The websites listed above give an in-depth explanation and description of what the program is meant to do. In short, it provides a fully functional web-base for teaching and learning, providing course content online, and makes it very easy for a faculty member to create an online course. In the beginning, he had looked at all sort of products, and in the end, they have instead created an all purpose course-authoring environment. It is written in javascript, which lets the client use it on their workstation while the server waits to serve another client, making it very efficient. NT-domain is important to use from an administrative point of view.
Email is provided as a closed environment within the class limits.
In next few weeks, it shall be possible to forward or cc outside of the environment. The message board is the most popular item of use at the moment. Jafari encouraged the CCDs to try it out, and to have their faculty experiment with it. Wittlich mentioned that they are also working through Elizabeth Rubins and Cathy Spiaggia of the Usability Lab to do usability testing of OnCourse with an eye to improving its use. They are getting as much user input as possible to help in further development of the tool.