Bb 9 Upgrade Notes (LSBU)

Last Friday, my colleague Robyn and I went to the University of Westminster for the London BbUG (Blackboard Users' Group). It was, as usual, a nice way of catching up with friends and colleagues in other institutions and a healthy outlet for our frustrations with, ahem, certain bits of software. We also got to see a couple of presentations - one of which was given by three people from London South Bank University (LSBU).

LSBU recently upgraded to version 9 of Blackboard and it was very interesting to hear about the issues they had and were, in some cases, still experiencing.

They have a large and diverse student body; 23,500 students, half of whom are of ethnic minority. The decision to upgrade came apparently from their Vice Chancellor, and was related to recognition of the need for a student portal. Coming from the top down as it did, the upgrade was thoroughly planned; Jim Nottingham gave a glimpse of their schedule as laid out in a finely-detailed spreadsheet. This tight schedule was crucial for them, I gather, as use of the VLE continued heavily through the summer months and they were upgrading from version 7.2 (which e-portfolio users will remember had some pretty dire bugs).

Sarah Bell, who's on the e-learning team there, listed some of the bugs they are now encountering in the upgraded software, among which were (from my scribbled notes):

• Problems with course copying (something to do with admin settings and existing courses)
• Language pack issues
• Availability of courses for the TA role
• Issues with announcements
• Ample time to make cup of tea while waiting for Grade Center to load
• File exchange issues
• Problems with lists and re-ordering items in courses
• Changing colour of item titles
• Browsing received e-portfolios still limited

I wasn't really surprised by the last of those points. The interface may've changed but the functionality of the e-portfolios is much the same. In fact, that's one of the main reasons we at Reading have decided not to opt for the upgrade this summer. The biggest challenge we imagined facing, before we even hit any bugs, would be re-training staff in the new Web 2.0 "look-and-feel" with its lack of control panel, etc. The new interfaces are better, and kudos to Blackboard for finally trying to catch up with the kids, but they do leave staff who are used to clunky workarounds and web-based forms with receipts in need of some support, guidance, and general TLC.

If you see this as a problem (which we did, in terms of resourcing) then it's one more to the list, as Version 9 doesn't actually have enough change in functionality to solve any of our existing problems! Ergo, automatically, the cons outweigh the pros.

I did speak to a few of people from Blackboard at the Bb World Europe conference this year about their plans for e-portfolios. All they could tell me was that big things were on the way (which, in retrospect, sounds kind of ominous). I have not-so-secretly been hoping that they don't change e-portfolios too much as we've adjusted to the pitfalls and built our enhanced iLearn features on the back of it. If they do, it would be nice just to include some extra functions that don't interfere with the current operations (like they did with the Received Portfolios organisation): things like an ability to import e-portfolios back into Blackboard, an option to give 'write' permissions to others and an improved WYSIWYG text-editor (like the LX one). Simple additions like that would go a long way to improving the tool, whether the interface is 'clunky' or not.

The same probably goes for the rest of Blackboard - which might explain why, with the exception of LSBU and one other person I spoke to, no-one else at the Users Group is going ahead with an upgrade this year.

TDA Project Climax

On Tuesday morning, my colleague Robyn and I went over to Bulmershe campus to run a focus group with a PGCE course convenor, Judith Davies. This was the climax to a project Robyn and I have been working on with Judith since before September.

Robyn and I had been asked to look at the wealth of Web 2.0 tools out there, select a bunch of them and match them up against criteria which we had drawn up previously. The idea being to find at least one Web 2.0 tool that would fulfil a newly qualified teacher's portfolio needs.

Throughout the project, we kept a wiki within Blackboard (using the Learning Objects tool) to analyse tools and compare them with one another. When the New Year began we looked at all the information we collected and we picked two tools (and a spare) that we were going to focus on. We also prepared a slideshow (embedded below) and several handouts to make the day run more smoothly.

TDA Focus Group

View more presentations from readingcdotl. (tags: wikis e-learning)

The idea of the presentation was to present these findings to a group of teachers who Judith had paid with funding to take a day's leave and give them a lunch while we were at it.

We took what I thought was a fairly "radical" approach to the slideshow - that is, there's hardly any text and the focus is more in images and making an impact with these to mark different parts of the morning. This was inspired by talks I've seen given at conferences recently and was an attempt to remedy the Powerpoint fatigue I've been afflicted by recently. When it came to the tools themselves, we simply logged in and did a live demo, showing some examples that we'd prepared earlier to inform them further. You can see the examples we created below:

http://tdaportfolioexample.pbwiki.com
http://tdaportfolio.edublogs.org

And while we were eating lunch we recorded the discussion that we had around the table - about e-portfolios, their shortcomings, or rather the current lack of an adequate tool, and what they thought of the tools we'd picked out.

Robyn and I have yet to go through the feedback but as we do, I will try and post some of our findings here and perhaps some of the wiki notes we made in early on in the project too. All in all, it was a successful morning - so much so, that I'm now trying to take the same "radical" slideshow approach with the workshops that we run here and with future presentations.

My First Slideshare

I've uploaded the slideshow I presented at Durham to a site called Slideshare. It's free to sign up for an account there and, in doing so, you get some space to upload Powerpoint presentations to. This enables you to share your slideshow with people and receive feedback.

The Promise and Practicalities of e-Portfolios: Getting Blackboard to Deliver

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: durham conference)

I've been a visitor to the site for a while and found it particularly useful for looking over slideshows from conference presenters I found particularly interesting. I signed up so I could "give something back" to the site by contributing my own presentations to the .

If you upload a Powerpoint file to the site, you can then embed the resulting slideshow into a blog, a wiki, a standard webpage... or even a Blackboard course, with relative ease. As I've done above. Aesthetically, this could be a nicer way of giving students access to your lecture materials.

Animations don't upload well, as you'll notice on a few of my slides. But I like the easy integration with the page.

I read the Terms and Conditions before uploading my presentation and IPR remains in the hands of the author, so far as I can tell. However, be aware that anyone can grab the code for embedding and put your presentation on their webpage -you can see I did this in previous posts with keynotes for the Durham Conference (here and here). This means the site is useful for viral publicity so long as you make sure you have your name on the front page!

Durham 2009, Day Two

Click here for Durham 2009: Day One

No doubt some sore heads in the first presentation this morning after a three-course meal in Durham Castle, with lots of wine, followed by a trip to the nearby Undercroft bar... Still as this presentation was the usual Roadmap spiel from Blackboard it barely mattered. We still don't have a definite date for the release of Version 9 and while I'm sure the information they gave about Project NG was useful for some, I'm also sure I wasn't the only one who'd heard all this before.

They did mention that Blackboard was being re-branded and that three themes would be evident in upcoming versions: Blackboard Learn, Blackboard Transact and Blackboard Connect.

Following that, a forward-thinking talk from Sophie Paluch (College of Law), Kate Reader (Bristol) and Zak Mensah (TASI - soon changing it's name to JISC Digital Media) about mobile technologies in Higher Education. One thing I took away from this presentation was how much mobile technology has moved since it first came about - and how quicky. Sophie showed an advert on YouTube, and while I haven't been able to find the same one, this clip should give you an idea of the kind of progress that's been made.



Later I saw a presentation from Ralph Holland (Tyneside) and Merv Stapleton (City of Sunderland) on their comparison of e-portfolio tools and their usage in different (and sometimes novel) situations. One example Ralph gave of marines trying to maintain e-portfolios out at sea but being unable to due to lack of proper Internet access was particularly vivid. I would have liked to have seen more examples here but I spoke to Merv after the presentation and we're going to keep in touch and share experiences.

Lastly, we were treated to an inspiring final keynote from Paul Lowe; a very energetic speaker who runs an MA Photojournalism and Documentary course at the London College of Communication and has his own blog here. He talked about the course he runs, which recruits mid-career professionals and requires them to keep their own blogs for purposes of reflection. The talk itself was very inspiring and, as you'll probably notice from the slideshow I've embedded here, very visual - but the main thing I took away from it was that it didn't matter so much which tool his students practitioners were using but that how they used the tools to interact with one another that counted more.

Blogs and educating the eflective practitioner

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: elearning professional)

Paul uses Blackboard but he barely mentioned it in his talk. And people on the course were allowed to use whatever blogging application they preferred. It seemed more important that they were paired up or put in groups so as to support each other during the reflective process (especially given that they were subject to a lot of criticism). Feedback was the crucial element here, I think.

Together with Andy's presentation the previous day, I came away determined to make more of an effort with my blog!

Durham 2009, Day One

So another year, another conference at Durham for Blackboard Users... Except this year, one of the keynotes is a user of Moodle! If that doesn't give Blackboard cause for concern...

The title of this year's conference is "e-Learning: A Reality Check - Do We Practice What We Preach?" and Andy Ramsden from Bath kicked the official proceedings off with a really stimulating and entertaining talk on whether or not e-learning has lived up to its early promise. A lot of his slideshow was made interactive by the use of PRS, which turned out to be an effective way of passing the main question on to us.

After letting the audience decide which way he should steer the talk, he went on to give us an outline of Collis and Moonen's 4-E model. As I understand it the model looks at the drivers behind the adoption of a new technology or approach at an institution and then compares these with factors in the institutional environment to determine a threshold, past which those drivers must push if adoption is to be successful. The drivers looked at include Educational Effectiveness, Ease of Use, and Personal Engagement, while institutional factors are all clumped together in the Environmental category - and there we have our four E's!

e-learning Reality Check: Keynote Durham University 2009

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: bbuk2009 eatbath-present)

Andy went on to explain what practical steps they are taking to make sure these drivers are in place and strong enough - such as doing fewer case studies, and working more with a project blog. I also liked the suggestion that members of the e-Learning Team sit in on actual lectures and get a sense of teaching styles in place as well as what technologies are being used! And his tip to make the time to blog is something I'm following up at this very moment...

This was a good start to an interesting day. There were quite a few presentations on e-portfolios (my own included) a couple of which sought to readdress the definition of an e-portfolio, presumably because the lack of tools that actually meet the requirements mean learning technologists are now seeking Web 2.0 solutions. (My colleague Robyn and I have done some work on this too.) Peninsula Medical College are using Learning Objects' Expo wiki tool on their Emily Blackboard system for example.

Tim Neumann from the Institute of Education outlined some scenarios in which the requirements of an e-portfolio were very different and the work he has done provided some kind of explanation as to why there isn't yet a killer app when it comes to e-portfolios.

One final handy tip from Andy Cree who teaches Business Ethics at Teesside Business School. He talked about his course and about he used video podcasts to direct students on his course to areas of the reading list that might normally be overlooked. The short infomercial type videos he produced seemed to be a simple but innovative way of getting students to engage with other points of view.

The tip here is how he provided visuals to his audio commentary on the books - by using a site called morgueFile (I think he called it PhotoMorgue but I couldn't find that so I'm assuming he was mistaken). It's a site where artists, professionals and amateur photographers and upload their photos for anyone to use for free -so if you're looking for some images to enhance a presentation, be sure to have a look!

ILP Walkthrough

Continued from previous set of screenshots... (As ever, click to enlarge/expand images.)



'ILP' stands for 'Individual Learner Profile'...



... a document which students are encouraged to fill out to aid them in the reflective process.

It was designed by Caroline Jacobs at the University of Portsmouth and adapted for the University of Reading by my colleague, Sarah Morey. The version we're seeing here has been further adapted (by me) from a paper-based form to a slightly more interactive web-form.




The idea of it being like this is that it fits seamlessly with the portfolio course-integration that I developed to making using e-portfolios in Blackboard easier.

If the user clicks the ILP option accidentally, they can always back out by clicking the familiar-looking 'Cancel' button at the bottom. As you can see in this screenshot, they're asked to confirm that this is what they want to do and warned they will lose any answers if they click 'OK'.



If the student clicks 'Submit' but hasn't answered every question, a little alert box tells which ones they need to go back and do.



This way, the students can't miss anything; they have to complete all questions before they continue.





When they finally do click 'Submit', the answers are automatically stored in their portfolio.

More on Step Four soon.

What I've Been Doing Today

It's not perfect by any means...



... but it will hopefully help ...



... by providing specific instructions ...



... as the user actually goes through the process ...




... of creating their portfolio.



Click any of the images to enlarge/expand.



Check back on Thursday...



for screenshots of the ILP feature so far.

Portfolio Update

The new developments I've been working on for Blackboard's e-portfolio system are now being shown to staff at Reading in the context of our iLearn project:



This is just a screenshot of the entry point to the tool, which sits inside a standard Blackboard course. This is pretty much the final version as we're going to be copying this for anyone who's requested an iLearn course this week. It's quite clean and simple and I like it that way :-)

The tool itself has changed a lot. What went from being a simple help system (which I presented at conferences in Manchester and Wolverhampton) following your movements around the portfolio help area in Blackboard is now an attempted enhancement of the tool - with Preview functions built in and additional quizzes which students take to populate their portfolio with information. The "help" itself has shrunk, however, from being a full explanation of what each area of the portfolio tool does to simple snippets of text that basically tell the user where to go next. The idea being that users wanting to do more advanced things will usually disregard help anyway...

I have been trying to work on a system that will assist the user in uploading documents to the Content System though this has proved more difficult and we're running out of time... More on this soon.

Preview of Previews...

One thing that's always annoyed me about the Blackboard Basic Portfolio is the fact that if you want to see your portfolio you have to go right out of it back to your list and then click on the title to open it. I suppose you could leave it open in a different window and then modify and refresh...

Not good enough for me though. I've decided to add a "Preview" button to the main portfolio menu. It's written in from the left hand panel (which I control) using a bit of Javascript. This is what it looks like:


See the difference?

The whole lack of preview for templates when you go to add an Item annoyed me too - it's like you're going into a new page blind, with no support when you get there. So I've added a "Preview" button to that too:



When you click the button it detects which item you've selected from the drop-down list and then opens another window with a Preview HTML file in it. I'm still working on how to get some sort of div in there that warns users that they are in fact looking at a preview but I think it's a small step towards making the interface more user friendly.

[This post is back-dated. 27-06-2008]