Heavy lifting

Last summer's move to a new office required a lot of heavy lifting, but this year I'm moving digits. We're switching to a new course management system in the fall, discarding WebCT for the more euphoniously named Moodle, and the Powers That Be keep insisting that we're aiming for a "seamless migration," which makes me wonder what sort of seamstress one might take along on a migration and what sorts of seams she might be called upon to sew, but never mind the mixed metaphors: today I'm dealing with the niggling little bit of the migration that will not be seamless. Namely, the gradebook.

Now I like keeping my gradebook online. It's so much easier than those messy old spiral-bound gradebooks with the pages half falling out, and the online version calculates grades much more accurately than I can. But the problem is that the gradebooks for past courses will not carry over into Moodle, so if I want to preserve a record of students' grades, I need to download them from WebCT.

Fortunately, for a few years I recorded grades both online and off, so I have hard copies of grades for some classes. But I still had a pile of classes for which I had no record of the grades except on WebCT. How big a pile? 21 classes. Not a lot. How difficult could it be to download 21 online gradebooks from WebCT and then save them as Excel files?

Not difficult---but tremendously annoying. WebCT is notorious for demanding multiple clicks for every action, and then, of course, I had to convert the downloaded data into an Excel file, give it an appropriate name, and save it in a sensible place. The first few files took some thought, but after that it was just mindless clicking.

How much clicking? I counted: 32 clicks per class, 21 classes, 672 clicks. Six hundred seventy-two. I kept sliding into that Zone of Mindlessness that opens up whenever a task requires endless mindless clicking, but then I would get to the point where I needed to name and save the Excel file, and suddenly I needed to retrieve my brain from the Zone, a migration it wasn't always eager to make. A few times it didn't quite make the trip all the way back and I ended up saving the file in the wrong format or in the wrong folder, and then I had to do some more clicking to fix the problem.

But the files have all migrated--not quite seamlessly, but you can't have everything. At least the heavy lifting is done. Now my clicking digits need some R&R, wrapped around a nice cold glass of iced tea.