Bb-anchester08

What's new? Assessing Learners with Enterprise (pm)

2008-05-15T15:29:00.002+01:00

This afternoon focussed on SafeAssign, the Grade Center and Scholar (not sure what this has to do with assessing, but I suppose it's an opportunity to push the tool).

A useful debate in the presence of Blackboard about the usability, value and robustness of SafeAssign. The urgent checking option isn’t really an option at all because all instructors will want checking to be completed as soon as possible rather than queued in the ‘slower’ option. SafeAssign does not yet accept Office2007 formats and it is not known when this will be resolved. Pepijn referred to the reports as giving an actual judgement of plagiarism. We explored copying and submitting web sources; the reports rarely identified the correct sources or simply gave partial matches, if they identified any matches at all. Jennifer expressed concerns about this and is going to report this issue to their Product Development Team.

A fantastic time exploring and getting to grips the Grade Center, although Pepijn and Jennifer must have experienced question fatigue from the amount of questions I was throwing at them. Again it was good to be able to hear reasons why things work the way they do from a Blackboard perspective, and being able to suggest enhancements.

And finally we were given a quick over of Scholar. I didn’t really take much away from this, not least after 7 hours of sitting in a warm pc room.

What's new? Assessing Learners with Enterprise (am)

2008-05-15T11:50:00.003+01:00

Quick report on the morning's session of the post-pre-conference workshop on 'What's new? Assessing Learners with Enterprise'. Arriving tired after being kept awake by police and ambulance sirens during the night's city centre violence, the workshop aims to cover the Self and Peer Assessment and SafeAssign tools, the Grade Center and Scholar.

The session is facilitated by Pepijn (Pippin) Kalis (Blackboard Training Manager) and supported by Jennifer Matthews (Director of Blackboard Training). There are 3 attendess: a teacher from Delft University (which burnt down last week - http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/105731/46ccb8cd/bouwkunde_gebouw_delft_stort_in.html), a Blackboard systems administrator from the United Arab Emirates and myself. Interesting mix.

So far we've looked at the Self and Peer Assessment tool. We've explored it from the student perceptive and it seems easier to use and more fun than I anticipated. The Instructor view and creating self and peer assessment items is much more complex and involves a number of discrete steps. And Jennifer herself admitted it can be quite difficult and easy to miss out crucial steps. The session is not all about point-and-click, but there's plenty of opportunity for discussion and sharing experiences which works well being such a small group.

Will be starting with SafeAssign after lunch.

2008-05-14T17:49:00.001+01:00

My final parallel of the day for me (before our 'graveyard' slot) was by Julie Andrews (not the one of Mary Poppins or the Sound of Music fame) from Manchester presenting on the benefits to staff and students of online formative and summative assessment (so I had to attend, naturally). Eee, and I'm glad I did. Slide no.2: Why should we be thinking about incorporating more assessment and feedback into learning and teaching? And I was referenced on the slide, and Julie said 'I'd given a great talk earlier in the week'. Yes, me on a University of Manchester slide. Highlight of the presentation. Nothing more worth mentioning/hadn't heard before/hadn't written about - benefits of online formative assessment, good reasons for online summative assessment, and how to get staff buy-in. Oh, and she overran into our joint session ...

Blackboard: Enabler of the XXI Century Campus

2008-05-14T17:46:00.001+01:00

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.

Respondus

2008-05-14T17:43:00.001+01:00

I like Respondus. I want Respondus. I went to the demo by the Account Mgr for Respondus. He demonstrated the 3 (soon to be 4) products of the suite and I have to say that I was actually impressed. We all know about Respondus 3.5 offering an offline assessment authoring tool, but this now makes publishing and deploying an assessment in Blackboard seamless (and you can even publish and deploy the same assessment in several Blackboard sites at the same time) - might be useful for surveys. Respondus allows the user to import questions (even containing images) from Word and publish directly into Blackboard. And Test Banks from several publishers including Thomsons, Pearson and McGraw-Hill can be downloaded for free.

StudyMate Author is a tool that allows Flash activities and multi-player games to be produced and again seamlessly published in Blackboard and they can also be viewed on mobile devices, phones and iPods. These are generated via wizards and templates and once deployed student scores can be extracted via SCORM. I was thinking that this might be useful to generate interesting and interactive activities to support pre-enrolment and applicants, which staff often struggle to develop ideas for - crosswords, jeapody, flashcards.

The next product demonstrated is not yet available - StudyMate Class Server. This plugs into Blackboard and enables staff and students to work collaboratively in generating Flash-based assessment activities, which can be converted into quizzes and linked with the Gradebook. Finally, we were shown the Respondus Lock-Down Browser. This secure browser enables any assessment in Blackboard to be 'forced' into a locked-down browser in which all browser menu functionality (apart from Refresh, it would seem), keyboard shortcuts, the systems tray and taskbar are disabled, screen-monitoring and IM are also disabled. Blackboard and website navigation (unless part of the test) is also locked. Once in the test environment students must submit the test; they cannot close or exit without. The Lock-Down Browser needs to be installed locally, and students can download this on their own machines and it is possible to perform a cluster installation. There is a two month free pilot available and I wonder whether it is worth pursuing this, along with the other products.

Blackboard Beyond: Using Blackboard Software Beyond the Institution

2008-05-14T13:14:00.002+01:00

John Morrison - Director of User Communities, Blackboard

This session was about Blackboard Scholar, Safe Assign, EduGarage and the new Facebook application thing. He went into lots of detail about BbScholar and Safe Assign, which I think most people will already know about, and then ran out of time before getting to the two other things that I hadn't heard much about. Useful session though.

We are the Web: From a Course to a Community (and back?)

2008-05-14T13:06:00.002+01:00

Melissa Phillips, Nicole Hayes and Zak Mensah - University of Leicester

This session was definitely not good. They started by asking if anyone had seen 'A Vision of Students Today'. When practically everyone in the room raised their hands she said, 'oh well, we're going to go ahead and show it anyway'.

I was completely lost in this session due to the fact that they didn't tell us what they were actually talking about, but from what I could gather it was something to do with staff development in lots of different countries. I don't think I'll go into any more detail than that because it really wasn't much use. Juliun Ryan shared my pain so he might be able to give you a clearer idea of what was going on.

Virtual Learning Environments - Content or collaboration

2008-05-14T12:48:00.001+01:00

Chris Turnock - Nothumbria University

This was a really good session based aon a diary study conducted at Northumbria. 14 students kept diaries for 8 weeks (1 entry per week). Very similar to the experiences research that I have done in that it was preceeded by a questionnaire and followed by a focus group (I did interveiws). Aim was to find out what students used on VLE, determine what students used VLE for and investigate student perceptions of the VLE.

Questionnaire stage was on a much larger scale than mine, 407 responses in total. Main themes that emerged from this were use of VLE as a transmissive tool and a collaborative tool hense the title, ease of use, support. Not really a big suprise.

Main themes from Diary stage were content provision to extend knowledge, motivate students, enhance note taking (but students didn't like lots of text based resources and inconsistencies in site design); support and interaction (VLE seen as a source f information but students desire more interaction); independent study (promotes autonomy in learning process); communication tool (variabvle engagement with discussion board facility, 17% of students used voluntarily, 30% used when instructed to by tutor).

Conclusions - VLE is used primarily as a transmissive tool, there is some evidence of use as a communication tool (both tutor led and student initiated), little evidence of collaboration.

I probably have't done this session justice here, it was actually really informative... Also had a useful discussion about how to increase staff use of the VLE and then voted on it what the preferred method would be and what method would be most likely to work. Here are the results: -

Top-down appraoch - 4%/27%
Provide support and training - 27%/18%
Exemplars - 4%/4%
Student demand and minimum requirements - 10%/16%
Give staff time off timetable - 18%/16%
Teaching recognition - 18%/11%
Showcasing and mentoring - 18%/9%

Setting up flexible snapshot processes based in role-based access control

2008-05-14T08:30:00.002+01:00

by Cathy Colless, University of York

Try to keep awake now... This was actually one of the best sessions I went to. They were talking about how they'd integrated their VLE with their student management system (which is SITS) and how they'd subsequently redone the integration so that they could handle enrolments onto sites that didn't map directly to a module - our co-taught modules, organisations etc.

They'd taken an interesting approach - for each module in SITS they created a dummy user in the VLE. Instructors could then enrol these dummy users onto their sites, and the integration checks for enrolments of these users, and then maps these to the modules in SITS and enrols the real users onto the Blackboard sites. So for example, if you have the same module taught at two levels, you'd enrol the dummy user for both MAVs onto the BB site, which would then mean that all students on either module would be enrolled on the BB site.

They'd then extended this approach to pull out other attributes they have information about on any university systems, meaning that you could enrol all Biology students, or first year Maths students, or HWB admin staff etc.

I'm not sure we'd use exactly this approach, but it shows it is possible to set up automatica enrolment for sites which don't map directly to a MAV, and it's probably something we should think about.

As promised...favourite poster picture

2008-05-14T08:18:00.001+01:00

Social Learning and Transcending Course Boundaries in Cooperation with Blackboard Software

2008-05-14T08:15:00.002+01:00

by Jarkko Elo, Diaconia University of Applied Sciences

In case you haven't figured it out yet, this was about using Elgg with Blackboard. It was a short session, and focussed more on the technical implementation that how Elgg was actually being used by people, which was a shame, as I'd have been interested in knowing more about that side of things. They view Elgg as a personal learning environment, but were also using it for some of the things we might use organisation sites for - instructors setting up sites for all students taking a particular course/subject. I'm not sure how this sits with the concept of a PLE - seems that if students are required to use it in certain ways, this is more MLE.

Third keynote - Michael Chasen unveils Bb NG

2008-05-14T07:45:00.004+01:00

In shock that no-one else has blogged the main event yet. Here is my shaky camera phone picture of Michael Chasen at BbWorld Europe (oh yeah, and some guy on stage, boom! boom!)

Seriously though, the classic Bb set piece aka product roadmap actually had a lot of meat in it this year. The new user interface for Bb9.0 looks great, it will be much easier for people to use, have a more modern look and feel, and, I think, set us in good stead for the next few years at least. There will be a LOT of decisions to make - institutionally and by staff designing sites and we will need to think a LOT about how to manage that effectively, but overall it will be worth it. We just need to help staff get past the *gulp* "this looks really different" moment and it will make a big difference. Of course, Michael's enthusiasm is infectious, of course, you feel concerned that he will run out of breath before the runs out of sentence (and at one point possibly also run out of stage) but it was a good keynote, it had substance and the way the audience were lapping up the screenshots and and drag and drop demos was fascinating. Not gonna comment too much here on some of the "coming soon" oddities: multiple vles, opt back to CE4 etc but overall with focus on the UI stuff we are reasonably confident to see before the year is out - things are looking good. Others attending the keynote might add more.

Oh and here's an extra picture...really just as a....sorry, no words, just picture

Blackboard Beyond: extending the Blackboard platform beyond the institution

2008-05-14T06:52:00.002+01:00

A popular one this...and very hard to find. Juliun and I ending up asking someone, and I'm pretty sure that the route they took us wasn't the approved route - it was the no unauthorised access signs that gave it away.

Covered Scholar in quite a lot of depth, and prompted the usual thoughts about Scholar, and whether we should be doing something with it, although I didn't think I really got anything new from the session. It did cover safe Assign as well, but I'm not familiar enough with it to know whether there was anything useful there - sorry Stu. The session overran, so not much about BB Sync, and nothing about anything else.

A seamless, integrated, virtual campus administration system

2008-05-14T06:46:00.003+01:00

by Dolf Jordaan, The University of Pretoria

This session outlined the systems they'd put in place to manage their e-learning implementation - users, courses, enrolments etc... session by Dolf Jordaan (University of Pretoria) about managing their e-learning implementation. Some interesting points - issues that they face with regard to power, bandwidth etc., that we take for granted (well, mostly). But many of the issues they were talking about were pretty familiar.

Their administrative support systems are not a million miles from the site request systems that we have, although more centrally managed and controlled than would work for us (see, I'm not that much of control freak after all). I don't think that there's anything we'd take from it directly, but it did prompt a few thoughts about how our systems work, and whether they could be more efficient/integrated.

The role of assessment in Learning Design

2008-05-13T18:58:00.000+01:00

By Jaroslava Mikulecka, University of Hradec Kralove

I really wish I hadn't attended this. The abstract said 'an emphasis on assessment'. The
emphasis was in fact on 'please appreciate our city's old architecture but we have modern
university buildings for 5 minutes, followed by lots of slides on learning objects, learning
design, learning units and XML - oh, the pain. With 2 minutes to go, a slide pops up 'how we
integrated assessment in the database module'. Hurrah! 100point Blackboard assessment made
up of 4 Blackboard tests using 3 different question types. People couldn't get out of the
room fast enough.

Students writing their own leactures: using Blackboard's wiki tool with a 'contributing

2008-05-13T18:57:00.000+01:00

By Cath Ellis and Sue Folley, Huddersfield

TQEF Distributed Learning Project proposing that students work together to build things into
lectures that lecturers should do (eg outline debate, stimulate interest, excitement,
connect to real world events etc) as informed by Collins and Moonen (Flexible Learning in a
Digital World) as part of a paradigm shift from knowledge acquisition to a
contribution/participation mode, bringing together what lecturing should do, wikis, and
contributing student approach. Talked in detail (with lots of slides) about the wiki tool in
Blackboard saying it is 'the strength of the Blackboard suite' and is easy to use as
demonstrated by the fact that 50% of the cohort on the Colonial and Postcolonial Literature
module are mature female (and I'm quoting Cath Ellis here). The wiki was built into the
module design using a Jigsaw Model (Aronson at al 1978) in which each member is given a
distinct role and contribution and then work together to complete the big picture. This was
done by using the wiki for students to choose a topic and write a summary of it (to provide
info), as a glossary (to explain terms and definitions), and to showcase scholarship. This
produces a resource that can be rolled over. I didn't get a feel for any evaluation.

Useful Feedback and Flexible Submission: Innovative Assignment Management through Blackboard

2008-05-13T18:56:00.002+01:00

Session by some guy called Stuart Hepplestone from Sheffield Hallam. Fantastic. Must have
been 100-120 people in the audience. Lots of nodding. Questions as expected. Integration
with Turnitin? Applying quotas to student upload? And specifying format of files permitted
to be submitted? Looking forward to tomorrow's joint paper.

Formative and summative assessment: integrating Blackboard software and Questionmark

2008-05-13T18:54:00.000+01:00

I didn't really want to go to this session, but having not seen QMP for about three years I
thought it time to catch up with any developments.
John Dermo (online assessment specialist apparently) from Bradford asked the audience who
currently uses QMP - only two admitted it.

Drive to online assessment is part of Bradford's 'ecoversity' agenda to reduce paper wasted
on printing hardcopy MCQs, in addition to NSS + feedback, HEFCE strategy on 'enabling
e-assessment', Bradford's LTA and e-strategies, and student expectations. Working on a
Pathfinder Project to 'embed support processes for e-assessment' See:
www.brad.ac.uk/lss/tqeg/projects/caa.php. Outcomes of this project - rules and regs,
training, item banking and learning spaces for QMP. John then spent the rest of his session
explaining the procedures for setting up formative assessments in Blackboard via the QMP
connector, a question type comparison, accessing results in the Gradebook etc, and the
procedures for summative assessment which simply allow assessments to be rescheduled in
event of power/server failure.

QMP still looks the same as the last time I saw it, and is as
difficult to use as ever, and lots of moans from the audience that the connector nor the QM
secure browser doesn't work properly. Really pleased we don't use it.

Using Blackboard for student-led podcasting and group assessment

2008-05-13T18:52:00.001+01:00

Chris Stokes - University of Sheffield - talked about an 'engaging way to present a group project' and replace group essays and rather than using yet another wiki (apparently there's wiki fatigue in the Dental School) Chris decided to get 3rd year students to make podcasts (or in reality, audio files) which can be peer assessed. 80 students in 5/6 (self-select) groups were given 2 weeks to produce a 5min 'podcast' based on the critcal evaluation of a published article. Students used Audacity or GarageBand and converted the files to mp3 before uploding to a MOLE discussion forum (My Online Learning Envt) in Moodle called the 'Podcast Wall'). On paper, each group assessed 2 other 'podcasts', the assessment criteria based on HEFCE standards for peer
assessment.

Chris demonstrated some examples; each one had a 'big opening' before becoming more serious
once they had got that out of their system. They were playing to the people who were
assessing them. Examples played were scripted, used clever editing and roleplay, used
backtracking tracks, presented as a radio show, or simply over the top.

Students found that it was difficult to condense their work into a 5min audio clip, but
thought it was an equitable and fair way of assessing as everyone in the group had to
contribute. Concerns raised by students included cross-over into informal space.

Next steps: peer assessment through Blackboard, full RSS feed for podcasts, possibly move to
producing video.

Second keynote - Blackboard Inc "discover" education

2008-05-13T08:52:00.003+01:00

This is a very odd keynote too. A member of Bb staff is telling a room full of very experienced educators that "in the old days the things everyone did in the room was about technology but now education has become important". Making me think of one of my favourite WW lines "let's set aside the fact you've come late to the party and just celebrate that you showed up at all".

Also a little odd - telling people in the room what senior managers in "our institutions" think, hmm interesting premise but I'm pretty sure I know what ours think. Obviously very proud of the bigwigs he's met.

Another "hey look" - apparently the OU senior managers are now prioritising and highlighting the importance of widening participation to HE (please note the use of the word "now" - remind me of the early 70s founding principle of the OU again)

I really wanted to like this whistlestop tour around the globe but really just getting crosser and crosser - we do this for real, you know, we are academic scholars, we're well read, we horizon scan, we research student experience, we predict trends and we have recognised the importance of education within the higher education context for way longer than the past couple of years.

OK, but seriously?? Bb are telling us how they have decided categorise HEIs, what they predict to be the challenges facing different sorts of institutions and what "our" (aka 30 old universities) senior staff think - do they really think we don't know? do they really think we need our eyes opening to the future of HE? - and setting aside the "are you the right people to do this?" aspect the content of this keynote is very simplistic not the "big thinking" that was being promoed

Posters, post-mix and post-keynote analysis

2008-05-13T06:07:00.003+01:00

Straight after keynote came welcome reception and posters. I actually like the idea of the evening keynote leading straight into social/posters/exhibition, I just think you need the keynote to be something that really energises the event. Sure this one sparked a lot of post-keynote analysis but about the thing itself rather than the content. My patented keynote quality assessment measure - "if the only person talking to the keynote speaker at the social event is the person who introduced them....."

Anyway the posters and the exhibition were pretty good, the layout of the room required people to walk past the posters in order to get to exhibition and so they were really busy. All the posters were good, I found them useful, Peninsula College poster is one of the best ones I've seen in years. I took a pretty shaky picture of it with my phone, hope it is still there today and I'll try to get a better one. A little bit of time in the exhibition which is of course tiny but chatted to a few people. This is my first post merger european conference and it is still a little odd to be bumping into people from Sheffield, Oxford Brookes etc - but in a good way.

After the social, we went to dinner at the midland hotel with Demetra, Andy McGinn, Paul Grist, Louise (PR person), a really nice woman from Salford (feel bad though cos I can't remember her name) and a freelance guardian journalist. Great food, great conversation - though, of course, Paul wasn't going to let me get a meal without earning it - viva on the SHU AQR.

btw for those of you who like to play the "Bb staff conference memo" game - my prediction for the three "all Bb staff must weave the following into conversations with clients" bullet points are:

reference the keynote, as in "you're right, it was just as Colin discussed...."
the "o" word - Outcomes (post-yaskin the Bb Outcomes System remains as incomprehensible as ever but you've got to admire their stamina)
Gordon Freedman...usually followed by "he's very clever, you know"

ok so here is an emerging idea for a game - if we were to have a "SHU staff conference memo" what three things should we be weaving in??

also (sorry, back to keynote for a minute) - the keynote title in the programme was "Employability and Skills: The Economic Imperative of Life-long Learning", on the day it had morphed into "HE in UK: Time for Change", my suggestion for a title would be:

"From Frankenstein to Einstein: how the Industrial Revolution is driving our voyage into the 21st century" (available with US subtitles)

emerging idea for game #2 - from the blog posts we make, how about we all have a crack at alternative titles. All are fair game - so far up for grabs are conference overall title (currently "Engaging Students, Engaging Communities"), keynote, poster sessions, even dinner

emerging idea for game#3 - no, out of ideas for now but still open to suggestions from you guys.

First keynote - HE in UK - time for change

2008-05-12T17:05:00.000+01:00

Professor Colin Sterling - Vice President (Teaching & Learning), U of Manchester

History of UK HE - hmm we seem to be meandering through the 60s (with the odd Leitch reference along the way) - pondering this, everyone in the room from UK probably knows this already, anyone from anywhere else probably doesn't care.

OK 25 minutes in and we're up to - students are changing and we need to change to meet their needs - students getting older, more local, more diverse, more vocationally motivated - now wondering whether this is really just intended to be a briefing session for Bb Inc staff.

Half way through - we're now at Dearing - no, my mistake, we're back in 1960 again, no sorry, back in the industrial revolution - spinning jenny, luddites. OK gonna stop blogging now cos I'm starting to lose the will to type....

OK had to come back for a moment just to share the fact that we are now exploring Byron, Shelley, Frankenstein (aka the lesson we should all learn about the dangers of the manmade machine...pondering the "as opposed to.." question), Lovelace, Babbage - not sure now whether the keynote is really a brain download - "look at the wide range of stuff I know"

Last 5 minute summary finally says the interesting stuff - UoManchester currently undertaking a root and branch review of its undergraduate teaching activity based on three key elements:
Curriculum design, personalised learning, learning technology

...and taking account of the future needs of employers, varying student needs and the opportunities to transform not simply transplant old teaching styles into new technologies - more visionary exploitation of new and emerging technologies to drive innovation and change

We're here!

2008-05-12T16:15:00.000+01:00

We've safely arrived. Train journey, taxi ride, hotel check-in and registration was flawless. I'm currently in my exceptionally warm attic room (I like to think of it as a turret) with views of slates, chimney stacks and the clocktower.

Customary venue post

2008-05-12T16:11:00.000+01:00

(albeit not quite as eventful as the US travel/accommodation lottery we've come to know and love)

All travel and hotel fine, on time, check in, registration, session splitting, badge ribboning, supplies of coffee and water nearby - wifi *gulp* £15 per day but at least its roaming.

Stuart seems to have been allocated a room in a far, far, distant turret - last inhabited by Rapunzel I think

Nothing much else to report so far - first keynote in 45 minutes so will keep you posted, right now, finishing touches to session

Blackboard - event-blogging

2008-05-11T08:56:00.000+01:00

You know the drill...we attend and blog (wifi permitting) - please feel free to comment - discussion points, questions, feedback, blah, blah