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Blackboard Course Management
By Anita Warren
Blackboards have been
indispensable tools in the classroom for decades. At Dartmouth, a new and improved Blackboard is rapidly
becoming an indispensable tool outside the classroom too.
Unlike its namesake predecessor, today's “Blackboard” is much more than a
tabula rasa.
It's a course management system that enables faculty members to construct and
maintain their own virtual classrooms, where they can post materials for their
courses, hand out homework, and hold discussions with students. What's more,
faculty members create these Web sites with little more effort than a mouse
click or two. Curricular
Computing, a subdivision of Academic
Computing, provides fail-safe support — answering questions,
troubleshooting, and offering outreach and education — and ensures the system
is integrated with other applications on campus.
The Blackboard team (left to right): Brian Reid, Sarah Horton, Mark
O'Neil, Susan Simon, Barbara Knauff. Photo by Joe Mehling.
Systems such as Blackboard have gained popularity on college campuses in
just the last three or four years, according to
Malcolm Brown, director of Academic Computing. Brown notes that
Blackboard's origins at Dartmouth date back to 1999, although it didn't take
shape as an enterprise-level application until 2002. Since then, Curricular
Computing has been busy molding it to faculty needs, adding tools to enhance
classroom learning. Most recently, the group has been working with librarians
on campus to provide direct access to the College's library resources.
“Blackboard is evolving and picking up functionalities, so it covers a range
— from that of a personal assistant, to a distribution point, to an actually
interactive collegial workspace for a course,” says Brown.
Through such tools as Photo Roster, Assignment Manager, Test/Survey Manager,
and Gradebook, faculty now can easily post assignments and download students'
submissions, create quizzes, and enter, compute, and distribute grades
individually. Blog and wiki features are slated for
rollout soon.
Blogs, or Web site logs, are a popular phenomenon, but wikis may be less
well known. “A wiki is a collaborative authoring tool that allows multiple
authors to edit the same page and kind of override each other,” explains
Barbara Knauff, senior instructional technologist. “Basically, it allows
students to add content to a Blackboard site and to actually author a little
project right within Blackboard. It's a step forward for us in that way because
it takes us away from the model where the faculty builds the course Web site
and the students look at it, to a model where students can now actually add
content to Blackboard more easily. So it becomes a more virtually collaborative
enterprise.”
“A course Web site no longer is just a place where faculty dump information
and students consume it,” adds Brown. “It's moving more in the direction of
becoming a group work space, where it can support interactivity and projects —
uploading and downloading, sharing files, sharing comments, and things of that
sort.”
Nearly half of Dartmouth's courses are employing Blackboard during fall term
2005. Knauff says faculty like what they see so far. “Whenever I do a new
Introduction to Blackboard workshop for people who haven't used the system
before, their reaction is overwhelmingly positive,” she says. “ I think faculty
are embracing it because it's simple to use and gets the job done.”
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