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.

Read more

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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new tools

Thought it was time to share a few developments.  Here’s some short snippets for your consumption;

• Use, and then feedback into the London Knowledge Lab’s updated Learning Design Support Environment. See the video above.
• JISC have produced an update guide on using Blackboard Collaborate.
• Blackboard Inc. have announced the launch of a Beta program for an interactive mobile application for Blackboard Collaborate(TM),  The new app would let learners participate in live Web conferencing sessions from smartphone and tablet devices, significantly expanding access to sessions delivered through the platform.  We are upgrading from Elluminate to Collaborate during July 2012.
• You can now add short audio feedback clips onto student scripts using Turnitin.
• Blackboard has updated its mobile app to accommodate test taking and to deliver alerts to students when changes happen to their courses without the learning management system (LMS) app being opened. Aston does not use BB mobile app’.
• Stay on top of Turnitin system up time by following their status tweets.
• Access our new PeerMark tutorial – courtesy of Cardiff learning support.
• Need to extend Blackboard functionality /any VLE easily – then use the IMS LTI standard! Read a recent interoperability paper written by Stephen Vickers.

Flipping Vital

In most examples at Aston,  Replay (Panopto) lecturecasts are made available to students immediately following the formal lecture. But “flipping” could provide another equally popular model?

What is flip teaching?
This refers to a method of instruction where classroom-based teaching time and traditional “homework” time are reversed (flipped). A teacher provides video lessons to be reviewed outside of class, which in turn gives teachers more time in class to focus on higher-order learning skills. Ref: http://ed.ted.com/about

I recently attended a webinar organised by the ViTAL SiG.  This caught my eye as it covered a new ideology called Flipping the classroom. The webinar by Carl Gombrich outlines his approach to successful flipping. Carl, records lectures, then encourages students to ask three questions about them (in the VLE) – and add a timestamp video reference.
Essentially this “movement” entails the use of short video “lectures” either using tools such as Panotpo, or shorter chunks of videos posted on YouTube, or hosted on sites like the popular Kahn Academy. Essentially the idea is to make traditional lecture material available to students BEFORE a lecture, in a more informal/accessible/varied format.

By supplementing the [chunked] video material with tasks/questions in a VLE or by using the new TED ed tool box – you extend the learning, and move towards a more inquiry based model. The students then arrive at the traditional lecture primed full of ideas they want to discuss – as per a standard tutorial format. We used to call this homework! The same outcome of promoting learner autonomy, inquiry, and problem solving, can be also achieved by posting any resources for students to work on before lectures into Blackboard or Pebblepad. The aim is to promote a more discursive, Q&A lecture format. The use of chunked video clips or lecturecasts in this new “flipping” ideology ensures that core course resources could be presented in a more engaging format (as opposed to text) and could therefore improve motivation?

Further information;

• http://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/news/carl-gombrich-flipping-the-lecture-theatre
• http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/04/flipping-the-classroom/
• http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/flipping-lectures/
• http://www.khanacademy.org/
• http://ed.ted.com/about
• http://www.youtube.com/user/TEDEducation 
• http://tlc.aston.ac.uk/aston-replay/case-study-lecture-capture-aston-university
• MIT & Harvard release Edx

Effective e-Portfolio use at Aston University

Connecting the Eportfolio Community : Copyright Alison Miller

In this blog post I report on two different uses of e-portfolios (PebblePad) here at Aston University.  Both have similar stories to tell, in respect of the methods the academic staff have used to scaffold and support student’s reflective evidence, and their methods of teaching critical reflective writing. Finally we ask the question of how they assess reflective portfolio evidence.   I should also direct your attention to five new enlightening JISC produced video case studies on e-Portfolio use across UK HE and FE: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/eportimplement .

Now it’s time for a serious look at the new and improved PebblePad 3– following the recent unveiling by the PebblePad team.

Dr Roy Smith: Combined Honours

At our recent Aston e-Portfolio interest group (ae-pig) meeting we had the pleasure of talking to Dr Roy Smith  (former Director of Combined Honours).  Dr Smith was invited to talk about his use of e-portfolios for the combined honours cohorts in recent years.  Dr Smith has been using PebblePad to allow students to build up evidence of skills and competences beginning in year 02.  Students are encouraged and guided (using a template webfolio) to continually reflect upon their experiences. They continually create a body of evidence that displays their development during their undergraduate studies and work placements.

In the initial stages of using PebblePad Dr Smith provided little scaffolding (with Pebblepad), but soon found this to be counter-productive to effective learning and their grasp on the importance of a reflective journal.  The lessons he learned echo others adoption of e-portfolios, namely;

• Provide initial support for the students. This ensured they understood the longer term employability benefits of using an e-Portfolio as a “living” document.
• Use simple scaffolding mechanisms to provide a framework for collated evidence, i.e. webfolio. Dr Smith utilised the skills and competences frameworks provide by our careers department for this purpose.
• Promote and provide effective reflective (academic) writing skills. In his case Dr Smith used the work of Dr Jenny Moon , by running writing workshops.
• Use secure gateways to manage large cohort reflective assessments.
• Add weighted assessment grades to both the live journal and the final CV parts.
• Final assessment of the journal ensured that students displayed evidence of higher order thinking skills, by collating and synthesising critical incidents. The critical reflections on their developing skills and competencies would therefore help guide them in their chosen careers.

Dr Smith concluded his talk by commenting upon another portfolio he implemented for an area of lecturing he covers. This is a paper based portfolio, and is extremely successful with the students recording lab experiments and field tests.  Fitness for purpose is the key here for “technology” or lack of in this instance. Don’t let the technology dictate the learning and teaching.

Whilst discussing the evasive subject of both teaching and assessing reflective writing, Dr Errol Thompson proffered an alternative method of defining assessment criteria; using the depth, width , and journey framework . This utilises the SOLO taxonomy   by Biggs and Collis (1982)

•  See also the International Journal of e-Portfolio (volume 2 number 1) which contains papers covering assessment.

Dr Ann Hartley: The Aston Certificate

At our previous ae-pig meeting in November 2011 we invited along Dr Ann Hartley to discuss how she uses and assesses the reflective aspects of student portfolios for the Aston Certificate:  An Introduction to Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.

Recently, this programme has adopted the use of PebblePad to enable students to reflect upon their teaching practice, for both continual and final assessment – using a web based platform.  Dr Hartley has been involved with the Aston Certificate for quite a while now, and has embraced the potential of continual (developmental) and critical reflection afforded by a web based tool such as PebblePad.
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Infecting Academia

This video explains the recent research conducted by Panos Vlachopolous, Kevin Brace (CLIPP), and David Pollard (LSS School).    Essentially academic staff valued both localised and central support, and also used peers to assist their use of technologies.  The results we interesting regarding the varying types and frequency of communications required to reach busy staff here at Aston, or indeed any university.   The need for more localised support mechanisms points towards the potential of nurturing communities of practice, and the importance of subject specific “champions.”

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.