Blackboard Learn has many tools. How do you help academics to make the right choices? How do you validate that the choice you've made will be fit for purpose? In this session, we will be exploring a framework for tool choice for assessment across quizzes, assignments, journals, blogs and discussion boards in whole-class, group or individual contexts. We will also share best practices in the preparation and use of these tools.
Thinking it through: Choosing the right Blackboard tool for the job | Neville Unvalla & Jeremy Goh - University of Melbourne | TLCANZ17
1. Thinking it through, endless possibilities in
Blackboard: Making the appropriate decision on
which Blackboard tools to use in your course and
achieving the expected outcomes
Jeremy Goh |
Senior Educational Technologist
Neville Unvalla
Academic and Learning Systems Support
Officer
University of Melbourne
2. 2
Introduction
• Part of Learning Environments
• Support for enhancing teaching and learning
• The team (10) supports the Learning Management System,
Lecture Capture and Subject Experience Survey
• Blackboard and managed hosted environment
3. 3
“It’s not always about the technology, it’s about the activity”
• Decide on the intended learning outcomes
• Playpen + other tool usage
• Decision making tree: choose the appropriate tool for your
activity
• Showcase example
16. 16
Why Blogs?
• Complemented pedagogical aims
• Writing style resonates with students
• Less formal, more engaged
• Academic context V Public discourse
17. 17
Strengths
• Smaller assessments, more feedback
• Greater chance of improvement
• Less formal
• “Take in” content through regular assessment
• Constant assessment by academic
• Deeper reflection by students
18. 18
Challenges
• Hard to copy/import
• Fiddly to setup
• Rubric and scores
• No originality reports
• Browser sensitive
19. 19
Feedback from students
• Positive response on blog tasks
• More enjoyable
• Diversity of tasks
• Too many pieces of assessment (3 x 400 word)
NU:
- Learning Environments provides support for enhancing teaching and learning through using educational systems and technologies, video production and event recording, as well as professional development and support services
JG:
- Just a bit of background about our Blackboard environments, we have 2 Blackboard environments, the main campus LMS that is self hosted and we just upgraded a couple of months ago to ver 9.1 2017 Q2 CU2 and we have a managed hosted environment [smaller] that serves that graduate fully online courses of the university, In this presentation we are talking about our main self hosted environment that has about 8000 subjects, 60000 users
NU: Its not always about the technology, it’s about the activity”
- Rather than thinking about what technology to use, we always decide on the intended learning outcomes first >> then the assessment >> and finally the technology to facilitate this activity.
- Various learning outcomes can lend themselves to particular technologies that Blackboard provides, such as blogs, journals, tests, assignments, etc.
- This can be achieved by choosing the appropriate tools based on the activity whilst using a playpen
JG: Adding to what NU just said, in the ever changing landscape of LMS especially now when we are given so many choices and with the number of sophisticated plugins, how many of us really know what tools to use and if we are getting the maximum benefit out of the relevant tool, maybe it would be wise to go back to basics and reflect on how we are using these tools presently.
- In our presentation today, we will cover Blackboards main tools, focusing on the tools that are used for engagement as well as for assessment, we will discuss a decision making tree on choosing the appropriate tools based on the assessment task in mind and will conclude by showcasing some examples
NU: Why
Safe place to explore and experiment;
Practice area where you can create tasks and use student preview mode to see how it appears to students
Once complete use Subject Copy tool to copy into the actual subject
We make use of playpens as part of our training workshops, so that once a staff member completes the suite of six workshops, they will have significant content in their own playpen to add to and experiment with.
JG: How
Previously, play pens were created by request from academic staff and it was a cumbersome and manual process. When we got rid of our middleware system (which some of you might remember me presenting about this last year), we reviewed this and now staff are added to the SIS(Student Integration System) framework through the feed files from our student information system tech one, a playpen is created automatically, not caring if they are professional or academic staff.
So what does a playpen look like and what is the naming convention?
It looks like any normal blackboard course, This is an example of my play pen.
The subject id as: pp_username name of subject: First / Last Name
Also on the top right there is student preview and you could go in to see what students are experiencing in the subject when you have added your new tool that you want to test or try out and play with.
This is an example of a student accessing a blog in the playpen.
Now that you have seen a playpen, you might ask what are our playpen usages like?
NU:
- Blue highlights indicate highest usage before commencement of Semesters 1 & 2- Usage of Playpens are low, we encourage academics to use playpens in workshops as well as during consults
- Playpen users have said they avoid potential issues during the semester
https://app.lms.unimelb.edu.au/bbcswebdav/institution/html/quick_links/PlayPenUsage.html
JG: Groups
Why: When you have large cohorts, more than 50, it would be good to split the students in to groups to encourage collaborative work amongst student, it can also help with administration for staff when the cohort gets too large.
How: You can create manual enrol or self enrol groups or you can create Group sets manually. Some of you might know that there is Class groups tool Building block created by ATD together with Bond Uni basically it takes tutorial groups from Student info system into Blackboard, we are currently exploring this and was hoping to show this to you but apparantly it is hard to get accurate data from our SIS so unfortunately this project has been delayed.
We have really large subjects that need to be broken down into groups, we have a number of subjects with (1000-2000) students, it takes a while for the grade centre to load and it is just a mess sometimes and a challenge to administer this.
A way to mitigate this is to to use smart view to improve the GC load time.
Some people like to use excel to manage this, hence it can also be a CSV upload and download to keep the groups up to date.
NU: Once your groups are setup, what tools are available to choose to get my students engaged or how would I assess them?
Do you want to implement informal collaborative work through the use of Discussion Board, Journals and Blogs, Wiki’s?
Or a more formal individual and collaborative assessment task through the use of Blackboard Tests and Assignments, Turnitin and PeerMark
JG:
This is a decision making tree that our team made to assist academics in making the right decision on when to use a private journal, subject level or individual blog, wikis.
Before the tool is actually chosen, we first ask a series of questions regarding the activity, example do you want to implement reflective writing? Is it a collaborative project, Do you want to provide an information resource? From there, depending if it is a yes or a no, it will lead you to different places in the decision making tree.
For reflective writing, is it private? If yes, private to whom to each student or to a group? If it is to each student, then a private subject level journal is created. If it is to a group then create a private group journal.
If the reflections are not private, are they group based, if yes then it will be a group blog, if it is no then create a subject level blog.
When implementing a collaborative project, is it group based, if yes create a group wiki, if no, create a subject level wiki open for students to edit.
This is an example of a decision making tree for this particular tool and we use this in our training workshops as well as our consults, when academics come to us with a certain activity in mind, it does not necessarily transcend to what they have planned.
JG: We have seen an example of a decision making tree and a similar sort of thing can be done for the other tools as well.
This is the usage of the learning tools that is specifically used for assessment across our LMS over the last 5 years and we can see that it has grown quite a bit especially the use of Bb Assignment, TII Assignments and Test, we only started with blogs and wikis with blackboard since 2016 before we were using a third party tool called campus pack but we decided to have a consistent user interface which is why we moved back to using blackboard.
We hope that by having this sort of decision making tree, we could help improve the numbers in these tool usages.
4000 active subjects
JG: Of course it is not always rosy when using these Blackboard tools.
Especially for the blogs, journals and wikis.
NU
Students were broken up into their tutorial groups
Given an assessment piece in week 3, 6 and 9.
Asked to write a blog about their own personal experience with group singing, the blog is assessed by the evidence of further reading, engagement with the issue and quality of writing.
Credit towards 30% of their final grade.
Impact for students
Many positive SES responses from students who enjoyed the blog tasks
Students have said the blog tasks set were helpful to their learning
Comments that blogs were enjoyable because they allowed the student to express themselves more than in essay form
Others commented they enjoyed the diversity of the assessment tasks and said they complemented the tutorials
But…some students found having 3x 400 word blogs to be too many pieces of assessment and too small a word count (I tend to agree!) and we’re working towards a balance for 2018
NU
- Blog writing complemented the broader departmental pedagogical aims, to use critical self-reflection in teaching and learning
- Students tend to read this style of writing a lot via social media etc.
- Encourages students to engage with course content in a less formal way
- Encourages students to consider how they can take the knowledge gained in an academic context and engage with public discourse on the subject
NU
Having more, smaller pieces of assessment gives students:
- A chance to receive more feedback throughout the semester
- Greater chance of improving throughout the semester. If a student does poorly on one blog, they have another chance
- A less formal writing style gives students the opportunity to share their personality, get creative and have fun
- May be more likely to take in the course content if frequent assignments occur throughout the subject
- Academic staff can see how students are travelling throughout the semester, more frequently (what is understood, what needs further clarity etc.)
- Particularly useful for students to think more deeply about practical learning experiences
JG
- Not really ideal to copy across/import across content collection
- Need to select ‘allow edit’ to ensure students can make edits (or you’ll end up with lots of emails…)
- Can be a little fiddly to set up – get the settings right the first time or there can be issues once students start submitting
- Rubric visibility and grade centre raw scores can be an issue with showing feedback
- No originality reports (though less likely to be an issue with self reflection)
- Browser sensitive: as well as mac/windows
JG
- Many positive SES responses from students who enjoyed the blog tasks
- Students have said the blog tasks set were helpful to their learning. Comments that blogs were enjoyable because they allowed the student to express themselves more than in essay form
- Others commented they enjoyed the diversity of the assessment tasks and said they complemented the tutorials
- But…some students found having 3x 400 word blogs to be too many pieces of assessment and too small a word count; coordinator agreed and is working towards a balance for 2018
NU
- Encourage users to use the playpens to try out new tools and new things that you want to explore before putting it in the real subject.
- Remember it is not always the technology, think about the activity that you want to do for your subject and then how technology can help you with this.
- Use the decision tree, to help you make the right decision on which tool that you want to use.