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Beyond the LMS

Blackboard Digital Gaming and Simulations: Emerging Trends in Hybrid Online Education
Crystal Day-Black, Faculty, Dr. Earlene Merrill, faculty, Coppin State University

A traditional classroom course, then Blackboard web-enhanced, was pushed to become a freestanding online terminal course at Coppin State University. The "engaged model" approach was implemented to produce a community of confidence and competence student learners through a variety of student-engaged methods (email, chat room, and discussion forums). Engaged learning met with student resistant and faculty frustration. Faculty recognized the "rules of engagement" needed tweaking. The digital student needed stimulation, realism, and entertainment, thus gaming and simulation. Games and simulation in a hybrid online environment appeal to a variety of learning styles and are effective in reinforcing learning by offering immediate feedback to learners.

Gaming and the use of simulation have re-emerged as innovative teaching-learning strategies that researchers have shown to be effective in improving student learning outcomes. The use of digital games and simulation as part of the teaching and learning experience in higher education fits into the philosophy of active learning and constructivism. These "nearly new" pedagogical tools help students understand concepts more quickly and bring "boring" course materials to life in hybrid online environments. With the use of Blackboard, faculty employs educational technologies without knowing which are most effective in various content areas and student populations.

Google as a Platform for Creating Learning Activities
Dionne N Curbeam, Support, Coppin State University

Google applications are widely used in teaching and learning. While they are worthwhile tools, it can become cumbersome when a student must register for a Google account and/or continually leave the LMS to complete activities. My observations have been that students prefer fewer "clicks" when completing activities and navigation becomes easier when activities are housed in the LMS.

From Blackboard to YouTube
Dr. Tracey L. Murray, Professor Lucille Belgrave, Professor Vaple Robinson, Coppin State University

The purpose of this presentation is to provide relevant information regarding how to increase interaction within the Blackboard format. There is a need to transition from posting of documents to ensure that the format is helpful and interactive for the student user. The presentation will provide helpful information regarding teaching strategies that are beneficial in the teaching learning environment. The strategies that will be discussed include the interactive topical outline, hyperlinks, integration of TurnItIn and Blackboard Testing.

Enhancing the LMS

Assessing Learning Outcome of Online College Algebra Students in Bb Discussion Session Teaching Mode
Dr. Atma Sahu, Faculty, Coppin State University

This paper presents the results of a teaching experiment conducted in a College Algebra class to investigate the use of the on-line Bb discussion questions to increase student's online participation. The paper gives the pedagogical context for the experiment and describes the experimental method. The problem solving process and learning outcomes are assessed by a thread analysis method. Finally, it discusses the results of the thread analysis of several Bb discussion questions, and satisfaction questionnaire completed by the participants of the experiment. The results are useful to educators for replication of this research experiment, and addressing online teaching and freshmen students' retention issues .

Safe Assign - Plagiarism Prevention inside the CMS
Melissa Thomas, Support, Salisbury University

For the past several years, Salisbury University has subscribed to Turnitin's Plagiarism Prevention service. In Spring 2007, a pilot was conducted to compare SafeAssign within Blackboard Campus Edition with Turnitin. In this AY 08-09, both services are being used by faculty for plagiarism detection, with the premise that due to increasing costs and decreasing resources, SafeAssign will be adopted as the new campus standard. This presentation will provide an overview of the SafeAssign service, various methods of integrating SafeAssign into course areas and the process of transitioning users of Turnitin to SafeAssign. Additional best practices on how SafeAssign can be used in collaboration with the CMS assignment tool will be included.

Using Discussion Groups for a Student-Centered, Interactive Teaching of Literature
Ralph S. Stevens III, Faculty Coppin State University

This presentation demonstrates the use of small discussion groups in literature courses. The Blackboard discussion group feature lends itself well to a highly interactive, collaborative teaching method. Such a method is particularly suited to courses in the humanities. The presentation shows how, through weekly discussion assignments in small groups, the instructor can observe individual student learning and adapt instruction to respond to the way students understand the course material. In general, this method makes learning more transparent than does even the best collaborative arrangement of the traditional classroom, because it elicits responses from all students, and gives details of how well each student understands course assignments.

Support

There's no "I" in technology or support
Akilah Jackson, Support, University of Maryland

Support is often perceived as a department and not a network of people with resources. In large institutions, support spans across departments and colleges campus-wide. Developing a distributed support model requires interacting with people of varying skills and resources in order to meet the needs of the end user. The University of Maryland has a central hub for managing technology-related needs, as well as localized hubs. Colleges have the flexibility to utilize the central hub (enterprise-level) or establish local hubs to meet their needs. To support incidents related to the learning management system, a distributed support model was adopted. The people network includes both technical staff, power users, and first responders. The campus-wide liaisons and relationships are reinforced with social and collaborative networks (eg committees), communication (eg change management), and external technical tools (eg. LOT). This presentation will talk about the human element involved in developing strategies that foster communication, collaboration and cohesion within a support network.

Virtualizing Blackboard: UMBC's Experience
John Fritz, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Two years ago, UMBC's 1,200 Blackboard courses and 350 communities were internally hosted on four physical servers. We annually spent $30k each year building new test and production servers, and there was no realistic disaster recovery plan if our computer room went down. We also had to upgrade during our January winter semester because it was the only extended time when demand was low enough to do so.
Now, Blackboard is one of 78 virtual servers (including PeopleSoft, Windows Active Directory, and others) that runs on just six, load-balanced physical machines spread across two campus data centers. We haven't bought or implemented any dedicated Blackboard hardware, our data centers use less energy and dissipate more heat, and for the first time, we will be implementing our annual software upgrade during the two-week window between summer and fall classes.

While virtualization may not be new to many schools, this presentation will share how UMBC brought Blackboard into a green, efficient, affordable and scalable system architecture.

Using Clickers to Control Access to Online Recordings of In-Class Lectures
Bob Armstrong, UMBC

If you record in-class lectures and make them available online, why would students still come to class? If they don't but can pass exams does it matter? While faculty have mixed feelings about recorded lectures, a combination of new technologies makes it possible to allow only students who attend class to access recorded lectures online, for the purposes of review (not discovery). This presentation will show how UMBC is exploring the use of clickers (or audience response systems), Blackboard course management system, and simple lecture capture tools to give faculty fine-grained control of who reviews online recordings of their in-class lectures.

Poster Presentations

Widget While You Work (Within Your Content Areas)
Akilah Jackson, Support, University of Maryland

Out of money for the current budget cycle? Not sure if your users need a certain functionality? Looking for additional light-weight functionality to supplement your existing installation of Blackboard? Look to prototype an idea? Using widgets in your content areas can address all of these questions. Embedding widgets in the WYSIWYG editor of a content area can expand the capabilities of blackboard. This presentation will explore the possibilities of expanding an existing installation with popular and user-friendly widgets. Popular sites such as Google Calendar, Yahoo, and Widget box are covered in this presentation.

Twitter Tweets for Higher Ed
Robin Hoffman, Salisbury University

Twitter is quickly becoming a commonly used tool in Higher Education. This presentation will focus on how faculty members can use Twitter to enhance their student relations as well as incorporate student to student collaborations. Faculty and staff members will be able to see the pros of adding this Web 2.0 technology to their LMS as an additional way to communicate with their students. Also, presentation attendees will see examples of how other institutions are incorporating the technology.

Chat Methodology to Increase Student Activity During Online Classes
Sandi Mitchell, Derick Albright, Richard Ruane, Raymond Love, University of Maryland School of Pharmacy

UMD PHMY 500 “Introduction to Pharmacy Informatics” is an elective course for first and second year students in the School of Pharmacy, University of Maryland. The majority of course content is delivered online as live lectures and interactive chat sessions using Adobe Connect. Team teaching is key to the course, but how do you do this in an online course? While one PHMY 500 faculty member presents a synchronous (“real time”) didactic lecture, other faculty members are monitoring and interacting with the students live via the chat Connect service, thus promoting active learning and monitoring student "whispering" in class. Although this is a faculty and resource intensive means of delivering the course to the students, we also see this as best addressing their needs since it allows students on a much more individual and “personalized” manner to learn the material through different modalities of learning concurrently (questions, chats, interactivity, visual/sound, with faculty and students).

Web-Based Applications for Coordinating Observation Schedules
Richard Ruane, Support, Wendy Klein-Schwartz, faculty University of Maryland School of Pharmacy

The Doctor of Pharmacy Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore has begun a transition to the use of multiple technology-driven curricular delivery methods with the opening of a satellite campus at Shady Grove. The advent of distance learning at the School of Pharmacy (SOP) requires instructors to adapt their courses to accommodate asynchronous delivery.

"Introduction to the Poison Center" is a 1-credit elective course at the School of Pharmacy that introduces student pharmacists to functions of a regional poison center. While most course content is delivered asynchronously, students are required to spend 8 hours of observation time in The Maryland Poison Center and to select cases for presentation. Due to limitations in the Center, only one student could sign up at a time and only limited slots were available in the course of a week. Coordinating time requests over two campuses for a three month period proved especially challenging. After consulting with the instructional technology team and examining Blackboard and other Web-based calendar programs, the School of Pharmacy course masters chose to use a mix of Google Applications to coordinate student schedules and requests during the semester. This proposed poster reports on the utility of Google Spreadsheet, Google Forms, and other Web-based applications in running distance courses for professional students that require extensive observation time.

Facilitation of Student Interaction through Discussion Boards in a Mental Health Elective Course
Jason Noel, Pharm.D., BCPP, Bethany Dipaula, Pharm.D., BCPP, University of Maryland School of Pharmacy

The Doctor of Pharmacy Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore has begun a transition to the use of multiple technology-driven curricular delivery methods with the opening of a satellite campus at Shady Grove. The advent of distance learning at the School of Pharmacy (SOP) requires instructors to adapt their courses to accommodate asynchronous delivery.

'Perspectives in Mental Health' is a two credit elective course at the SOP which explored the historical, societal, and clinical aspects of service delivery in mental health. Many sessions of this course consisted of student discussion and exploration of controversial issues in psychiatry, facilitated by the instructors. This poster reports on the use of discussion boards in the Blackboard platform to present thought-provoking content and to facilitate discussion among students. The discussion boards were used in a modules where students uploaded weblinks to film portrayals of patients affected by mental illness and where student groups delivered presentations on controversies in mental health. The discussion boards yielded significant student interactions, which may have exceeded the level of participation possible in a classroom setting.

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Last updated: April 14, 2009 ©University of Maryland 2009