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.

Respondus

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.

Third keynote - Michael Chasen unveils Bb NG

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

Formative and summative assessment: integrating Blackboard software and Questionmark

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.

Second keynote - Blackboard Inc "discover" education

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

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.

Customary venue post

(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

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