Improvement stories - Blackboard
(Redirected from Blackboard improvement stories)
There is a long, potentially never ending list of tasks that can improve the operation of Blackboard and the experience it can provide to students and staff. This is meant to be a place where we keep a list of all the Blackboard improvement tasks we know of. Anyone and everyone is invited to offer their suggestions.
The current plan is for the list to be broken up into categories and each category to have a list of stories which briefly describe the improvement and the rationale for it. These descriptions are not large nor final.
The stories/suggestions below may be considered good ideas by some or even most people. But for each story, at least one person at some stage, thought it would be an improvement. Before any story is implement appropriate change management strategies will have to be used.
Contents |
Management
- We support e-learning at CQU, not "product X"
- It is essential that we and others understand that CD&DU helps people do e-learning. That includes, but is NOT limited to, using Blackboard. There are a range of tools and approaches we support. We aim to suggest and provide what is most appropriate, within the practical resource constraints we all work within.
- Knowing what is going on, who is using what tools
- In order to support use of Blackboard we need to know which courses are using which tools so that if one breaks we can be proactive and targeted in our solutions
- Significantly reduce the workload required leading up to the start of term.
- Staff allocations to course sites and making sites go live is low level stuff that should, where possible, be automated.
- Need to get a handle on workload
- As part of the previous point, we need to know the level of work, the type of work and when it occurs in order to make sound judgement.
- Backups
- There must be formal, quick, safe processes in place by which we can restore backups of courses .
- Known issues with 6.3
- Should generate, prioritise and where possible fix the known issues with 6.3
Community
- Understand what level and approaches to community are currently in place
- I believe there is a mailing list which has academics using Blackboard on it. Correct? How is that list populated? Is there value in the list?
- Re-launch the community
- We need to implement some activities, related to the wider CD&DU launch, that send a clear message that Blackboard support is different now and in particular to gather feedback from academics (and students) about what can be improved, what are their immediate needs.
- Expanded and differentiated community building
- There is a broad range of different types of users. We need to offer a more differentiated community process.
- Get to know what people want to do
- Get the CQU academic and student community together to discover what they want to do, what's their itch?
Online assignment submission, management and copy detection
- How many staff will be using Safe Assignment in T2, 2007
- How many staff plan to use Blackboard for online assignment submission and marking
- Move away from Safe Assignment
- There are range of problems with reliability and integration of Safe Assignment into CQU practice. Look at what is required to recommend staff move away from using Safe Assignment.
- Look at integration of OASIS into Blackboard.
Technical operations
- Blackboard authentication
- Increasingly we will want to integrate a range of external applications into Blackboard. The first likely attempt will be OASIS. The aim is not to do a tight integration with Blackboard, for the integration to be as "loose" as possible. A major first step in this would be enabling OASIS to
- Have course jump use the student portal direct links to Blackboard course sites
- The student portal can link directly to individual Bb course sites. Staff MyCQU, via the course jump facility, currently cannot. See if we can get this fixed.
- Server setup
- Currently we have a dev and live server. This is not a sufficent number. We have the following needs
- A live server
- An academic dev server - on which academics can experiment with a box as similar to the live server as possible
- A technical dev server - on which technical support staff can experiment with technical changes etc.
Longer term
- Replace the e-courses.cqu.edu.au home page
- Currently it is simply a login to Blackboard. It includes heavy Blackboard branding and not connection to other CQU resources. Remove the blackboard branding, provide links to other services. Allow an automatic jump to courses.
