Calgary, AB (September 27, 2004) - WebCT has become an indispensable, collaborative teaching and learning tool used daily by more than 10 million students at nearly 3,000 universities and colleges in over 85 countries. Business entrepreneur and University of British Columbia Adjunct Professor Murray Goldberg of Vancouver, B.C., has won this year's coveted $100,000 Encana Principal Award for his remarkable innovation that has helped create and continues to nurture a worldwide e-learning community.

Goldberg got the idea for WebCT (World Wide Web Course Tools) after conducting an experiment with his computer science students. It showed that those who learned from his classroom lectures and a Web-based course did better academically than students taught by lecture or website alone.

But a decade ago, high-quality educational websites were extremely expensive, time consuming to create, and required a lot of computer expertise. Goldberg pioneered the field of e-learning by building a tool that he and other faculty members could use to easily create and deliver Web-based courses.

"WebCT opens up communications paths," he says. "It allows students to communicate much more effectively and much more deeply with one another and with faculty members."

His WebCT software — designed by a teacher, for teachers — immediately caught on with educators around the world. Within four years, more than two million students were learning with WebCT.

To meet the growing demand for his product, Goldberg founded WebCT Educational Technologies Corporation with business partner Sasan Salari, a student who had helped him design the software.

In 1999, WebCT merged with Universal Learning Technologies of Massachusetts. The company (www.webct.com), under the leadership of President and CEO Carole Vallone, now has a total of more than 300 employees in offices in Lynnfield, Mass., Vancouver and Australia.

WebCT continues to be the most widely used software of its kind in the world, in a global e-learning market estimated to be worth about $7 billion US. Courses created with WebCT contain searchable course notes and content, review material, a bulletin board for discussion, assessment tools such as quizzes and exams, image databases, chat areas and more.

Michelle Lamberson, Director of Learning Technology at UBC, says Goldberg's innovation "has empowered educators to create meaningful online experiences for students, and enabled the creation of new forms of educational access for learners in Canada and worldwide."

Goldberg left as Canadian president of WebCT in 2002 to found a new company, Silicon Chalk, which builds e-learning products for the classroom, as a complementary technology to WebCT. He still loves teaching and tries to teach at least one course a year at UBC — with WebCT's help, of course!

"My greatest satisfaction is in knowing how much of a difference WebCT is making," Goldberg says. "It's actually improving education for people, or providing access to education that they might not have otherwise had. That's extremely rewarding."

Since 1982, the annual Manning Awards program (www.manningawards.ca) has encouraged and rewarded leading Canadian innovators with more than $3 million in prize money. This year's four major winners, being announced throughout September, will share a total of $145,000. All will be honoured at the annual gala awards dinner Oct. 1 in Vancouver.