Online Training, 2002,
.
Support: printed guides, basic support.
Review by Heidi J. Larson
Rating:
In a hurry?
Recommendation
When the college district I worked for decided to
build an online presence, the educational technology committee voted
for Blackboard after several months of debate. In the end, the
decision turned on how instructor- and learner-friendly the system
was. In an academic setting the faculty are the developers, and the
best way to get them interested and even excited about online
teaching is to provide them with a system that is easy to use.
In a corporate or government setting, training professionals can
be assigned to course development. But they too can "vote" on a
system by resisting or accepting it, and the needs of subject matter
experts parallel those of academic faculty.
I have been working with Blackboard for nearly two years, and
I have done a user survey of district faculty who have worked with it for
a year. This review is based on our extensive collective experience with the technology.
This review can be of use to readers with a range of
interests:
- You and your organization may want to proceed with full-blown
web-enabled instruction and create an online community.
- You may simply want to test the Internet waters with a
web-enhanced or hybrid course because you are not sure how ready
you and your learners are for this new technology. You can use
Blackboard as an enhancement to your teaching and training, for
instance, by posting announcements and assignments, using the
discussion board for after-class questions and discussions, and
hosting an occasional chat session.
- Or you may not want to use Blackboard for teaching, but
instead for marketing courses by making the basic course
information available online. Blackboard allows you to post just
your course syllabus, required materials, faculty
information--whatever you want students to know about your courses
and instruction.
It is entirely possible that within your organization, all of
these dispositions are present. Assisting you in understanding all of
the system's capabilities and limitations is therefore an important
goal of this review.
Company
Blackboard is the largest company in the U.S. postsecondary
market and has had some success in the corporate market as well.
Marquee academic and government clients include Arizona State
University, Georgetown University, Florida State University, the
Fairfax County School District, Harvard Law School, and eArmyU.
Commercial clients include Pearson Education Inc., LEXIS-NEXIS,
Kaplan Inc., Academic Systems, AOL@School, FT Knowledge (a division
of Financial Times), JP Morgan, Boeing, Novartis Nutrition, and
Progressive Insurance.
Product
Blackboard offers three levels of service, with a wide range of
license prices. Level I contains all the elements to deliver a course
online. There are separate areas for the syllabus, course information
and announcements, textbooks, lectures, assessments, assignments,
resources, grades, and course statistics.
Built-in tools for
communication and collaboration include a discussion board, email,
and a virtual chatroom. Students can take notes in an online
notebook, check the class schedule on the calendar, turn in homework
assignments using the Digital Drop Box, and do research using the
integrated Academic Web Resources.
For organizations that would like to offer a comprehensive online
community, Blackboard offers larger, more expansive packages. Level
II, the Community Portal System, is an extension of the Learning
System. It adds modules that can integrate courses, communities, and
administrative services online through one customizable Internet
gateway.
There is one entry point, or URL, to access courses as well
as administrative and student services. Information needs to be
uploaded only once, and users need only log in once to gain access to
all the courses, services, announcements, and tools that pertain to
them. In addition to courses, campuses can use Blackboard for teams,
committees, clubs, departments, course catalogs, and more. Customers
can also brand their online venue.
Level III adds an administrative package tailored to running an
academic campus. It allows web-enabled operation of student
identification, dining services, campus commerce, building access,
and business with off-campus merchants.
Blackboard offers its products as installations or hosted on the
application service provider (ASP) model.
Tools, Features, Characteristics
A good course management system includes tools not only for
delivering courses, but also for communicating expectations and
encouraging interactivity and feedback. It respects different
learning and teaching styles by allowing use of different media. It
encourages a consistent look and feel so students and teachers can
learn the navigation quickly. The technology doesn't overwhelm the
teaching, and it is friendly to those with disabilities.
Content Areas holds most of the course material. Customizable to a
limited degree, it includes areas such as Course Information,
Syllabus, Staff Information, Textbooks, Course Materials,
Assignments, Information, Lectures, Labs, Projects, and more. The
feature called Learning Units is your main vehicle for delivering
lectures and labs; it presents information in the order you designate
and builds a table of contents as you go.
Among the many tools you can use to communicate your expectations,
the Syllabus can contain a grading rubric detailing exactly what is
expected of students. Or you can set up a simple list of assignments
in Assignments. The Calendar feature is beneficial for students who
can plan better with the course mapped out for them. You can include
reminder dates like "Have project topic decided" or "Project
midpoint" or even "Project due in Drop Box by midnight Pacific
Time!"
Blackboard has several ways for students to collaborate and
communicate. They can send emails to their instructors and to other
students in their class and groups. The Virtual Classroom lets you
have a real-time discussion (chat), ask and answer questions aside
from the discussion, add graphical slides or draw your own graphics
(whiteboard), and archive the proceedings. Virtual chat is perfect
for office hours, group discussions, or tutoring sessions. It's also
good for meetings. You can brainstorm, make annotations on charts or
graphics, answer questions as you go, and record the entire session
for future reference.
Blackboard's Discussion Board lets you create different forums for
each topic. You can sort messages by thread, author, date, and
subject, and you can search messages by author and keywords. The
Discussion Board provides an excellent launching pad for student
debates, WebQuests, peer reviews, and issue analyses, as well as
being a vehicle for questions and answers that pertain to the entire
class.
You have a choice of seven question types when you create quizzes,
and you have a multitude of quiz delivery settings. Quiz grades are
stored in Blackboard's electronic gradebook. Surveys allow students
to give feedback to the instructor anonymously. Some instructors like
to present entrance and exit surveys for each module; others prefer
just one end-of-course evaluation.
Students can check their overall course or session grades if the
Online Gradebook is enabled. Instructors and administrators use the
Course Statistics area to generate reports on course usage and
activity.
In addition to presenting text, Blackboard allows you to include
audio and video files, graphics, multimedia such as Flash, and links
to other websites. Materials can be presented sequentially in the
Learning Units and also in areas where students can choose their own
exploration order. Assignments and course deadlines can be presented
in several different ways, and students can actively participate in a
class by taking notes on the Electric Blackboard.
Blackboard enforces a consistent look and feel across courses by
controlling the choices available to developers. Although developers
have some ability to change the color, pattern, and shape of the
navigation buttons, the buttons always appear on the left side of the
screen. Developers can decide which buttons and tools to show and
hide, but there are a limited number of label choices.
The main course color scheme, information icons, and menu fonts
are pre-set. The tools remain constant throughout all the courses.
Once student users have mastered the Digital Drop Box in one class,
for example, they can handle it with ease in the others.
In Levels II and III, users have easy access to their classes by
typing in the community portal URL. After logging in at the welcome
page, students see all the classes they are taking and instructors
all those they are teaching. Teams, committees, clubs, boards, and
other online activities are also presented here, eliminating the need
for multiple user IDs and passwords.
Blackboard's reputation is that it is easy to learn, and it really
is pretty simple. If you start out designing a basic class to present
on Blackboard, then you will find the tools and materials easy to use
and easy to find. Almost all of the developing tools are on one menu,
the Control Panel, and there's a button right on the instructor's
navigation bar that gets you there.
Top
Evaluation
How does Blackboard fare in the real world? To supplement my own
experience, I asked nine faculty members and faculty trainers about
their students' reactions to it and about their own experiences
developing and teaching classes in Blackboard.
In this case, Blackboard has been a success. One respondent wrote:
"In only three semesters we went from zero Blackboard courses to over
700, including web-enhanced [regular classes that use the
Blackboard tools as additional class resources], hybrids
[classes that meet online for part of their class time], and
75 that are fully online. Part of that was good planning and good
training, but it was only possible because faculty can learn quickly
how to use Blackboard and get started."
Six of the nine faculty said students like using Blackboard as
their course platform. They find it very user friendly, and it's easy
to learn and fun to use. The other three faculty responded that
students learned "somewhat quickly" and found the interface
"So-So—it's okay." If students did have troubles, they usually
involved the Digital Drop Box or taking exams.
Five faculty said their experience teaching with Blackboard has
been very good. The others thought it was "So-So," and one didn't
answer. Eight of the nine said that the Discussion Forums feature was
the most important teaching tool: "very valuable, and it's great that
the instructor can set up as many as needed." Assessments came next:
"Very useful if you use quizzes or exams since it can administer them
online and then grade them and put the score in the gradebook."
While teaching and learning using Blackboard are lauded,
developing with it received a lukewarm response. Three instructors
agreed that the experience was "Great! Blackboard is so easy to use!"
Five said it was "So-So," and one confessed to it being "Awful!"
Said one of the instructors who responded "So-So:" "The web pages
made within Blackboard are very 'plain vanilla' and it is hard to do
even basic things like … link to other web pages within your
same Blackboard course site. Also, some media doesn't want to play
properly in Blackboard." Internal linking is an issue that Blackboard
must address. As of Version 5.5 there is no easy way to do this.
If you are new to online course development, Blackboard makes it
easy by labeling things clearly and taking you down well-marked
paths. If you are used to web editors like Dreamweaver or FrontPage,
however, you may get frustrated by Blackboard's structure. There are
buttons to push every step of the way, and development moves slowly
as you wait for the Blackboard server to process every command.
And sometimes the tools Blackboard provides aren't enough; five
instructors also said they use "a lot of HTML" to get the course to
look or function the way they want. However, the HTML they do use is
usually basic and easy to learn.
The faculty were not enthusiastic about Blackboard's help
resources, with six voting for "Okay, but sporadic." One person
wrote: "We use the help that we have set up for both students and
instructors and find it much better than Blackboard's."
It's not that Blackboard doesn't have a lot of documentation and
ways to get help, but it is redundant on the basics, does not provide
sufficient detail, and is silent on many advanced topics. Blackboard
should make available a detailed reference that includes basic and
advanced issues and offer a public message board like WebCT's Dr.
C.
For issues that require a Blackboard technician's attention, there
are phone and email support options. Usually these are excellent,
quick, and courteous, but at times you can be on hold forever or your
messages aren't returned or you get the feeling that the email people
simply answered your email as "Resolved" without ever looking at your
problem.
On balance, the instructors I surveyed are satisfied with
Blackboard. As one instructor wrote, "Blackboard offers an excellent
balance between features and ease of use. [But] it still has
plenty of room for improvement.…" Another said,
"[Instructors] mistakenly think of Blackboard or other course
management software as only for online courses--I use it for all my
classes, including my face-to-face classes, and students in those
classes love it. It's a great way to extend the class beyond the
classroom."
On the basis of this experience, Blackboard fares well on the
seven LMS Success Factors. (For more information, see the
Introduction to the Training Media Review research report series.)
The product's instructional competence, ease of use, administrative
capability, and aftersales service are all good or very good.
Compatibility and interoperability are not outstanding, however, and
the vendor's pricing is hard to evaluation because it does not
disclose specific figures for reviews. The vendor's financial
stability seems to be good.
Recommendation
Blackboard is a good fit for an organization making its first foray
into online learning with potential developers who are not
particularly technically savvy. Blackboard is also a good platform
for an online community. If you do not have many courses that need to
be imported into Blackboard, all the better. Blackboard works best if
you build a course from scratch within its structure.
On the other hand, if you will be developing multimedia-rich,
technically complex content, or if most of your developers have a lot
of course development experience, then Blackboard may not be for you.
You may end up building a new system within Blackboard to work around
its limitations, and the vast number of buttons that must be clicked
to do anything may cause a resurgence of the Primal Scream.
As one instructor put it, "We don't have the perfect CMS yet!
There's lots of room to grow or for competition."
You can test Blackboard by creating a limited-time, trial
course of your own. We recommend this as a mandatory step for
anyone seriously considering the product.
