Unfortunately, the margin for error was negligible due to the infrequent class meetings. Therefore, when problems occurred, which is inevitable in the faculty s first experience with courseware, they were insurmountable for facul ty and students alike. This negatively effected the students experience with the courseware. From this preliminary analysis of the focus group data, length of course is a crucial factor in student evaluation of courseware. Traditional lecture courses delivered over a period of time have more margin for error than do brief or compressed courses .
Problems are more disruptive to students' learning in brief or compressed courses.
Courses offered over longer time frames have more slack, and therefore room for courseware problems. The inexperience faculty in this study have seen the utility of WebCT even through the cloud of problems mentioned above. The experienced faculty was able to deal with some of the access problems that occurred in their courses. More complete results will be forthcoming in our presentation as the data analysis will be completed in the near future. References DeSieno, Robert.