BPP College Virtual Learning News

Over the last few weeks we have had a number of meetings with Blackboard and fellow Blackboard users.  Some of these meetings have focused on our own installation and issues.

However, two particular meetings were interesting in looking at how the product may be developing.  The first was a Blackboard organised day looking at the ‘Roadmap’ of future developments, the second was the London Blackboard User Group (LBUG) meeting for December.

There was a lot of overlap between the days so the major topics will be covered together below.

I would strongly recommend all VLE users register at: blackboard.com/projectngplayground now (more details in number 2 below).

1) Project NG (Next Generation) stage 1 (Blackboard version 9.0) and experiences so far

As some readers will know, we were very close to opting to move to Blackboard version 9 in the summer.  Few users actually opted for the move so it was interesting to hear (at the LBUG) the experiences of Northampton, CandI and Teesside moving to 9.0.

Overall, the message seemed to be that they had been that people who went for 9 early have been “unpaid beta testers” helping Bb iron out lots of problems.  Kate Boardman from Teesside was happy to say it had been worth the hassle, I did not quite get that impression from the others.  Overall, Kate could argue that as most issues are now resolved it was only a few months of problems – perhaps okay for those providing three year courses but perhaps not realistic for us: especially with the launch of the Accelerated LPC this year.  Even Kate admitted the move to 9 was the hardest decision she’s had over a Bb upgrade – her team were apparently split on the issue.

The major benefit from the move to 9, flagged by students and tutors, is the interface change and improved aesthetics.  Northampton and Teesside both offered plenty of drop in training sessions for staff to learn how 9 is different – our plan for last year did include a training period.  However, their considerably sized Learning Technology teams would help them in being able to roll out such training programmes.  Advantages in 9 pointed to by the three institutions included:

• More intuitive
• Less control panel
• Inbuilt blogs/journals (we will have to consider our usage)
• Group improvements (inc. Student create, signup, random, group blogs)
• Sub tabs for portal usage

Overall, 9.0 is stable now after teething problems – not all Bb releases can claim this.

See the announcements from last year for more on this.

2) Project NG (Next Generation) stage 2 (Blackboard version 9.1) and beyond

The first step for 9.1 will be to resolve some of the outstanding issues for 9.0 – including Webdav/Data Store issues.  However, it has been deliberately delayed to resolve outstanding issues.  It is 9.1 which we will trial later this Winter on the Test Server (bpptest.blackboard.com) before deciding on if we upgrade in July.  The Playground (see link above) will be released shortly to help iron out problems before 9.1 is available for our test server – it would be great if as many BPP staff as possible could register to test the functionality.

9.1’s focus is on instructor productivity – likely features:

• Grading – centralized grading of assignments and assessments.  Grading of blogs and journals.  Question by question and anonymous grading.
• Question discovery and management – easier to reuse content.  Can browse existing (test) questions and filter/search to add into new tests.
• Course files – WebCT style space in course for managing files in directory structure.  Effectively the ‘courses’ folder in Data Store, which we are going to activate when we move to 9, but accessible via the learning module.
• Learning Modules (previously Learning Units) – revised to more WebCT style.  Structure of content with table of contents and optional hierarchical navigation.
• Course Wiki – collaborative editing, instructor grading – inc. search by user’s edits.
• Flexible course roles – can copy roles to create new ones and edit privileges, now 160 privileges to fine tune.   This could be useful in restricting what freelancers, externals, etc. can do on modules.
• ‘Mashups’ – Course Designers and Instructors can discover external content and embed it in the course.  These appear anywhere the rich text editor appears so can pull in content from elsewhere – 9.1 is likely to ship with 3 or 4 Mashups (definitely YouTube and Flickr).
• Lesson Plans – allow instructors plan structure of content.  Plan sequentially – may be of use for pedagogic planning of modules and individual pieces of content within it.

Content System (aka Data Store) improvements:

• Thumbnail previews for images.
• Web based applet for dragging and dropping folders (less need for using My Network Places).
• Better course folders (see above)

In addition in 9.1 – the Calendar tool and RSS support are supposed to be improving but I would not hold your breath on those ones.

Beyond 9.1 a few other issues were discussed:

• 9.2 will focus on visuals and reliability.
• 9.3+ will look at more ‘social’ learning possibilities, better use of Content System as eAssessment repository, ePortfolio improvements have been pushed back and there was also good discussion on reports and how data at course and system levels needs to be improved (not least to help build student formative profiles, business cases, etc.).

If you have any ideas on any of the above feel free to submit them to Blackboard’s suggestion box (http://www.blackboard.com/Company/Feedback/Suggest-Product-Enhancements/For-Learn.aspx) – you may want to check with the Learning Technology Department first on if your ideas are already possible.

Blackboard have been quite busy with user engagement and feedback – these (and other) events are covered on sites including the below:

Durham University: http://www.dur.ac.uk/lt.team/blog/?p=712

TVU: http://tvuelearning.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/blackboard-release-9-stories-so-far/

So all in all, 9.1 here we come (fingers crossed) – now where is that plan from last year…

IG.

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• Blackboard and Microsoft Get Even Closer (boycottnovell.com)

Please note that for security reasons Blackboard have removed the ability for tutors to export and import content from one module to another using module Control Panels.

We are working with them on getting this resolved.  In the meantime, if you need a lot of content copying from one module to another let the Learning Technology team know as we can do it from the System Admin side.

Now that the new Staff Intranet has launched ( SharePoint) we are keen to hear your views on if you want this blog to continue or if all announcements should now be made on our SharePoint pages.

The current thinking is that this site can remain of use for sharing thoughts, FAQs and news whilst SP may be of use for system stability announcements and the like.

Let us know your thoughts – IG.

The final parallel I attended was not all that interesting – really being a marketing pitch by Blackboard hidden as a case study looking at one College’s Bb implementation.  The more interesting bit perhaps being the use of the Quality Matters rubric for course quality.  They have also acknowledged the limitations of their deployment and are looking at building an Instructional Design team to improve the aesthetics of their Blackboard site and to ‘liven up’ the learning.  Let the Learning Technology team know anytime you want to discuss these kind of issues.

Included in their course template are basic student ‘how to’ guides which are copied within the template for each new learning module.  Would such generic advice be useful by default in your learning modules?

The final keynote was from Lester Holt of NBC.  An interesting talk on the parallels between education and journalism, focusing on the revolution in both resulting from the Internet and other developments.  I will not describe the talk in detail here but feel free to have a chat with me about it sometime if you would be interested.  Mr Holt also talked about the new deal which will see NBC content available through Blackboard in the US – obviously nice opportunities with this for history classes and the like.

Did you find the accounts of this Conference interesting and potentially of use to your practice?  PLEASE give me some feedback via this link [http://www.rypple.com/iangardner/pleasegivemeyourfeedback]. Thanks — IG.

This was one of the better sessions I attended as it was quite focused on concrete examples of assessment ‘2.0′.  For more information on ‘Web 2.0′ type ideas see the Wikipedia entry.

The objectives of ‘pedagogy 2.0′ in this case were described as being about more engagement, improving learning, etc.  If the tutor is creative then the student will be.  Particular tools were looked at.  First was Flickr:

• use of notes to highlight points/sections of image
• reinforce lectures, notes, etc. with annotated Flickr images
• notes can include hyperlinks to more resources

Obviously, having students upload and annotate content has obvious uses in archeology and other subjects.  How could you use this?  How about uploading an image of a key document in your course and annotating it – remember copyright though!

One thought for me here was that we could perhaps use this for interactive learning module menus instead of using flash – something to experiment with!

The second tech was Big Huge Labs (’the home of Flickr tools’):

• Can be used on top of Flickr content – for example creating magazines from Flickr images – for (re)interpretations and summaries of topics
• The trading card creator tool – have students create cards related to a topic: basically like flash cards (which we can also do with StudyMate)

Tech 3 were online office tools such as Google Docs and Zoho.  We use Google Docs already for some surveys and the staff search info but we have not really looked at Zoho in detail since c.2007.  There was some interesting functionality shown, including Zoho Creator for databases and survey.

Tech 4 was ToonDoo which is one of the emerging sets of easy to generate animation tools.  One advantage of ToonDoo is that you can create your own characters and can be used for creative writing, commenting on current affairs, etc.  ToonBooks can perhaps be used for flipbooks including training materials.

Session number 14: Web 2.0 tools was similar to the above but was really just discussing tools which were better known to me and with less application to learning than in the above session.  This session covered:

• Textthemob – mobile phone voting.
• Jing – from the people who make Camtasia this is a largely similar scaled-down version.
• Picnik – image editing.  This is a good resource for getting your image file sizes down before uploading to the VLE and you can also make your images more interesting, see below as an example of photos from (around) the BbWorld event.
  

  Images from BbWorld09

• Dvolver – easier video making/animation online.
• Gabbly – a chat type tool as mentioned in previous posts, including this one.

Some tools from the discussion which also praised:

• dabbleboard.com – this seems to be an online collaborative whiteboard similar to that which can be found in online classroom tools like Wimba Classroom.
• voicethread – these are multimedia discussion board style conversations.

This session covered one institution’s setup for course creation and archiving.  They have a logging system for requests, which we might need, although it would be better for this to be formalised within programme review/development.

They also seem to have a lot of responsibility on tutors for archives – Blackboard actually provide a service for offline saving of old courses – we just have not taken them up on it yet.

Overall, this session was really for Blackboard admin concerned about the size of their databases but please contact us for information on backups, restores, etc. for your VLE content.

Babson College is a small, private, business school and this session concentrated on their Innovation in IT department’s programme designed to increase staff understanding of online teaching.

Some points I took away:

• use exemplars to show what can be done.
• ensure training stresses the need for the tutors to work with their learning tech/instructional design team: encourage quality in design not just teaching of other people’s content.

Their particular sessions training were said to include:

• staff go through a 4 hour student experience session which make staff aware of how it feels to be a student
• design - including 1-2-1 support
• faculty teach and take – experience what others have designed as a student and start online teaching by teaching other trainee tutors
• ongoing - people going through are given credit: ‘blended fellows programme graduates’ and works into tenure.

I like the fact these sessions are practice, rather than technology, focused but how scalable running workshops for six people at a time, with lots of ‘hand holding’, is questionable.

This was an interesting session by one of the other UK delegates, Barbara Newland from Bournemouth University [BU].

SUE = Student Unit [i.e. Learning Module/Course] Evaluation.

The aim of SUE was to get feedback to help improve BU’s performance, including in the National Student Survey.  A paper based survey was moved online first using the Blackboard survey tool and then using the WayPoint system, which offers some interesting functionality.   An evaluation of survey tools was made with key criteria including:

• integration with student records and Blackboard (same login for students)
• accessibility
• anonymous response options
• faculty able to see real time completion (and different levels of access – just their course, their department, etc.)

The Bb Survey tool was discredited as it was found it would be 42 clicks per course to setup – i.e. not scalable!  Also opportunity to pilot Waypoint’s assessment element.

Despite prizes being moved offered and the move to Waypoint survey responses were disappointing:

• paper based response = 36%
• Blackboard = 19%
• Waypoint <19%

One problem was using a generic survey seems to have led to ‘drop outs’ during survey – better response were received on specific surveys such on topics such as lecture capture technology.

Other options were mentioned including CourseEval who, like Waypoint, had a stall in the BbWorld Exhibition.  If we want to consider becoming more coordinated in using online surveys for student views on courses/tutors, in a detailed manner, it may well be worth us going through the kind of evaluation which took place at BU.  However, the costs (inc. man time) were flagged up in the presentation.

Session PowerPoint.

Other people present mentioned similar activities elsewhere – including using survey tools within Banner (student record system) – and standard educational survey issues were raised, such as not being able to withhold grades until a survey is completed, the negative impact on scores if responses are enforced, potential negative impact of final grade if survey is run after student receives coursework/test marks, etc.

Respondus provide a number of tools we make use of.  Another tool which seems to be improving nicely is their LockDown Browser which helps reduce problems with Blackboard online tests such as integrity of assessments and loss of Internet connection.

As well as talking to Respondus at their stall I also attend one of their sessions:

Session number 9: StudyMate Class Server: “The Ultimate Study Group” for Blackboard Courses

See here for other posts on StudyMate.

The session on StudyMate showed how it can be used for group work and student authoring of materials.  Why might you want to use it?

• encourage active learning
• students lean at all stages – creating new items, editing items, viewing the activities of others
• engaging and fun

There are multiple types of activity which were described in the older posts.

Some nice features were shown – including the option to export student authored StudyMate questions into Respondus for tutor use and how each time SM is added to a content area that creates a new ‘Project’ which can have different settings so multiple content can be added.

New features described in the session:

• maths equation editor – are working on it but difficult.
• images in questions – coming soon (may indeed already be available by now)

This session covered the Blackboard exemplary course scheme/competition.  The scheme includes good advice on building online course elements and if you would be interested in submitting do let us know.  We have recommended the Rubric to some College staff in the past as a way to check your learning modules, even if you are not planning to submit to the actual scheme.

The major part of the session was some examples from previous winners, some tips I picked up from them:

• set out your instructional strategy clearly and build your course elements to be appropriate to this.
• offer plenty of support to your students – inc. how to videos, what they should be doing, time release content so they do not get lost, etc.
• have a quote to grab attention and lead into each subtopic.
• brand content so subsections of course have an identity – such as ‘Thursday Night Live!’ for online classroom sessions.
• constant improvement frameworks in place to keep the development of an online course going.
• use the rubric to focus on learning – NOT ADMIN.