Blackboard: Enabler of the XXI Century Campus

By Filipe Rocha, University of Minho 'with-two-campi', Portugal

There was nothing else worth attending at the time, so I chose this session. A very quiet session with about 10 delegates, though we were invaded by chanting of Russians, the tooting of car horns, and the occasional cry of 'Rangers'. The session was about UoMinho's story of implementing learning technology across the University and their paradigm shift from learning to discovery, individual to collaborative study, teach as knowledge to teacher as guide etc, and lots of references to Bologna throughout. In 2005/06 each of the Schools (can't remember how many he said - I was suffering from 'University statistics fatigue' at that point) choose their own technology to pilot (eg Early Education, Moodle, DMart) with the idea to pick the best features of each to build into a University-wide platform. The idea failed, and they went with Blackboard and inhouse developed Portuguese language pack instead - easy to use and reliable. (Blackboard is a 'she' apparently and was subsequently refered to her gender for the rest of the presentation - 'she keeps on working', 'she never fails'). They have developed a set of 'e-UM levels' with appropraite training to gauge and promote usage:

e-UM(A) - compulsory use for course/module documents ('course dossier')
e-UM(B) - static content online
e-UM(C) - use at least one communication or assessment tool
e-UM(D) - put learning objects online
e-UM(E) - e-learning

Filipe then talked about how they had extended Blackboard with a 'Course Dossier' Building Block that forces staff to develop this set of information (which is compulsory for all courses in Portugal) - a kind of definitive module guide. But I was interested in their Sign-Up Tool development by the School of Law that allows students to assign themselves to groups and then generates the Group Pages in Blackboard.