Blackboard Conference Report - Kate Wright

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Blackboard’s 2010 Teaching and Learning Conference was held in Swansea University between 12th and 14th April. During the conference, Blackboard launched its latest product upgrade, version 9.1 and a significant proportion of the conference was dedicated to outlining the features of this new version.

As well as presentations by Blackboard staff, there were a number of papers presented by Blackboard customers, mainly from academic institutions.  This provided useful information about how Blackboard is being used in different ways ‘on the ground’, particularly as a number of papers were from users in Europe working in both similar and different ways to ourselves here in Aberystwyth.

Day One

The opening keynote speaker however, was not a Blackboard user or staff member, but an educationalist who has worked as a primary head-teacher and also acted as an advisor for Tony Blair. Richard Gerver (www.richardgerver.com/) spoke enthusiastically about the need to take risks in education and the dangers of stifling creativity through risk aversion. He gave a great example of the role which informal online learning can play in children’s education by talking about his experience of the disjunction between his daughter’s formal maths education and her entrepreneurial enterprises in Second Life.

The second day of the conference began with a presentation by Richard Henderson, the President of Blackboard Learn who spoke very honestly about the issues that Blackboard faced with the roll-out of version 9 and the lessons learnt from this experience. He outlined the changes that Blackboard have made in their support and development sections to support customers upgrading and the mechanisms in place to address issues such as software bugs, user support and accessibility. Ray also introduced Aaron Wasserman, the developer of Blackboard Mobile, to launched Blackboard latest mobile product, Mobile Learn (www.blackboard.com/Mobile/Mobile-Learn.aspx).

Day Two

Tuesday’s keynote was followed by a series of parallel sessions, including:

• Panel discussion on adoption and usage of Blackboard. This session included presentations on the use of Blackboard with adult learners, the role of the VLE in supporting students through college closures due to snow, the development of a Blackboard portal and using Blackboard to give access to resources for GPs involved in medical training. One concrete thing that I gained from these sessions was the notion of an educational continuity plan (Northumberland College) to set out an institution-wide use of Blackboard in the event of site closures.
• A presentation by Blackboard staff on Blackboard Mobile, a new service to present information to users of iPods, BlackBerry smartphones and iPads. Mobile has been developed by students at Stanford University and its first incarnation was Standford U.
• A complimentary training session from Blackboard on the new Grade Centre in 9.1. The Grade Centre has a number of useful new features including inline grading for blogs and wikis (the ability to grade whilst looking at the work itself), better organisational tools and new ways of viewing information. Staff will also be interested to know that it is now possible to undertake anonymous marking in Blackboard.
• A discussion of ‘cleaning up’ Blackboard to weed out old courses etc.
• A presentation by an academic member of staff who moved from not using Blackboard at all to becoming a keen advocate of the system.
• Aberystwyth’s Mary Jacob presenting on our use of Campus LX tools.

Day Three

Wednesday began with a more depth look at version 9.1 and the changes and enhancements it brings. One thing that may please staff using Blackboard is that a number of the OK confirmation buttons have been removed, getting rid of some of the unnecessary clicks.

Wednesday’s parallel sessions included:

• A panel discussion on collaboration and staff development. One of the interesting issues raised in this session was a study by Edge Hill University on the notion of a ‘minimum entitlement’ for all students in Blackboard.  This was based on a survey carried out with students which led the University to look for more consistency around the use of Blackboard.
• A complimentary Blackboard training session on keeping students engaged in online courses. Whilst this was mainly aimed at staff running wholly online courses, some of the principles, such as consistent design, a common approach to organising content and regular announcements and updates are useful to staff working in a blended learning environment.

I also presented at the conference, speaking about Aberystwyth’s experience of deploying lecture capture through a Blackboard building block.

Overall I found the conference useful and informative and provided a good opportunity to meet up with colleagues working in similar areas and facing similar challenges. I also found it useful to hear first-hand from Blackboard staff about their thoughts and approaches to supporting us as customers. I came away with lots of new ideas which I hope will be useful in the training and support we offer to staff and students using Blackboard.