At first glance, some recent changes to the university’s student and faculty web portal, PAWS, seem like a step toward a more adaptive, streamlined system. Yet upon closer inspection it appears students may be at risk of losing a certain level of functionality in exchange for a visually sleeker website and the promise of enhanced usability.

The changes in question are in the “course tools” section of the Academics tab.

In the past, each course had its own set of tools available on a homepage, built directly into and accessible through PAWS. But beginning with the 2011 fall semester classes, the PAWS course tools homepages have been scrapped. In their place, PAWS has been integrated with another piece of academic software called Blackboard, widely used at other Canadian universities.

When asked about the impetus behind the shift, Keith Jeffrey, Manager of Educational and Research Technology Services at the University of Saskatchewan, pointed to the fact that there had been no major updates or changes made to the software behind PAWS in several years. Blackboard, on the other hand, has evolved and improved enough recently to more effectively fulfill the needs of students and instructors.

Recent improvements aside, while most of the features available through the original course tools homepages can be found in the new Blackboard equivalent, the standard homepages are lacking several familiar options.

The first change that students browsing PAWS in the summer will likely notice is that the course members list — the register of students enrolled in a particular class — is no longer available by default.

The course members list may seem insignificant when compared to other, more pertinent academic tools — for instance, the ability to check grades, hand in assignments or download files. In actuality, the member list is an important component of what students have come to expect from PAWS.

The course members list was the first destination on PAWS for any student keen on establishing a friendly or working relationship with classmates prior to the semester’s commencement. Of course, it also let you see if friends were in the same class. There is a silver lining to this change, though: no more spam from classmates who miss lectures and need notes.

Professors will have the option to enable specific course tools on a case-by-case basis, says Jeffrey, allowing them to customize the course homepage as they see fit. Initially though, a predetermined set of tools that “most instructors were using” are enabled by default, with “scores of [other] tools and functionality” available should instructors choose to make use of them.

Yet even if professors have the capability to enable specific course tools as they see fit, including the course members list (among others), there is no guarantee they actually will. Because the default homepage lacks certain sought-after functionality, leaving the ultimate layout of course tools up to the instructor could cause problems as the school year progresses — especially in the (all-too-common) case of computer-illiterate professors who avoid the Internet like the plague.

The new Blackboard-based homepages, while flashier on the surface than their PAWS-based predecessors, will not likely herald any groundbreaking new features. In fact, a number of previously readily available tools are now hiding deep within the menus, or are simply disabled by default.

These changes will take some getting used to. Students will have to adapt to the new menu system and attempt to dig up the functionality that was once readily available.

With any luck, professors will be properly familiarized with the changes made to the course tools homepages. In the hands of a professor who knows how to properly customize and utilize the tools potentially available to them, the Blackboard-based homepages should be an improvement on PAWS.

If not, and students are forced to deal with the bare-bones functionality of the default Blackboard homepage, then they will be starting the semester with a more limited set of online course tools available to them than in previous years.

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graphic: Brianna Whitmore/The Sheaf