For the purposes of grading, I use the compile feature to select some or all of the contributions and compile them into a continuous text. This technique avoids the excess labor involved with opening each contribution separately, a task that gets tiresome when performed 50 times. For my business writing course, I use the bulletins to manage student peer reviews. Forty students are placed in teams, and each person reviews the work of his or her team members, producing 120 reviews. To organize these reviews, I create a limited access forum for each team.
Students post a review in a message box and route it to the right forum with a drop-down menu.
The system works well for instructors for two reasons. As the above example suggests, WebCT already provides significant powers that are unavailable to conventional teachers. The trade-off, of course, is time, time that most teachers do not have or do not wish to expend on digital instruction. As a representative of the current generation of course management systems, WebCT suggests an answer to this question. First, the future CMS will entail very little wait time for any of its processes.