Say goodbye to the confusing days of Campus Gradebook, WebCT Campus Edition, Blackboard, WebBoard and Mallard. Illinois Compass, a new online learning system, will replace the host of classroom Web services in 2004.

Students and faculty will be able to turn to one service for quizzing, grades, paperwork, announcements, assignments and discussion. Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services officials plan to introduce Illinois Compass this spring with complete release in fall 2004.

The service will provide every student with an account and a central homepage for all class Web sites.

"This will be an incredible boon, especially during the first two weeks of the semester when students switch courses frequently," said Lanny Arvan, assistant chief information officer for Educational Technologies. "They will see their new classes on the Illinois Compass home page soon after they have added them."

Illinois Compass is designed to avoid the frequent pains some students have using the variety of online course supplements.

"Every time I try to sign on, finding the actual Web site is really frustrating," said Diana Fernandez, senior in business. "It takes 20 minutes to get started on homework because you can't find the freaking Web site."

The overlapping of systems means that students often have to use different programs for different classes in the same semester.

Campus Gradebook has roughly 20,000 registrations, as well as 50,000 on the other four systems, Arvan said. That's well beyond the number of students at the University.

However, Illinois Compass will require only one account, eliminating the tangle of passwords.

"Everyone always forgets all their passwords, then they come up and bother us," said Thrupti Shivakumar, a CITES technician at the Union. "Illinois Compass will integrate all of these things. Soon, you won't need 20 million passwords."

While many CITES services have been cut due to the University's budget woes, officials decided Illinois Compass should move forward, even with a price tag that Arvan estimated at nearly half a million dollars.

The project also is built to eventually support information sharing with Bluestem Authentication security services, Library system and UI Integrate, the University system's information sharing project.

"(Illinois Compass) will make things a lot easier," Shivakumar said.

http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/edtech/projects/compass/index.html