2007 Pacific Northwest/Washington Blackboard Users Group meeting | October 19 in Eugene, Oregon

Here is information about the 2007 Pacific Northwest/Washington Blackboard Users Group meeting in Eugene Oregon on October 19. I will be presenting two breakout sessions, the first focuses on how to integrate iTunes U content into Blackboard, and the second on the results of my recent experiments using Blackboard and Moodle to teach two sections of the same course. Details can be found in announcement below.
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The session schedule and descriptions for the 2007 Pacific Northwest/Washington Blackboard Users Group meeting are now available at http://www.wabug.org/.

We have a full slate of sessions for faculty, system administrators, program managers. The keynote speaker for this year is Dr. Cable Green. Dr. Green is the Director of e-Learning for the Washington Community and Technical College system.

The conference costs $30 if you register by October 4, 2007, and $40 after that date. More information, including on-line registration and discount hotel information, is available at http://www.wabug.org/.

See you in October!

The 2007 PNW/WABUG Steering Committee
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Tim Boshart, University of Oregon, Co-chair
Yvonne Jones, Cascadia Community College
Marc Lentini, Highline Community College, Co-chair
Jerry Marshall, Green River Community College
Jane McCarville, WAOL
Sheila Palmer, Walla Walla CC, Spokane Falls CC, Big Bend CC, Florida CC at Jacksonville, and Capella U
Jill Weber, Skagit Valley College
Curt Whittaker, Eastern Oregon University

Helpful error message for a user

I received this error message after clicking on a thread in the discussion board. I left my computer for several hours, must have timed out. Blackboard is pretty user friendly but I don’t think the average user will be able to figure out what to do next. The screenshot will come in handy as I am currently teaching a course on web usability testing.

Changes in the Collect feature

One of the nice discussion board features in Bb 6.x is the ability to "collect" all messages so that they can be read as a single document without having to independently click on each message. You do lose the "threadedness" view but it is a quick way to review what is happening in a discussion.

I just noticed that the discussion board in Bb 7.1 does not include the "read" or "unread" options for selected messages. This is a critical issue because the Collect feature in 7.1 does not change the status of "collected" messages to "Read." This means that if you "collect" messages, read them all and exit the forum, the next time you come back all the messages are still marked as unread so you have no way of knowing which messages you have already looked at. The only way I can see to overcome this is to separately open each message.

Can you say Carpal Tunnel?

Discussion Board in 7.1

We have Blackboard 7.1 up and running. I’m interested in knowing what others think of the new discussion board. Here are my issues:

1. The forum view takes forever to load after clicking the Discussion Board button. (An existing course with 24 forums takes ten seconds to load the forum view on a high speed connection.) The interface now includes the number of unique participants in each forum. It calculates this each time the discussion board loads. Are others experiencing long load times?
   
2. Clicking on a forum shows a thread view but a thread must be selected to see sub threads (responses). This adds extra clicks when you want to go directly to a sub thread after clicking on a forum. There is time savings once you select a thread as the page doesn’t reload each time you click a new message.
   
3. A flag feature has been added to allow you to flag messages that you want to return to later. Good idea but you can only see the flags when you are in the thread. You can’t see them at the forum level which would help remind you of the thread you flagged a message in.
   
4. An updated search feature has been added. Good idea but it takes up a huge amount of screen real estate. In other words, I found that I had to scroll down each time I clicked on a message to read in a thread. I have a laptop with a screen area of 1024 x 768 on a 14 inch display). If the search feature was minimized I would have been able to read most messages without scrolling.
   
5. The control panel that allows you to collect, mark as read, etc. is available at all time in 7.1. This is good. The Select button, which is used with these controls, is located at the bottom of the window so to show all messages on the screen at one time you have to scroll to the bottom and select all, then scroll to the top and collect. The Select control should be with the others.
   
6. When I respond to a post I like to review the message I am responding to before pressing submit. The new discussion board doesn’t show the message you are responding to unless you click an extra link to see it. I’m sure there was someone who saw that as wasted text to load but I think it is a good practice to reread a message before pressing submit.

Open University going Moodle | eGov monitor

This could be trouble for Blackboard. The Open University has never settled in on a standardized solution. Moddle has always been considered a small campus solution. That perception will change if an e-campus of 200,000 students begins using it.

Jumping ship?

I have been at a technology conference this week. Yesterday the discussion turned to Blackboard. A number of the institutions are considering a move to Moodle because of Blackboard's annual license cost. Moodle is a "free" open source course management system that is comparable with Blackboard on ease of use features. The drawback on open source software has always been that free isn't really free. The purchase price of the software is only one part of the cost. Who do you call when it doesn't work? Moodle community members will tell you that they take care of each other and it appears to be working.

Blackboard has become a mission critical application at SPU. Over 80% of our courses use it each term. If we were ever to consider changing to another CMS we would have to consider the cost of retraining all those users. There are features in Blackboard that faculty and students would miss. At the same time, a product like Moodle has integrated tools like blogging and wikis that Blackboard has been reluctant to add.

Blackboard - Banner Integration

We are one year into Blackboard - Banner integration. Here is a quick list of pros and cons about the results.

Pros

Faculty control when a course is made available to students because the snapshot tool automatically creates a Blackboard course for every course listed in Banner

Adds and drops are done automatically so students making changes during the first ten days of a term aren't waiting to be added to a Blackboard course

Cons

If someone in the registar's office deletes or changes a course once it is made available it can cause real problems in Blackboard. Several courses have disappeared only to find out that a setting was changed. Content was lost when this happened.

Faculty can add a teaching assistant to their course but if they try to add a student or instructor Blackboard will delete the addition when it synchs up with Banner.