A month into the semester and with classes in full swing, students and faculty seem to be putting Blackboard to good use. After using virtual learning system WebCT for a decade, Blackboard is making a transition into everyone’s academic life on campus –but in many different ways.
Louise Pasternack, a senior lecturer in the chemistry department, said Blackboard is hard to use.
“It’s harder to organize,” she said. “Blackboard has a lot of extra functionality; it’s hard to find what I need.”
After Blackboard Inc. bought WebCT a few years ago, they planned to phase out this outdated system and eventually replaced it with Blackboard last July.
According to an article in the JHU Gazette, Hopkins considered other web modules to fill the shoes, of WebCT, but Blackboard was the best from all the options based on a user-survey administrated to faculty last year.
In terms of cost associated with the switch, the Information Technology Department could not provide and figures.
The response to Blackboard, so far, has been mixed.
Professor Oleg Tchernyshyov, of the Physics department, prefers Blackboard over Web CT because of its, “newer features, smoother interface, and discussion groups available to both students and TA’s.”
However, he believes the transition from Web CT to Blackboard has not been easy. For example, he finds it particularly frustrating that “the classes cannot be separated by sessions, and are instead merged into one.”
Students must be organized into groups based on which session they are in manually, which is tedious. Professor Tchernyshyov has also had problems with using specific browsers with Blackboard. “Safari sometimes doesn’t work, and Firefox won’t let me add files at times,” he says. However, the IT department has been more than helpful in returning his questions, and CR was efficient in the training sessions earlier this year.
Conversely, many students find Blackboard a great resource that is not really that different from WebCT, observing a very smooth transition between the two.
“I find [Blackboard] very easy to use. I don’t really see much difference between blackboard and WebCT,” said senior Mary Vitale.
Some instructors would also agree. Professor David Schley, who teaches Expository Writing, said, “I have found Blackboard fairly intuitive for my purposes; I had to look at a user guide in order to figure out how to make the course page accessible to my students, but since then I have had no difficulties.”
He admits, however, that he has not used his Blackboard site as often and as comprehensively as other instructors do.
The transition is not as easy for others. Blackboard version 9.1 offers a plethora of features to faculty and students — from a more effective file upload process, to blogging features, to better functioning with CPS clickers.
However, some added extras on Blackboard make the switch from WebCT to Blackboard a bit more difficult.
Richard Fenrich, a sophomore, generally likes the new Blackboard, but still finds it a bit perplexing.
“I do prefer the Blackboard interface over the WebCT interface — it is more modern and incorporates a menu on one side of the window for easy navigation,” Fenrich said. “However, I find the menus excessive and unnecessary, and wish the layout was more direct. Overall though, it serves its purpose better than Web CT did, although a little more simplicity in design couldn’t hurt.”
In contrast, some professors find the increased quantity of features the highlight of the new system. Jessica Valdez, a graduate student in the English Department teaching “Dialog of Forms: Newspaper and Novel in Nineteenth Century” finds them very helpful.
“I prefer Blackboard to WebCT because it offers more services. I particularly like the ‘Blog’ function in Blackboard, which I am using extensively in my course. Instead of asking students to submit weekly reading responses directly to me, I am asking them to post their responses on a class blog so that they can read each other’s reflections and continue the class dialogue outside of class. This feature works perfectly with the topic of my class, which concerns changing forms of communication,” Valdez said.
Besides these features, some professors have other frustrations stemming from Blackboard. Opening up a Blackboard site was a novel process to many instructors.
“I did not realize I had to open up the Blackboard page to my class before they could access it,” says Valdez.
Pasternack cites troubles everyday. She specifically is frustrated with Blackboard’s inability to fix graded assignments. When wishing to change the “failing grade” for a 10 point online safety quiz to less than or equal to 8.9 from less than or equal to 9, “Blackboard says 8.9 isn’t a number. It’s a number, [but] not an integer! This is just Blackboard being dumb!” she said.
With the new troubles and new set up of Blackboard, the university has done their best to smoothen the transition from WebCT. They offered three different training sessions to faculty, one for online content, one for online tests, and another for online discussion and communication using the Blackboard system. Each session was 1 to 2 hours long, and was hands-on, as faculty would experiment with Blackboard while learning.
The university has also provided tech support for the new learning system.
“The Blackboard admin are fantastic. There is always great support,” Pasternack said.
Professor Michael McCloskey, of the Cognitive Science department, used WebCT for one semester last year, and has been getting accustomed to Blackboard.
“It seems okay,” he said, but thinks the daily emails can be confusing. Rather than attending the optional training sessions, Professor McCloskey opted to refer to the internet for any questions he had regarding the new system.
Overall, the response to Blackboard has been positive, although there have been a few troubles along the way. Of course, after only a few months of using Blackboard, it takes time to get acquainted with the new interface.
“I’m not used to it. I’m hoping it’s not Blackboard, it’s me,” Pasternack said.
