Virtually Present: Using Blackboard software and building blocks to provide online training and support

Virtually Present: Using Blackboard software and building blocks to provide online training and support by Mary Jane Clerkin, Berkeley College

They run a series of online-only staff development workshops for academics wanting to teach online. The first is an online tutorial about teaching online that is two weeks long and tries to get academics to see the perspective of a student online and asks them questions about how they feel about online learning to determine if it is suitable for them (Not sure if they do this at the end as well, to see if any minds have been changed during the process). It includes online research through library databases, online discussion and submission of writing assignments. They were big Wimba fans for leaving audio and video everywhere in the site and said Pronto was effective for supporting their staff members via instant chat.

Encourages their academics to come to staff development events - have 12 at BbWorld this year. There's a central online resource center Bb site where everyone who does the course gets access too. In there is a reading group, lots of resources, conference listings, etc. Might be good to have upcoming e-learning conferences listed somewhere easily accessible at SHU for interested staff.

The part I didn't get is they said all meetings with academics were held online for them too, along with discipline specific discussions. Of course there were screencasts and self-help resources in the online centre too.

Then, after the intro course, you must take another 3 three week courses to be able to learn about instructional design for online (only) courses. They linked into help desks, library directors, student support in these courses, which was good. However, I thought it was a rather draconian way of getting people to do staff development. By the end of the third course they have finished planning out and creating an online course which is then compared to a strict checklist for approval, which is finally carried out by the Online Dean to evaluate if it is suitable to be online.

Students must take a course called Road to Success in Online Learning to determine if they will be suitable for online learning before they can sign up for an online course too.

I asked her what about blended learning, how did that work? She said that they did blended learning, but did not elaborate about how that did or did not fit into the system. I couldn't imagine every single lecturer in the university going through this type of process to be able to use Blackboard at all, so I'm not sure what training is necessary for those folks, or if most people can have Blackboard without any training. I got the impression not, which seems to be causing its own problems. In general an OK session, in that I saw a different way of doing things, but I don't think most of it applies to us.