Blackboard

All weary lecturers - picture this: You sit at your computer on Monday morning and send out three group emails to your honours classes telling them that they will find the handout for the class on the course site, you give them their assignments and you set a deadline of 12 midnight on Sunday so next Monday when you sit down at your computer you have three groups of completed work. You know the exact time they were submitted, you can mark them and return with comments by email in minutes and you haven't touched a photocopier or a dog-eared essay all week.

Gone are the days of phoning round to change tutorial times, masses of photocopied hand-outs at the front of the lecture theatre and students failing to turn up for their essay return slot. The University's sub-committee on the use of communication and information technology in learning and teaching has just recommended that the University purchase one of the leading software packages providing a virtual learning environment. Blackboard allows staff to create a class icon with all resources, class notices and facilities for students to share ideas and work. Students can then bookmark all their classes on their own personalised homepage so every time they log in they find all the latest news, assignments and resources.

This facility can also be used for news and events from student support services and student and staff societies. If you were a staff member of the music society, had kids at the University nursery and liked to be up to speed on the latest University exhibitions you would pull the icons for these three sites as well as your classes on to your homepage and have all the info you needed on one page without trailing through the website.

Virtual learning environments have proved in Universities all over the world to be invaluable to staff and students. The speed of information exchange has brought academic communities much closer. Imagine receiving a call from the most respected academic in your field offering to deliver a lecture at 5pm in the Bonar Hall that evening and knowing that by lunchtime, everyone in the University will know about it at the touch of a button and you are guaranteed a capacity audience. How often do we discuss issues with colleagues and conclude that we need a University wide debate? With Blackboard, weekly discussion forums are easy and fun with people posting emails to the discussion site that is accessible by everyone in the University. Trips, lectures, parties, lunches, seminars can be posted and accessed in minutes by the whole University.

Three support staff are to be appointed before Christmas to provide training and deal with any initial teething troubles. They will be based in the learning and teaching support unit in the centre for learning and teaching which will be housed in the Franklin building. The purchase of Blackboard has been funded by SHEFC's knowledge economy task force initiative.

Some staff in the University are already familiar with a virtual learning environment - webCT. Where webCT is up and running there will be no obligation to move over to Blackboard but resources will support the new package.

Blackboard has been piloted across some faculties. Here are some of the opinions:

Professor Michael Rennie: "Blackboard will revolutionise the delivery of teaching. The new sports biomedicine course will be delivered by Blackboard making it easy for students to manage learning in their own time and free up staff for appropriate face to face tuition."

John Lee, school of nursing and midwifery: "We wanted to dip our toes in the online learning water. Blackboard allows us to explore different online approaches, without a major time investment learning the technology. This means that we can focus on developing good teaching approaches. Because it so quick and easy to use, the focus is on the learning, not the technology.

I like the way that you can choose the features that you want to use. In one continuing education course we are only using the discussion board - the majority of the teaching and learning happens in the classroom."

Full details on Blackboard are available at www.blackboard.com

Next Page
Return to October 2001 Contact