WashingtonOnline (WAOL) provides a suite of teaching and learning tools and support services to the 34 community and technical colleges in Washington and to the State Board staff. WAOL provides full-service hosting of a course management system, ePortfolio, webinar, a repository toolset, professional development and 24 x 7 technical support for all users. In addition, WAOL’s cascading enrollment system allows colleges to pool enrollments in completely online courses so that colleges can offer more choices online to their students and in order to aggregate enrollments to efficiently serve small numbers of geographically dispersed students

All students supported through WAOL are enrolled through one of the system community and technical colleges, and the college that enrolls the student retains the tuition, the FTE and any fees. Currently, if the student is supported by WAOL, the enrolling college is billed a technology fee.

If the student is enrolled in a course that is shared among colleges, the college that enrolled the student pays the college that hired the instructor an instruction fee. Currently that fee is $40 per credit; however, it will increase to $50 per credit in Fall 2008. WAOL does not take any part of the instructional fee.

Completely online shared courses help students get access to the courses they need when they need them. A college can adopt and offer online courses that are shared without worrying about the number of their students who might enroll.

Further, if a college does not offer a wide array of online courses to their students, students may go to other colleges that provide those courses. So by offering shared courses, the college will retain tuition and FTE dollars that might otherwise go to another school.

The big advantage is to the student who can take all necessary courses at the same institution, making financial aid, transcripts and program completion easier for the student.

• WAOL will migrate from Blackboard to ANGEL July 2008 through June 2009.
• WAOL will offer new teaching and learning tools, like ePortfolio, a content repository and Elluminate; Elluminate will be free for use by any college.
• Using ANGEL, WAOL will be able to provide branding and administrative access for colleges using ANGEL through WAOL.
• The SBCTC eLearning Team is working to discontinue the WAOL technology fee by funding WAOL costs centrally as directed in the system technology plan.

As soon as WAOL has ANGEL up and running (August 2008) WAOL will create an account and an empty classroom for all active instructors and interested college staff. New users will fill out a registration form to get an account.

WAOL and ANGEL will copy the last classroom taught, a summer classroom and a master if one exists. The instructor will be responsible to check the classroom and make any adjustments or changes to work in ANGEL and to take advantage of the new tools available in ANGEL.

WAOL will begin offering a variety of training opportunities for faculty beginning August 2008. Instructors who have already taught online will be able to learn ANGEL by face-to-face trainings or online tutorials. Training will be available from college staff and from WAOL.

Instructors who are new to online will take the online “Planning for Success” course in ANGEL rather than in Blackboard.

Full WAOL training is required for all instructors who teach shared courses and instructors who teach in courses that use a WAOL ID and Intent to Teach Form process. Instructors from colleges that are using WAOL ANGEL as a hosting service will make their own rules on training.

Currently, any instructor who can demonstrate proficiency in online course delivery only has to learn about WAOL administrative processes in order to be certified to teach on WAOL.

ANGEL has an integrated content repository that allows instructors to post material once and control how and by whom it can be accessed. For instance, an instructor teaching three sections of a course will only need to make a correction once in order for the correction to appear in all three sections.

Further, instructors can make their content available to other instructors in their department, in their college, in the state system; or to the world.

ANGEL also has an ePortfolio.

The WAOL Council is a group of college representatives and SBCTC eLearning staff who meet monthly, online in Elluminate, to discuss how to make WAOL tools and services better. Each college may seat up to 3 representatives on the Council.

The Council will meet online monthly with additional meetings scheduled as needed. The Council will meet in person once a year. Agenda items may be suggested by any Council representative. The Council will work to support each other’s ability to utilize the WAOL collaboration and learning environment to support learning and teaching, at the highest possible level of reliability, and for the lowest possible cost. Opportunities to share resources, information, procedures, and personnel will be a priority of the collaborative.

Colleges with existing Elluminate contracts simply expire at the end of the contract.

Colleges with existing Angel contracts can get out of their contracts at their next contract anniversary date.