Excerpts from the Handbook

Common Problems Encountered by First Time Users:

• The most common mistake is not allowing yourself enough time to set up this tool properly. It is an advanced tool with a complex set-up and therefore, you must give yourself a reasonable time frame to set it up. Without any technical support and only using the instructions available here and on the web, you might want to allow a week for experimentation. Technically, the tool can be set-up in a matter of minutes. Practically, because there are so many steps to doing it and at each step a very simple typo or error can cause the tool to fail, you should allow more time to be able to set up the tool without feeling pressure.
• Write out all the steps on a practice or set-up sheet. There are quite a few steps and trying to keep every aspect of this set-up in your head will almost certainly either lead to an unsuccessful attempt or make debugging it very, very difficult.
• Shying away from this tool because of its complexity can be a big error. In some courses, this tool is the only valid option for creating the kind of course necessary. There is help available. It should be attacked much the way you might have approached using the Quiz Module. This tool has a learning curve, but the power it can bring to your course is almost unsurpassed by any other technology at the present.
• At the end of this section is a checklist of things that could go wrong with the set-up of this tool, be certain to keep that list handy until you have the same confidence with the CD-ROM Tool that you have with any of the other tools.
• There can be some confusion about how many tools and how many CD's you can have per course.
• One CD-ROM Tool per course
• Multiple CD's are allowed per course.

WebCT Vocabulary (see documents at http://www.webct.com/ for comparison of terms from earlier versions):

• Mirror Files; Dummy Files, Empty Files: Many people when discussing this tool use these names interchangeably. They all are referring to a file inside the course Manage Files area that has the same file name as the actual file on the CD that you will be accessing. This file in Manage Files is usually a file that has only one character in it. The CD-ROM Tool tries to call the empty file into your Content Module. Since the file is essentially empty, the CD-ROM Tool then bounces to the CD drive to find the real or full file. Hence, the terms mirror, dummy and empty all sort of describe these files but none are completely accurate.
• Root Directory: This always means the beginning directory of any computer, disk or Manage Files area. It is where the filing system begins. In WebCT the root for all your content is My-Files. You cannot go before that directory. You will put everything you upload in this root including your sub-directories (subfolders). On your CD, the root is the first directory on the disk, everything else goes down or in from that starting point.
• Relative Reference or Referencing: This terminology is from basic HTML and other computer terminology.
• Files on your computer have relative addresses to each other, but only absolute addresses to other systems on the Internet. Files inside your WebCT course all have relative addresses to each other, but generally only absolute addresses to anything outside of your course. Note that these absolute addresses to files inside your course require a user id and password. The reason instructor/designers and programmers use relative rather than absolute addressing so much of the time is that it saves quite a bit of time and it usually helps to make hyperlinks more portable to other courses.

Student View versus Logged in as a Student:

As an instructor/designer your View option is an approximation of what a student will see in your course. You cannot test the CD-ROM Tool using this view. You must have a WebCT ID that is in the Manage Students listing; then log in to your course with that ID to test the CD-ROM Tool. This is no different than how you would test the Quiz Module.

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