A Peek Under the Hood of

1. A Peek Under the Hood of Blackboard Learn 9.1

2. Timeline • Initial rollout • General faculty training • System rollout in production

3. Rollout Schedule • Initial roll-out of live courses:  Fall 2011Two faculty from each college will be asked to be part of the initial roll-out. The directors of distance learning and educational technology at each college will be making recommendations to the ac deans, who will make the final decision about which faculty will participate. • Second roll-out of live courses:  Spring 2012Additional faculty (to be determined) from each college, plus the two faculty from fall 2011, will be included in the second phase roll-out. • System-wide move to Blackboard Learn for all faculty/courses:  Fall 2012

4. Training Planning • Training Timeline: Faculty participating in the Fall 11 rollout receiving training in Feb./March ’11; faculty participating in Spring ‘11 rollout will be trained in July/August ’11. We plan to begin providing general faculty training targeted at those teaching hybrid/fully online courses in late summer or early fall ‘11. Spring and Summer ‘12 will be focused on training faculty who are teaching web-enhanced classes. • Hands-on training, webinars, as well as many online resources, included many videos (some in Blackboard’s On Demand Learning Center, as well as customized videos created in-house) will be available. Faculty can find and register into all sessions (hands-on and webinars) via the IITT Course Cart online registration system: https://www.commnet.edu/academics/iitt/coursecart.asp. • We plan to redesign the websites that faculty use to access information related to Blackboard and other types of technology training. We’re also considering a variety of new ways to provide community resources for faculty to encourage information sharing and discussions. • Although courses can and will be migrated at the instructor’s request, we feel that many faculty may choose to encourage rebuild their courses from scratch, since Bb Learn has many new options. Also, faculty reported during the last upgrade (to Blackboard Vista)that the redesign process gave them the opportunity to “rethink” their course design in light of best practices.

5. Where to Find Updates & Resources • For the MOST CURRENT information on the Blackboard Learn rollout, visit this website: www.commnet.edu/academics/blackboard/faculty/ • There you will find a link to a page listing information about the Blackboard Learn Implementation & Rollout, as well as a page listing information and resources for Blackboard Learn Faculty Training. • The faculty training page include documents that address the specific differences in tools between Blackboard Vista and Blackboard Learn.

6. My Blackboard: Bb Vista

7. My Blackboard: Bb Learn

8. Interface: What’s new or different? • No Build, Teach, or Student View tabs; now instructors toggle the “Edit Mode” button to make design changes or view the course as a student would. There is no longer an “interactive” Demo Student enrolled in every course. • Drag and drop reordering of lists and content items. • Fewer clicks required! Less navigating through multiple screens to make changes. • Course Menu is much more customizable with new options for buttons, links, subheaders, dividers, etc. • No “fixed” Home Page: The course entry point can be determined by each instructor. • New content types: Content areas, Item, File, Blank Page, etc. • Notifications provides updates on a variety of new info, items, announcements, etc. in the course. • A module page (referred to generically as the Notifications Dashboard) is the default “course entry point” for new, blank course shells, but not for migrated courses. • Notifications are also linked to Early Warning System rules and a Performance Dashboard; these tools can help keep students on track.

9. Blackboard Vista Section Interface

10. Blackboard Learn Course Interface

11. Top-Level Notification Settings

12. Course-Level Notification Dashboard Notifications for students (and instructors) are linked to due dates in Assignments, Tests, or other types of assessments or grade columns.

13. Tools: What’s new & different? • Assignments – No longer a stand-alone tool • Assessments and Question Database – no QB; now pools • Learning Modules – very much the same as Bb Vista • Email & Messages – Now two separate tools. • Blogs & Journals – much the same as Bb Vista, but no option for individual student blogs, not just a “course blog” • Discussions – New grading options; some functional changes • Groups – Greatly expanded capabilities • Wikis – great new built-in tool for collaboration! • Content Collection –replaces File Manager; great new drag and drop functionality for folders and files; no need to upload/extract zip files.

14. New Content Options & Features • Announcements: No more pop-up announcements; however, instructors can make the Announcements tool the “course entry point”, so students see that FIRST when they enter the course. • New content options include “content areas”, “Items”, “blank pages”, “files”, and “module pages”. • Mashups provide a simple way to add multimedia to your course (from Flickr, YouTube, Slideshare) without having to create it yourself. • Coursewikisenable active collaboration around course content and group projects, and include grading integration. • Audio, Image, and Video tools allow instructors to easily upload and integrate these media files in most common formats into a Content Area. • The Course Files tool (previously File Manager in Blackboard Vista) enables java-based drag and drop of folders and files from your PC into the Course Files area….no more zipping and extracting folders. • Grade Center has a number of new features: Easily customizable views, a field to provide individualized student feedback for each grade column, and an easy interface to weight different grade columns.

15. Content Areas

16. Designing for the Future • Most faculty who use Blackboard start out using it in web-enhanced classroom-based courses. • Within the two years, most instructors begin adding more complexity to their instructional content as well as additional tools and activities. • It’s much easier to transform a Blackboard course shell from a web-enhanced course into a hybrid or fully-online version if best practices of course design and delivery are built in right from the beginning. • For this reason, Blackboard Learn training will focus on a design approach that, while appropriate for web-enhanced classroom courses, will also make it easy for instructors to “scale up” their classes later, and minimize the amount of re-engineering and redesign that would otherwise be necessary to prepare the course for fully-online delivery.

17. Close your eyes and think of a textbook you use…

18. Imagine if your textbook looked like this!

19. Focus on Course Design That Supports Learning

20. Blank course default layout • Blank sections will display a default course menu which was designed to be relevant for web-enhanced courses. This menu was developed through discussions between the system’s DL directors and SO staff. • The “Announcements/Alerts” page is the course entry point by default, but this can be changed by the instructor by going to “Customization” in the Control Panel.

21. Sample migrated course Migrated courses display the information from the original course’s home page as the default course entry point. Again—this can be changed by the instructor. NOTE: • No multi-column layouts; two columns max • no custom icons

22. Time for the tour!

23. Recap!

24. Course Migrations • Course content, including folders, learning modules, assessments, etc. all migrate over. • We’ll be bringing over migrated courses from about a year back—probably back to Summer 2011 (for go-live in Fall 2012). Faculty will be able to modify their migrated course in Bb Learn and then copy that modified course into future course sections. So for example, if you taught English 101 in Fall 2011, that course will be migrated to Bb Learn. You can then modify the migrated course, and if you are teaching three sections of that same course in Fall 2012, you’ll copy the revised version into those three sections. • We’ll be doing testing on several sample courses that have been migrated from Bb Vista to Blackboard Learn and distribute a “migration checklist” for faculty.

25. Tools: What’s new & different? • Assignments – No longer a stand-alone tool • Assessments and Question Database – no QB; now “pools” • Learning Modules – very much the same as Bb Vista • Email & Messages – Now two separate tools • Blogs & Journals – much the same as Bb Vista, but no option for individual student blogs, not just a “course blog” • Discussions – New grading options; some functional changes • Groups – Greatly expanded capabilities • Wikis – great new built-in tool for collaboration! • Content Collection –replaces File Manager; great new drag and drop functionality for folders and files; no need to upload/extract zip files.

26. Assignments • No more “Assignments tool” with all assignments in one place. Instead, Assignments are created “on the fly” on content areas, in side folders, or in learning modules. However, all Assignments in migrated sections are collected in a content area named “Assignments”. • If a content area, folder, or learning module that includes an Assignment is deleted, the Assignment it contains is deleted • No Assignment Dropbox; assignments are now graded in Grade Center. The Grade Center can be filtered to show ONLY assignments for easy grading. • Instead of having students take back and resubmit assignments, instructors can enable multiple attempts of assignments, and additional attempts can be set individually for specific students, since there’s no longer a “cut-off date”. • No association of rubrics (e.g., Grading Forms) with assignments in v.9.1, but this should return in v.9.2, which we’ll be using for the production rollout. • No more “publishing” of assignments.

27. Assessments and Question Database • Now called “Tests/Surveys/Questions”. • New question types: calculated formula, “hot spot”, File Response, more… • No more “Question Database”: Questions are now “owned” by a specific test, survey, or pool. Questions used in multiple places can no longer be modified in a central location. Questions can, however, be collected in individual questions “pools”, then imported into tests or surveys. The Question Database in Bb Vista courses is migrated as a Pool named “Question Database”. • Instructors have a choice between Questions Sets (which are questions selected from various tests or pools presented in random order) or Random Blocks (which are selected only from a single pool). • Students can no longer be prevented from submitting tests after time has expired; however the test indicates which answers were submitted after the deadline. • Options for releasing test scores to students have changed.

28. Learning Modules • No longer a stand-alone “Learning Modules” tool. • Learning Modules are created “on the fly” in content areas or in folders. • There are no longer “headings” in learning modules—rather there are folders within the module that can contain other files and links—these function to “chunk” the content inside the module. • If a content area or folder in which a learning module “lives” is deleted, the learning module is also deleted! For example, if a content area with an Item on it, as well as a Learning Module that contains 2 files is deleted, the message below would be presented. If the instructor clicks OK to delete the content area, ALL OF THOSE FILES WILL BE DELETED.

29. Email & Messages • These are now separate tools. “Messages” are strictly “internal” to the course section. • The Email tool enables users to send individual emails messages to external email addresses, and those users can reply to those messages directly…they no longer have to log into Blackboard in order to respond. • No notifications of new messages or email—students and instructor need to navigate to the tools to check.

30. Discussions • Discussions, Blogs, and Journals are now separate tools. • Terminology: • Bb Vista, instructors create and manage discussions, which consisted of topics and threads; • Bb Learn, instructors create and manage forums which consist of threads and replies. • Students can ‘subscribe’ to forums to receive updates via email. • Discussion topics in Bb Vista courses migrate over as “discussion forums”, including descriptions; however, additional care will need to be taken to be sure that students see the forum description. • Instructors can grade discussions by forum or by thread.

31. Blogs & Journals • Discussions, Blogs, and Journals are now separate tools. • The Blog tool now provides instructors a choice of creating an individual blog for each student which others can read and add comments, OR a course blog (like in Bb Vista) where ALL students can post and/or comment on posts. • There can also be group blogs and group journals. • Blogs and Journals migrate from Bb Vista into the correct tool.

32. Groups • Groups will be moved from Bb Vista to Bb Learn (empty, members will have to be added). • Groups can create their own discussion boards; can also have their own group blog and/or journal. • Groups can create Tasks to track the progress of internal deliverables. • Students can create their own groups to take advantage of group communication and collaboration tools. • Groups have a “file exchange tool” that enables them to upload files to share with other members of the group (however, they cannot collaboratively edit the file and resave it, however). • Groups can still “submit” an assignment on behalf of the group as a whole.

33. Thanks for attending!Questions? Contact Tobi Krutt at the System Officetkrutt@commnet.edu