Henry McLoughlin

The Development of European Learning by Technological Advance (Delta) programme was part of an upsurge in EU research funding in the late 1980s. I was a computer science lecturer at UCD and artificial intelligence and educational technology were my research interests. The early stages of Delta supported blue sky research, which was the type that I preferred.

UCD won funding for the A Courseware Engineering System (Aces) project – an ‘exploratory action’ in which we partnered with University of Ulster (UU) Jordanstown, Courseware Europe in the Netherlands and the University of Amsterdam. Between 1988 and 1990 the group developed support software for educational curricula in any discipline. These prototypes matched learning styles with the course material and used AI to assess whether learning objectives were being met.

Courseware Europe was the official coordinator for Aces. At the end of the project its CEO concluded that we had created nothing of commercial value. That meant that any partner could put the results to whatever use they wished.

A different consortium came together for a follow-up project in the next round of Delta. UCD teamed up with MARI Computer Systems, ICL, the University of Maastricht and UU Jordanstown (again) for Educational Access and Support Tools (East) which ran from 1992 to 1994. Its goal was to build an educational support server that provided various levels of support to specific classes of users during different phases of their education. Eamonn Webster and myself were UCD’s participants in the study with assistance from a couple of temporary contributors.

To my mind, East was a disappointment.

Instead of doing interesting things, we fell back on standard software engineering methods and ended up demonstrating stuff that wasn’t ambitious. The official reviewer didn’t like our work. And the European Commission was not happy.

After East we turned our attention to remote video lecturing, working with our partners in Jordanstown and with UCD computer services. But that technology did not live up to our expectations.

Duncan Lennox was a UCD masters student in computer science. He also worked for Glanmire Electronics at the weekends and kept me and my departmental colleagues up to date on new Apple technologies. When Duncan discovered the Mosaic web browser, he suggested that we take look at it. We couldn’t get Mosaic to work properly on a Macintosh, but thought it was an interesting little gimmick.

At least we knew now what the World Wide Web was. And in 1994 it began to dawn on me that we could use this new thing as a platform for the educational support software that we had worked on.

I employed Duncan for three months and asked him to put together a web site that would mimic the course delivery and administration system that we had in mind. For example, it should allow a student in Belfast to log into a server in Dublin, see what work they needed to do, then study multimedia material or communicate with a tutor.

The web server for this demonstrator was a Macintosh. Miriam Allen at the UCD Audio Visual Centre did some graphic design work for it.

Duncan then made another discovery. Apple was running an awards scheme for software developers. We submitted our web application and it was selected for the finals of the competition in June 1995. Duncan, Eamonn and I headed out to this event at the PC Expo in New York.

Miriam Allen helped us to produce a little brochure before we left. We picked the name Web Educational Support Tools, or West, as the name of the software – because that was as far away from East as possible. I showed this document to Dennis Jennings, who I had known since he started working in UCD computing services. The only time in my life when I saw Dennis’s jaw drop was when he read our description of West.

When we arrived at the exhibition we looked around the competing entries and thought we might have a chance. Duncan did all the talking in front of the judges, because he had more experience with presentations in the US. The presentation went well and we won an Apple Enterprise Award in the education category.

By September we were ready for a first public release of our course management system. We met the accountant from Glanmire Electronics and asked if he would set up a company for us in exchange for a few pints. Like our product, the firm was called Web Educational Support Tools and Dennis became the chairman. He got us up and running with an office in the business incubation unit on the UCD campus.

Dennis gave us a very important piece of advice – that we should agree on the division of ownership in the company while its shares were still worth nothing. This we did. Dennis also identified business contacts for us, including Paul Kenny, who joined West as CEO in June 1996. A director of the NCB Group investment bank, he had commercial experience in computing as well as in financial services.

I was now giving about one fifth of my working time to West. I tried to educate other educators on how the web could support and their students, spreading the word informally around other academic institutions in Ireland. We gave demo copies of our software to all the universities. The UCD public affairs office tried to support this activity, but the people there did not understand yet what the World Wide Web was about. That became apparent when they arranged a radio interview for me in a part of the country where there was no university.

Meanwhile, we handed over the development of a new product release to Eamonn Webster, who was one of the best software developers I ever came across. He rewrote the course management system in C. This became the first commercial edition and was marketed as the Desktop Education Server. Its functionality was the same as the version in the brochure, but the software was now more robust and ran on a variety of web servers.

We set a price of $250 for the software and did not place an upper limit on the number of users. The first sales went to high schools in the US.

By the end of 1996 Web Educational Support Tools had moved out of UCD to offices in Pearse Street. The company had now started working on package designs and user manuals. It also added an interface for system administrators to the software.

We had arrived at a point where we needed to decide about our future relationship with the university. Eamonn and Duncan were happy to leave the academic environment and to commit themselves to the company. I was in a different position. I was already employed as a lecturer and my main interest was blue sky research rather than commercial software. I figured therefore that I should stay in UCD. But I would retain my shareholding in the company.

In early 1997 Web Educational Support Tools renamed itself WBT Systems and its software became known as TopClass. The company made a landmark sale to the State University of New York which ran 64 campuses. Commercial organisations were also beginning to select TopClass for employee training.

WBT Systems set up a sales subsidiary in San Francisco. It secured venture capital funding from Delta Partners, from private investor Tony Kilduff and from Forbairt. I was not involved in the investment discussions but I was aware that this money would enable the company to take on more employees.

The level of optimism about WBT Systems reached a point where other shareholders wanted to buy my stake. I sold some of my shares – not all – and raised £40,000. Thus I could say that I had made money from the company.

Over the next few years I kept track of WBT and its activities. It became clear that its business model was moving away from education and into corporate training, especially in organisations with regulatory compliance needs. UCD continued to use the course management software on a limited scale. It ran in the computer science school, in the Audio Visual Centre and in the medical school – probably because it was good at providing access to image files.

Some years later I had one final encounter with TopClass when I introduced it into another organisation on the UCD campus.

I had become technical advisor to ProfExcel, a distance education service which provided special needs training to second-level teachers. It implemented TopClass in 2002 but had limited success with the system. Some of the learners ran into problems when they tried to access the web server through connections with a very narrow bandwidth. They were able to use the system, but missed out on its ability to produce a lot of visually appealing courseware.

Last edit: October 2023

© Henry McLoughlin 2023