eLearning - The annual spring clean of Blackboard

Well I know it's not spring, well at least not in the northern hemisphere, but it is that time of year when students are away and my thoughts turn to tidying up and preparing my eLearning for the coming academic year. And one piece of spring cleaning I have to do each year is Blackboard.

Earlier this week our local install of the virtual learning environment (VLE; Do you speak my language: V is for Volume, Vapourware, Virus, VoIP, VNC, VPN, VLE, Virtual Campus) Blackboard rolled over. By that I mean that all the courses were copied forward to the coming academic year, and once this process is complete I can start making the changes I need for the next semester. Basically, blowing the cobwebs off, and tidying things up a bit.

One thing that has struck me during this process is just how bad Blackboard is for this type of thing. There is far too much clicking. There are no real "power-user" management type tools. In fact, the more I think about it the more convinced I have become that when Blackboard was designed it was not designed with the Instructor in mind. Blackboard maybe good for teaching (although sometimes I doubt that), but it certainly is not a great system for managing courses. The tools are really just not there for quality assurance purposes.

Where Blackboard gets it wrong

Two words - normalisation, and information.

Blackboard is not normalised. This is a real pain.

So, what is normalisation? Well, I am using the word here as it would be used when discussing a database (see Wikipedia on Normalisation), and specifically what I am referring to is only having information in one place in the system, even when that information is used in multiple places. For example, take my contact details, which are the same from me across Blackboard. Typically, this information has to be added to each course that I teach. Hence, if I teach on 10 courses this information has to be entered 10 times. If I change my contact details, for example the hours that I am available in my office, I have to change it in 10 different places. If I forget to change in one place then I have two forms of information in the Blackboard, which can lead to confusion for the students (and for me).

A sensible way for Blackboard to deal with this would be to have my contact information entered in one place and then disseminated to the different courses. This in essence is normalisation. You have the information in a system once, and then you disseminated to the places in the system where that information is needed. You make changes in one place, and all occurrences of that information are updated. Clean, elegant and simple, and less likely to cause errors to arise.

The normalisation problem becomes even more worrying and problematic when you consider assessments in Blackboard. For example, let's say you have an assessment that is used on different courses, or is used multiple times within a given course with different groups of students. Unfortunately, there is no way to "normalise" this process. By that I mean it is not possible to have just one version of the assessment to which all other occurrences of that assessment are linked. Therefore, again, if you want to make any changes to the assessment you have to go into each individual occurrence of the assessment and make the changes. Miss one assessment and one set of changes and there are problems.

The other problem Blackboard has is information, or more accurately the lack of information. Blackboard does have a number of tools that enable you to see how students are progressing, and how students are interacting with the system, but there are no real tools to assist with "quality assurance". So, for example, suppose I have a course in which I have five different assessments and I wish to check that they have all been set up correctly with the right start and end times. Blackboard has no mechanism by which I can easily and quickly see whether or not I have this right. I have to go into each assessment and check. There is no easy overview or summary. And again, this can lead to the potential for errors, which could be very serious in cases of where assessments are carrying significant marks on a course.

Where Blackboard gets it right

Blackboard is simple to use. But, this is the problem. Blackboard have thrown away (or more likely not consered) the 'power-tools' to help educators do there job, and have instead adopted an approach that plays to least skilled of its users. If you want to do anything that is complicated on Blackboard it gets very tricky because it just doesn't have the tools to get the job done. It is stifling creativity in eLearning.

Conclusion

Well, the students like Blackboard, and as a repository for loading up lecture notes and some other material it certainly works. However, the management tools fall far short of what is ideal, and the lack of these tools is holding back the development of truly creative and innovative teaching on the system.

And in closing I would just like to point out that I do use Blackboard for my teaching, and I spent three years chairing a Blackboard Steering committee for the University. So, I do know what I am talking about.... Well, I think I do... but then again, I always do.

If I don't know what I am talking about (which is possible), then why not leave me a comment below.

Image: A blackboard used by Albert Einstein in a 1931 lecture in Oxford. The last three lines give numerical values for the density (ρ), radius (P), and age of the universe. The blackboard is on permanent display in the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford - link

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eLearning - The annual spring clean of Blackboard

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