CLIPP Board

Durham BB users conference

This is the first of two blog posts covering the recent Durham Blackboard
users Conference .

This post will concentrate on the presentation on day two of the conference
by Greg Ritter, Director of Product Management with Blackboard Learn. He
covered the details for Bb service pack releases, their current support
websites, and future plans. I’m also going to comment upon a panel
presentation covering recent experiences of Bb mobile.

Firstly I’ll cover the Bb plans, drivers,new products and  enhanced support services. Then I’ll highlight the new features in service packs 10,11, and 12.

Greg was keen to underpin his presentation with their primary drivers, which
have are summarised into four major challenges driving product development. They are: recruitment, instructor efficiency, student engagement & retention, data
driven decision making. He also commented upon their new automated testing on
Bb platform. What took 3-4 days now is is done overnight. A mixture of auto
and manual testing.

So the new products (i.e, Blackboard Connect text 2), and a wealth of new
inbuilt and optional analysitcs tools really highlighted the increasing
importance of accurate data driven decisions across modern educational
organisations. I’ll cover some of these later in the post. One of the main
conference sponsors http://www.eesysoft.com/ offers analytic solutions for
educators to measure VLE impact/ ROI / engagement! Let’s not forget Bb’s own
analytics tool  that offers the ability to extract a wealth of data for various stakeholders.

Greg was also keen to highlight the new and improved websites offering
specific guidance to users, including new upgrade cohorts, the improved help
site  , etc. The list:

• blackboard.com/bits - Blackboard Innovative Teaching Series
• blackboard.com/digitalcontent – Integrating 3rd party resources
• blackboard.com/cohort – Upgrade Cohort Programs
• blackboard.com/rubrics – using and sharing rubrics
• blackboard.com/trial – free guided trials
• go.blackboard.com/faculty – train staff, innovate and share effective
• practice
• blackboard.com/bie – idea exchange, get involved in product development
• blackboard.com/usergroups – join online networks to share practice
• blackboard.com/catalyst – exemplary courses
• Not forgetting Coursesites  - who offer free  online courses & training for educators

Getting Mobile

I watched a very useful panel discussion by five institutions (HE & FE) who all launched Bb mobile last year. They either bought the product, or just enabled the option on Bb to allow students to access Bb via native apps. The common themes were; soft launch, and unfounded concern about staff and students inability to cope! All five panel members remarked that the process had been far less painful than envisaged, and all had experienced far less support calls that expected. Mobile access continues to increase across all institutions, a positive result! There was only one institution (Liverpool John Moore’s) to provide staff training/support and regular forums exchanging ideas. The rest just quietly launched it! The Blackboard mobile users group met at the conference. This blog post by Sharon Flynn  of NUI Galway is worth reading to find out about future mobile plans – including a new native app this summer.

Let’s Xplor!

Perhaps the most interesting new product was announced off the back of Greg’s
comments about their MooodleRooms  acquisition last year, and their
Sakai support. So it seems Bb are strategically aligning themselves
as a multiple VLE support company now. Therefore the Xplor (in beta) tool
has been created to enable cross platform creation and sharing of learning objects/resources using OER and Creative Commons licensed resources. Resources can be embedded  into all supported VLEs. You can also create and manage content from xplor,
including links,assignments, assessments, and discussions. Fewer question
types available than BB Learn. This is an interesting move for Bb – embracing
cloud based content creation and sharing. It could provide a viable
application to allow staff to “easily” create and share learning resources.
Service packs 10,11,12

To finish off let’s have a look at the highlights out now, or soon to be
released.

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Active MOOC

I’ve been dipping into the Blackboard MOOC  called Designing an Exemplary Course. I have found it to be quite useful picking up instructional design nuances from previous exemplary course winners . The weekly course structure is run via BB own CourseSites platform and makes use of a blog plus weekly webinars showcasing  online or blended courses.

The supporting blog also reinforces the learning theory; active (and social) learning  which is proving to be a key scaffolding concept . I’m currently designing a new staff development course promoting active learning by exploiting experiential methods using the tools (discussions, wiki, blog, journal) in a student context. The top ten methods summarised in the active instructor post resonated with my own approaches , i.e. exploiting adult learning theories; real world projects, collaborative work, peer learning using a variety of media. I’m also including opportunities for reflective thinking throughout, and group presentations in the final week.

There are also links to another Blackboard blog, discussing active learners in relation to 21st Century teaching, including the very outdated reference to “digital natives” in the form of a particularly cheesy video.

The visitor & resident metaphor developed by David White  is a more accurate portrayal of the continuum we all reside on in relation to the use of technology. Make sure you follow the link to the peer reviewed journal to read his critique of Prensky’s digital native/immigrant paper. As we all know, the concept of digital native is an overhyped myth, which is currently being investigated by the JISC funded digital literacies programme. They say..

“By digital literacy we mean those capabilities which fit an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society: for example, the skills to use digital tools to undertake academic research, writing and critical thinking; as part of personal development planning; and as a way of showcasing achievements”.
The Study of how UK FE and HE institutions are supporting effective learners in a digital age (SLiDA) is well worth reading.

Obviously I’m currently focussed with developing the digital literacies of our staff in relation to the exploitation of the tools we have here, which in turn should cascade down to our students learning experiences. I’m finding the use of small developmental steps beneficial – taking inspiration from the 3E Framework developed by Dr Keith Smyth.

New year – new tools

MB512

Welcome to the new academic year at Aston. We’ve been busy upgrading some of the core learning tools during the summer. Before I talk about new tools, I thought it’s worth shouting about a new collaborative learning space (MB512) – see image above. This space has been designed and installed to showcase the ideas and feedback from recent consultations coordinated by Steve Ellis. It looks and feels great, and has been designed to ensure the space is flexible and can cater for collaborative (small group) working.  The design, colours, and embedded technology all make for an innovative space.

For those just getting back into the swing of things here’s a few pointers to keep you updated;

Blackboard VLE has been migrated to a managed hosted service, and is now updated to service pack 8. The transition has been slick and painless, and thus ensures a robust service for all our users. Two new tools of note in this release are:
• New grading rubrics
• New reports (tracking) types

As you may be aware, Blackboard purchased Elluminate and Horizon Wimba last year. The resultant development was Collaborate, which we upgraded to this summer. Apart from the improved interface , upgrades include:
• Echo cancellation, which eliminate feedback noise, meaning you no longer need to use headphones with PC speakers.
• Improved scheduling via the Blackboard integration.
• (vastly) Improved application sharing. Meaning you can share your desktop/live applications with session attendees, to illustrate an idea, walk through a solution, or collaborate in real time.

Collaborate is fully integrated into your Blackboard Courses.  Access it via the Tools menu.

We have also upgraded Turnitin’s integration with Blackboard. This new integration should eliminate some operational issues reported last year. The new (direct) integration fundamentally alters the way BB VLE links to Turnitin. This has resulted in a change to the submissions inbox, removing the ability to sort by student name, and no paper ID column! Students still get a full time and date stamped receipt. The main difference in the assignment set up, is the new multi part assignment. This can now cater up to  5 parts to a new assignment,  each with their own due dates – which could be useful for large/iterative or group projects.

Skype has been installed on all the Pool rooms PC’s, and uses the handheld/tie microphones. So if you are planning to invite a guest speaker from afar, they could be “present” in your lecture via Skype.

Turnitin updates

Metal Slug by Demonsub - distributed by CC

I recently attended the International Turnitin User Group meeting on Monday 16th July at the Sage in Gateshead (see picture). This was held just before the start of the 5th International Plagiarism Conference, so there was a healthy attendance. This was quite a unique event, in which the whole iParadigms management team were present, to answer a whole raft of questions posed prior to, and during the session.
Given the recent UK outages, the Q&A sessions were quite civilised, with some very useful questions being posed about the direction of the company and its suite of products.  On that note, Lucy Cave a Phd researcher here at Aston – gave a presentation on her latest findings. Lucy’s presentation was reported in their local paper, which covered student’s attitudes/understanding towards plagiarism and collusion. This raises further questions about student use and support of the WriteCheck tool.

Dr Christian Storm, Chief Technology Officer and last remaining founder of Turnitin covered their current research projects. These include;

•  Improving the audio feedback length of time (from the current 3 minutes), and the ability to embed the audio feedback into a pdf download,

• Continual refinement of their algorithms to ensure fewer noisy matches and false positives, as a result of the growing paper database of papers and indexed internet matches,
• Tackling translated paraphrasing as a form of plagiarism,
• Support for right to left languages (e.g. Arabic),
• Advanced phrase exclusion, so that particular phrases or “boilerplate” text  can be excluded from reports by assignment or all assignments.
• Stylometrics, which can identify changes in writing style, which will help address the problem of identifying students employing ghost writers. This was mentioned in relation to the new e-rater tool which is still in the testing phase, and requires further refinement,
• New “role types are to be developed, i.e. reviewers and viewers.
• And finally he mentioned developments into extracting text from “scanned” pdf files using new OCR methods.

In my view, the statement that had the most impact by Dr Storm was his reinforcement that the underlying purpose of Turnitin is as a teaching and learning tool, used to improve student academic writing skills. NOT just as a “checking” tool. This was reassuring to hear from a founder member – and underpins my ethos of this tool.

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Learning platform updates

The vendors of three of our core tools have recently announced product updates. We will be monitoring and testing (some of) these during the forthcoming months; and will report back on progress.

Turnitin2

Two new major updates are currently being planned for later this spring:

1)   Updated Basic integration;

• Upgraded Instructors interface, enabling better tracking and monitoring of all scripts in assignments
• Instructors being able to view any requested matched papers from within their own institution – without needing to contact Tii support
• The ability to attach audio feedback to scripts.

2)   Direct Integration (currently in beta test). Main features;

• Multi-part and continuous assignment types
• e-rater grammar checker
• removal of the roster synch button
• Export grades to Excel format, user un-mapping ability, ability to recycle /rollover old assignments (with new cohorts)
• Releasing grades only on “Post” date
• Improved support for moving assignments.

Read more here: http://submit.ac.uk/en_us/support/integrations/blackboard-direct

Note: some of the features listed above (e.g. audio feedback, or upgraded instructors interface) will be implemented as standard for the web document viewer, so they will ultimately appear in both the direct and basic integrations.

In addition to the above new features on the horizon are;

• A whole new set of analytics tools will be made available to assignment instructors.
• A phased roll out of fully iPad enabled Turnitin access will begin in spring 2012 through to winter 2013.
• Translated paraphrasing will also be available this year. This relatively new method of converting text into different languages – then back into English, can be now be “checked” to detect this practice.

Book your place on the free Turnitin webinars running spring 2012.

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Learning greening

The Greening of ICT is an awareness of the issues associated with the use of IT within the tertiary education sector, i.e. the reduction of sector carbon footprint and associated energy costs (JISC 2009).  Here at Aston, we are running a number of initiatives associated with improving the sustainability of the campus – detailed in the Environment and sustainability web pages.  Also within this website CLIPP explain how the use of virtual classrooms and webinars (using Elluminate) can help with this campus wide push to both improve sustainability and enhance the student experience.

More recently CLIPP assisted Dr John Blewitt to run an entire conference online, covering these very issues.  We used Elluminate in conjunction with Blackboard to create a synchronous online experience, with presenters from across the globe.  The whole event ran very well, and not only show-cased the tools and their potential we have on offer for staff and students to learn “at a distance”, it also demonstrates our on-going commitment to reduce carbon emissions.  Dr Blewitt has since edited the four (video) presentations from the day, and added them to a new website explaining the ideas that underpinned the conference themes.

VLE features

Our upgraded VLE has a new permanent URL and a new “paste from Word” tool added to text editors.  This tool sits below other Mashup features added to the latest version of Blackboard. This new addition fixes previous bugs, and now allows course builders to simply paste directly from Microsoft Word documents, whilst retaining text formatting.

Find other Blackboard tutorials in our new TLC website.

Blackboard news

Latest Blackboard news I gleaned from attending the recent West Midlands Blackboard users group.

•    Confidence was high after the recent acquisition by venture capitalists – and was reported to “be business as usual”
•    The new rubrics tool (available in Service Pack 6) can be deployed at assessment creation stage – this ensures constructive alignment is built into the assessment process. Multiple rubrics can be utilised on a single assessment. Students will be able to view easily all the feedback and feed forward comments.  This has the potential to provide very detailed feedback – and has appears to be more flexible than GradeMark.  GradeMark only offers 10 single rubric criteria, whereas the Bb version has up to 100. You are also able to export rubrics and therefore share them amongst courses.
•    There is a new SCORM player – that allows tighter integration (of Adobe Presenter) with the Grade Centre.
•    We saw a demonstration of the flexibility offered by the overarching Community feature. Amongst many portal type features this allows local administration and finite control of blocks using the Community addition.   For example one School could purchase a “block” and it could be controlled to serve only the students of that area. This feature is not available at Aston.

•    Kaltura + Sharestream are now official Bb partners. Both offer viable options for a video streaming solution via BB?

•    BB Collaborate (replacing Elluminate & Wimba) is out now:
http://www.blackboard.com/Platforms/Collaborate/Products/Blackboard-Collaborate/whats-new.aspx?cmpid=CollabB_WhatsNew_071011

Blackboard blocks/extensions;

•    Durham have developed a Twitter and sign up block
•    There are now Google Doc’s and Microsoft Live blocks
•    Birbeck have developed a Federated Access Management Block
•    Developers have the ability to use the Google Apps engine to create new features. i.e. Edinburgh  has developed a virtual field trip.
•    Purdue have developed the Purdue Signal block. This delivers “learning analytics” from data derived by tracking student engagement with the course. This can then be subsequently used to predict assessment failure or attrition rates.
•    There is a BB STATS tool that can be used to deliver real-time course usage data to an Android phone.

Open Standards;

As yet; no one, apart from the JISC funded CELTIC project (integrating ELGG, WebPA, and PebblePad) appear to making any use of the LTI Open Standards!  I found this to be quite surprising, considering the potential it offers.  Maybe it is just too new for universities to experiment with, as we are all too busy testing service packs!

Online marking tips

During testing of the range of tools available within the Turnitin suite of tools, I set up the new rubric manager tool.  This allows you to create a set of rubrics for a given assignment and easily apply them to student scripts.  Together with the GradeMark comment banks, this new rubric tool can really save time , and ensure a consistent marking schema is applied.  It was simple to set up and link to to the existing assignment.  Ideal for teams of markers and second marking to ensure that all involved are utilising the same rubrics – all contained within the Turnitin library.  The PeerMark tool also has allows a quite complex set of peer marking scenarios, thus complementing the GradeMark and Orginality checker.  Turnitin continue to expand the product base into a very useful set of online marking/feedback tools, helping to save academic staff valuable time.  This approach also ensures a consistent quality of service can be delivered across programmes, creating a level plaing field for online marking and feedback.

When you link Turnitin with Blackboard (our VLE) as we have, you now have the potential for paperless marking – as the results get fed into the GradeCentre. These can be subsequently be uploaded into the registry system.

I thought I’d finish this post by linking to a short video by Professor Curtis Bonk, which highlights the need for academia to adopt a holistic and pragmatic approach to detering plagiarism and collsuion.

Going the distance

Durham

This is my second post inspired by proceedings from the recent Durham Blackboard Users conference.
There were a number of presentations covering aspects of HEIs attempting to get to grips with effective online course design, support and delivery.
First up was a very encouraging presentation by Nicola Hayes from the University of Leicester. She discussed their relatively new Distance Education Centre and their new approach to marketing and supporting students when thinking and then applying for an online course. In her presentation entitled “Three Steps to Success: Building the Right Foundation – A taster, induction and first module reconfiguration course design for students studying at a distance” Nicola described a very supportive model of creating carbon copies of the live courses to give prospective students a real a taste of the real thing.  If students did sign up, they were then given access to a second module, with more authentic tasks to complete.  This method essentially provides a pre- course authentic student experience, which extends the idea of the Gilly Salmon 5 stage model to pre course activities.  Chatting to Nicola after her presentation, confirmed my previous experience and research of the importance of high quality student support, before, during and after online learning.  Nicola’s previous  experiences as an online tutor at Liverpool Hope University will certainly add weight to their ongoing plans for distance learning courses.

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