"Is There a Class With This Content?" WebCT and the Limits of Individualization:

Abstract

This essay traces the provenance of Internet-based course delivery and management systems such as WebCT and Blackboard, and thereby seeks insight into the ideologies and assumptions underlying the current diffusion of such systems into institutions of higher education. A historical perspective reveals that these purportedly revolutionary pedagogical tools originated with the low-tech teaching machines with which behaviourists of the 1950s and 1960s sought to individualize instruction. Although widely touted as an educational panacea and source of learner empowerment, individualization emerged from a drive to make instruction more efficient by replacing the human teacher with a machine that delivered standardized content to a large number of students. This goal underlay further developments in computer-assisted instruction, computer-managed instruction, and integrated learning systems. The potential of contemporary Web-based systems to enhance classroom dynamics in higher education is therefore severely constrained by the legacy of individualization and the long-standing premise, embedded within the design of such systems, that the goal of technology-based instruction is to achieve efficiencies by replacing human interaction in the classroom with access to mediated, individualized content.