XplanaZine

Of course, if you are using Blackboard on your campus, you need to make the best of it. And there is an art to making the best of everything! The Math adjuncts at my school asked me and my IT colleague Charles Bender to come speak to them about how to use Blackboard to increase and improve communications with their students. They know that there are all kinds of difficulties with trying to do math equations in Blackboard - but they were willing to put that aside in order to see how Blackboard could help them do a better job teaching in general. (WebCT does do a much better job of supporting math equations, but we will have only limited WebCT availability starting next year: budget constraints.)
Making Blackboard Required
Now since I am pretty much an anarchist kind of teacher, why would I want to start off by talking about requirements? Well, it is important for both the teacher and the student to make some kind of commitment to using Blackboard: what can the students rely on from the teacher? And what can the teacher rely on from the students? This is something that needs to be made clear to everybody - and that teachers need to make clear to themselves before they even begin using Blackboard. As we learned from talking with the Math Adjuncts today, there is a vague sense that somehow they “should” be using Blackboard, but the exact size and shape of that “should” is not clear. This uncertainty causes anxiety for the instructors - understandably! Vague requirements, wisps of “should”, do not really do anybody any good! The same is true for students: if the instructor only gives them a vague sense that they “should” be using Blackboard, then a lot of confusion will result.
As an instructor you need to decide for yourself how much time you have to spend working with Blackboard, and commit to spending that time over the course of the semester. You also need to let your students know how much time they should spend working with Blackboard, and you should recognize that effort as part of their grade for the course.
Luckily, there are a variety of ways that you can “see” students working with Blackboard and get a good measure of their efforts so that you can recognize and reward that effort. There are obviously the Blackboard statistics, which let you see how often students log on to the course (a blunt instrument, but it does exist). You can also sort a Discussion Board forum by author and date to do a quick count for grading (lots of instructors seem not to know about using the sorting options down at the bottom of the forum). Surveys are a great tool for getting student feedback, and you can also quickly check to see which students complete any given survey. I showed the instructors today that you really can make ungraded quiz questions with a zero point value - while including a question on the quiz that awards points just for taking the quiz (for example, a short answer/essay where you collect student feedback about how the class is going).
Of course, there should be better ways to do all of this in Blackboard - the teacher ends up doing a lot of work that probably could be automated. But it’s still worth it - and I was impressed that the instructors today were willing to kludge their way along here.
Making Blackboard Valuable
By “valuable” I mean not just the grading value, but the intrinsic value of what you can have the students doing at Blackboard. You really can use Blackboard as an educational tool - for example, by giving students graded or ungraded practice questions in quiz-format (yes, you really can leave questions with zero-point value - Blackboard protests, but allows you to do it). The immediate feedback that can be provided to students this way is of enormous value. I have been teaching Latin online, and I do a lot of online quizzing for that - the students get immediate feedback, and I don’t waste my time grading quizzes.
Of course, the quizzes I create in Blackboard cannot be used by anyone else. In contast, the Latin quizzes I put up at QUIA are used by people all over the country all the time, and I get lots of happy email from them about that. (Quick note: the QUIA quizzes I built are for the Wheelock Latin textbook, which I simply loathe - but since Wheelock is the most popular Latin textbook out there I knew people would benefit from the quizzes - and it’s a great way to spread the gospel of QUIA.)
So, there’s the rub: when you create truly valuable materials inside Blackboard, it is a very sad thing that you cannot easily share those materials with others. Assemble a good set of Web Sites in the little web site library that Blackboard helps you build: great! Your students will really benefit from that! But you cannot share that great resource with anybody else outside of your class.
It’s a compromise. Like everything else! If you know that the instructors do not have the resources or tools that will let them share their materials on the open Internet, then Blackboard is definitely better than nothing! And at least at my school, Blackboard is the only web tool that we make freely available to all instructors. (And having free tools is the crux of it at this point: our university’s budget is in a tailspin, and we cannot ask instructors to pay for tools on their own to pick up the slack.)
Making Blackboard Fun and Personal
Requied… valuable… and fun! The fun part is perhaps the most important thing for instructors to actually see in action. When you first get your Blackboard course, there is nothing fun and personal about it - it looks and feels very generic. And most instructors have never taken a course in Blackboard, so they don’t realize that it can be fun and personal. They are creating their Blackboard course often without any prior experience. But there are lots of things you can do - just turning off the buttons you are not using is a good way to start. Then you can add a class banner of course - or even change your banner for all occasions, just like they do at Google. Karen Cozart, the Coordinator for Distance Learning for OU’s College of Arts and Sciences, does exactly that: I was at a presentation where she happened to show us her Blackboard course and since it was right around Valentine’s Day, there was a sweet little Valentine’s Day banner that she had put there - just for fun!
Image management is one of the best ways to make students “feel” like they are in your Blackboard course, and not in somebody else’s course. As I discussed a while ago, images are a great advantage of working over the Internet. College classrooms are usually drab and impersonal - unlike elementary and high school teachers’ classrooms which are often decorated with all kinds of artwork and images. Well, you can decorate your classroom in Blackboard. I showed the Adjuncts the simple trick of using the IMG SRC tag in HTML in order to add images to Blackboard Announcements and to posts in the Blackboard Discussion Board. If there is an image out there that you want your students to see, you can use the IMG SRC tag to make that happen. Of course, life would be so much better if Blackboard had an HTML editor that you could use when creating Announcements and Discussion Board posts (the WebCT demonstration we saw last week featured a lovely little HTML editor exactly for that purpose!). But nevertheless, you can bend Blackboard to your purposes if you try hard enough.
And that goes for students too, of course - they can also add IMG SRC tags to their Discussion Board posts to great effect. In fact, one of my students (Katie Wilks) created this illustrated email hoax right inside the Discussion Board, using the IMG SRC tag (it was the “Urban Legends” storytelling assignment for this week).
I cannot let you into my Discussion Board to look at it, but I’ll copy it here for your delectation. Fun is a good thing. And just imagine how much poorer this student’s posting to the Discussion Board would be without that image… the fate of the earth could be at stake here! Not to mention the planet Erath.

Don’t delete this! It is for real! REALLY!
My friend’s uncle’s brother’s dead cousin told this to him in strict confidence, so therefore I know it’s true! Space aliens from the planet Erath have mistaken our planet for their’s! They have just come out of hyperspace sleep and are about 6 zil away from our galaxy right now!

What do I have to do!?!?!? Just hit the little “Forward” button at the top of this email and select to send it to your entire address book….There! Now was that so hard?

Dr. Nina Nemo
Medical Center for Studies of Medical Stuff
University of the College of Medical Science
USA, America