« years to get where we are," Morgan said. "A lot of our faculty were scared to use the new technology. They were afraid it would be too much work. But very few faculty who use it one time quit using it. Usually they use it one time and then they're hooked."

Students, meanwhile, don't need any convincing.

"It's really the students driving all of this," Morgan said.

But he acknowledged that it's important to still give students an incentive to come to class. That's why Morgan makes sure the lecture notes he posts would only make sense to the students who came to hear him speak.

"That is a problem," Morgan said. "Students shouldn't think they're getting everything by just printing them out."

Vallone stressed that most professors use WebCt to complement their curriculum, and the product is not meant to replace the special bond that can develop in the classroom.

Yet, not all students reveal their true self in a crowded room.

"I think faculty find students are often more vocal online," she said. "They're not as intimidated to ask a question."

The potential to change how students learn and teachers teach is exhilarating for the staff, said Jarboe, who added he's never worked for a company where customers send unsolicited _ and glowing _ testimonials about the products it sells.

"It is exhilarating and part of the reason it is is because we're not just selling software and services, we are actually in the middle of helping college and universities transform the educational experiences," Jarboe said. " That's what makes it a mission. ... The power of that is what makes working here so much more energizing than, `Oh yeah, I have a day job.'"