John Ramsay – ICT Digital Education Team Blog

Blackboard TLC and DevCon – Newcastle 2019

2 July 2019

Blackboard

A rather sunny Newcastle was the destination for this year’s Blackboard European Teaching and Learning Conference. The 4 day event, which was split into the DevCon and main TLC conference, took place in Northumbria University Business School. We will be looking at some of the highlights from both events.

Northumbria University Business School — Northumbria Business School

Blackboard DevCon

Welcome & No REST for the Wicked: The Latest on REST APIs in Blackboard Learn

DevCon 2019 kicked off with a welcome from Mark O’Neil and Scott Hurrey, they discuss the outline of this year’s DevCon, including events and tasks scheduled for the day and how they have had to improve the Developer Community to meet the demands of its users.

They discuss the growth of the developer community and mention how the number of members has doubled twice over in 2 years from 810 to 3507. This also reflects why there has been an increase of REST API calls, reaching up to 1.2 billion.

The REST API section in the developer portal has been improved to handle more user subscription. Improving the API documentation by filtering on each Blackboard version
Correcting typos to prevent incorrect API Calls

Best practice techniques were discussed, to enhance calls made to the API, for instance caching reusable data such as tokens and only caching data that changes infrequently.

Token Caching: Example One of the techniques to enhance calls made to the API
Cache your REST OAuth token

Introduction to Blackboard Data: The Next Generation Data Analytics Platform

Introduced by Rachael Scherer begins with the focus on “What reasons are we usually requesting data?”. Most responses are centred around tracking and measuring success, which is useful to the session as Blackboard Data provides reports and direct data access (a feature available for SaaS) across the learning ecosystem, by bringing data together we can predict the needs of students.

We continue work with Blackboard Data and we are given a preview to the Blackboard Data User Interface. All the features are not yet available, but we are given an insight into the; data dictionary which details the contents, formats and structure of a database and the relationships between tables used to query the databases.

We can see here the term definitions and relationships to other tables, certain terms have been assigned privacy notes, these privacy notes give the user an indication of which information should be treated with care. In the Blackboard Data user interface, you can also access the reports. These reports are generated, once you have executed the queries using Snowflake. An analysis platform we begin to use. Blackboard provide a quick training session on their two partner products partners Snowflake and Pyramid Analytics, as we are challenged to use these tools to create a report.

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse, focused on collecting data from multiple sources, used to collect all data for analysis. Access to a demonstration site using Snowflake to query Blackboard database was set up for us to execute queries and create reports.

In the afternoon we were given a demonstration of the Pyramid analytics platform, which provides reporting and direct data access from our learning ecosystem, (available as a feature on SaaS platform). The benefit is that it can live alongside and extend our analytic tools.

Developer Roadmap: Highlights the API and Future Enhancements

Blackboard Teaching and Learning Conference

Some of Europe’s leading universities were presenting at the event. The main focus this year seemed to be divided between developments in SaaS, Ultra and Ally and how they have been adopted in different institutions. During the welcome from the CEO Bill Ballhaus, he mentioned that 534 clients have moved to SaaS, 134 are now on Ultra and 548 institutions have adopted Ally. It was clear throughout the event that Blackboard are looking to increase on these numbers and were keen to showcase examples throughout the TLC. The welcome presentation also highlighted how Blackboard have simplified the business over the last year to focus more on teaching and learning to help increase innovation. The company is trying to move away from a single product approach to design a more holositic EdTech platform that will help deliver better learner engagement for all its customers. For Blackboard, Ultra and Ally are key to this.

Moving to Ultra: Northumbria

Northumbria University gave an interesting presentation on their journey towards adopting Blackboard Ultra for 2019/20. Interestingly they noted that Blackboard Learn 9.1 was not meeting the strategic aims of the University or achieving requirements for staff or students. In short, they felt they had a great modern campus but not a VLE worthy of it. The Northumbria journey started in 2016/17 when they moved to managed hosting. Their overall objectives were to move to SaaS, enable Ultra base navigation in Ultra courses, implement new module and programme standards, adopt Ally and undertake staff training. They came up with the following options and have decided to go with option B highlighted in the below image.

Moving to Ultra was not without challenges. Firstly, they found the core functionality was limited when compared with the tools available in Learn 9.1. They also had the added challenge of dealing with continuous delivery, a different way of working for the TEL team. Moving away from a yearly upgrade to updates every 4 weeks was not something they were initially prepared for and lead to a reaevaluation of testing. Finally, the challenge of training all staff in using Ultra and helping staff rebuild content from scratch. To deal with this, the team of 4 are now rolling out 256 training sessions for 4000 members of staff. They also have drop-in sessions 5 days a week for one-to-one support. This is all incredibly labour-intensive and in addition to this, they are continuing to train and support staff in using Learn 9.1 as this system is still active (for the time being).

Has the move to Ultra been worthwhile for Northumbria? So far, they say it is a resounding yes. It has been an opportunity for them to redesign courses and students who have moved to it have been positive in feedback. A trial with MSc students who used 9.1 for their first module then transitioned to Ultra gave the following positive feedback.

So for Northumbria, they still have a bit of work to do before the start of the 2019/20 academic year, particularly in terms of training. The summed up that if your organisation is planning on moving to Ultra then it is important to know your objectives, have a robust raining plan, have a solid communication and engagement strategy then go for it.

Aberdeen’s Journey to SaaS and Ultra

Aberdeen provided an interesting presentation focusing on the good, bad and unexpected on their journey to SaaS, Ally and Ultra. The ultimate goal is to move all courses into the Ultra view by August 2020. First steps for Aberdeen in this journey was to move to SaaS from managed hosting which they did in January 2018. This process took 3 months and they felt it was the next logical step from managed hosting (also crucial if you want to move to Ultra). In March 2019 they started to pilot Ultra courses. For Aberdeen, one of the main benefits of this journey to Ultra was that it would allow them to re-engage with the different faculties and opportunity to re-develop courses. One of the main negatives has been preparing for update on SaaS due to the constant nature of Blackboard’s continuous delivery model. Keeping on top of all developments and system updates can be a challenge. One of the main and unexpected outcomes for Aberdeen is that users were taken by surprise with the changes and developments in the move away from 9.1 Learn. This was despite all the effort the TEL team had put in to prepare staff and students via workshops, online guidance, drop-in sessions, focus groups, course design guidelines and templates etc. So to sum up, Aberdeen are on their way to their 2020 target but it hasn’t been without challenges, mainly getting the message out to the masses.

Comparisons of Ally

Reading, Northumbria, Derby and Edge Hill conducted a joint session comparing how they have implemented Blackboard Ally in their respective institutions. Ally is Blackboard’s content accessibility solution that uses machine learning to create alternative accessible formats (https://www.blackboard.com/accessibility/blackboard-ally.html). It was interesting to see some key differences in how it has been implemented. Northumbria and Edge Hill went for the ‘big bang’ approach and as they wanted all their courses to have access to it. Reading in comparison have introduced it via a 2 year pilot and focused on more of a ‘soft’ launch. Furthermore, although it is available on all courses, as it is a pilot, they decided not to advertise it as a service. One area all the speakers were in agreement over was on the approach to communication, support and training. Northumbria ran a number of roadshows and drop in sessions for staff. Edge Hill started by training Learning Technologists so they were fully aware of the capabilities and manage any potential fears they had before they went on to train academics. User feedback on Ally has been positive for all the institutions. Staff were initially cautious due to potential changes to their courses but running training and 1-1s with disability officers, academics and students has helped. Reading reported that the students who know it is available are using the audio alternative format for revision purposes. However, as they have gone or the soft launch approach, a lot of their students are still not aware it is available. The presentation was wrapped up with the goals for the future. Main things to consider for anyone considering adopting Ally is to have a strong communication strategy, arrange ‘a lot’ of training, engage with students and add Ally into any VLE baseline.

In addition to the joint session, Blackboard have shared the following video featuring a number of other institutions from around the globe talking about their experiences of Ally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ha8B1L6WCh0

That’s all from this years conference. It will be interesting to see how Blackboard continue to evolve their EdTech platform over the next year. The Ultra platform, although its had a number of developments and improvements over the last year, still needs a lot of work until it is a viable alternative to Learn 9.1. Speaking of Learn, what is the road map for this product going forward? Will Blackboard be focusing solely on Ultra by the time of the next conference? We will find out at the 2020 TLC.

Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference 2018

John Ramsay

19 February 2018

In January I attended the Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference. This was the 18^th running of the event by Durham University and the first I have attended. Each conference has a unique theme and this years was based on the classic Spaghetti western, The Good, the Bad and The Ugly. The two day conference featured a number of talks, demos and presentations highlighting what is good bad and ugly with Blackboard.

Before I cover some of the sessions, I have to say it was an exceptionally well run conference. The team at Durham have put a great deal of work into not only the event, but the social aspect following the conference. A highlight was a private tour followed by dinner in the rather glorious surroundings of Durham Castle.

Alternative to Turnitin?

Moving onto the programme, the Durham team managed to arrange a number of interesting and varied Blackboard sessions over the course of the two days. One of the first sessions I attended was by URKUND, one of the conference sponsors. URKUND, which has a large presence in Europe, offer a plagiarism detection service that compares submitted documents against around 11 million student papers, journals, periodicals and books all over the web. Click on the video below for an overview of URKUND:

URKUND have been working with Blackboard to create a building block that uses Blackboard’s Mashup tool so that assignments are sent directly to URKUND for checking. From the demo, it looks like there are a few key differences from Turnitin. Firstly, URKUND doesn’t have the option to remove bibliography from similarity report which is something you can easily do in Turnitin. It also creates two columns per assignment in the grade centre. One column for the assignment and one for the similarity report. Are there advantages of using URKURD over Turnitin? Well, it is difficult to say at the moment. For long term users of Turnitin, would they allow you to take your institution repository and place it in a rival system or would you have to start again from scratch? Another consideration is the user experience and whether it offers the same functionality as Turnitin. At the moment that remains to be seen.

Self-directed Blackboard Course

As a Blackboard training provider, it is always interesting to see what services other institutions are offering. Candace Nolan-Grant from Durham University gave an interesting presentation on a self-directed Blackboard course that introduced new staff to their Blackboard platform (duo). The course, available to all new staff and anyone on request, was designed for those unable to attend face to face training or preferred online learning.

The course aim was to help staff with the basics of Blackboard to ensure they meet university minimum standards and crucially, understand Blackboard from a student and staff perspective. The initial idea was to create a sandbox for all staff. However, Candace commented that this ‘clogged’ up the system so they limited to new staff. Durham produced some stats after rolling out this introduction course. They had 79 unique visitors. 62 visited more than the first page. However, they only had 18 return visitors, possibly due to the staff completing the course after one visit. Interestingly they had zero posts in the blog they created highlighting a challenge most institutions have getting staff and students to engage with interactive tools. Overall, it is a good first attempt at developing self-directed training.

Upgrading to the latest release of Blackboard Learn

There was an interesting presentation by Jonathan Knight from the University of Keele discussing how they have radically changed their process for dealing with upgrades to the latest versions of Blackboard Learn. Historically Keele, like most institutions, are a version or two behind the current Blackboard release, preferring to wait for others to test new releases and explore features before making them available to staff. Jonathan used the analogy of the canary down a mine to demonstrate this point.

Over the last few years they have changed that policy and now prefer to run the latest release with all the features turned on. Jonathan argued that introduction of SAAS Ultra and updates every two to four weeks makes Blackboard the ‘canaries’ finding all the bugs and doing all the testing in their latest version. For Jonathan, he found that with Blackboard backfilling bug fixes into a version a year old can sometimes lead to side effects and in turn impact functionality in the older version of Learn. Jonathan also suggested that not having to spend time doing rigorous testing has freed up their teams time to focus on new developments. Personally, I feel it a bit of a brave move going to the latest release as you never know what might work or more importantly not work. Interestingly when questioned on change management procedures, Jonathan mentioned it is not something they deal with. Jokingly (or rather ominously), Jonathan ended his presentation saying if he is not around at next year’s conference then you know that this method has not worked. Maybe best not to rush to the latest version yet.

Moving to Managed Hosting – A review

One of the final presentations of the conference was by Chris Boon from City College Norwich on their move to a managed hosted solution. There were a couple of key drivers for Chris. Firstly, the increased number of services that have moved to the cloud meant it was a good time to review the hosting option. Secondly, it would hopefully resolve what he described as ‘Thursday slowdown’ problem where the system would be temperamental for no obvious reason. Chris spoke about the on boarding process which you can see in the image below before moving onto disadvantages and advantages.

The main issue they have had was losing access to the database. Previously they were able to fix things via database queries or run simple reports on database. However, on the flipside they no longer have same the performance issues they had before. Furthermore, upgrades have become significantly easier and less labour intensive. This has also had the knock on effect of freeing up more time for other developments. It was a somewhat positive end to the conference knowing that the move to managed hosted can bring a number of potential benefits.

Turnitin User Summit Review – 6/10/16

John Ramsay

12 October 2016

On Thursday 6^th October, I attended the Turnitin User Summit in Newcastle. The one day event consisted of short presentations from Turnitin representatives, guest speakers from UK HE institutions, a group workshop and a ‘knowledge bar’ which provided an opportunity to speak to a variety of people working at Turnitin. Before I discuss the event, here are some pictures from my time in Newcastle.

Newcastle, for those who have not been, is a Northern city (closer to Edinburgh than London) dominated by a number of bridges over the Tyne, a plethora of bars and clubs, an average football club and two very central universities (Newcastle and Northumbria). Incidentally, my trip coincided with freshers’ week so I spent most of Wednesday evening dodging drunk students dressed as gladiators, knights and Harry Potter.

Hello from the CEO

The user summit took place in the rather nice surroundings of the Crowne Plaza in Newcastle. After the customary coffee, pastries and meet and greet, the event kicked off with a video from the CEO Chris Caren, who discussed recent successes and outlined his vision for Turnitin. Future aims include increasing the number of submissions to one billion (currently at 636 million), tripling the number of unique users to reach 100 million learners and improve the ‘journey’ for students submitting drafts. For instance, students submitting formative drafts with have full online feedback and not just an originality report. Turnitin are also working on a ‘ghost writing’ build to recognise if someone else is writing your essay.

Recent successes for Turnitin include doubling the customer support staff and introducing the ‘wizard’ support feature. Moreover, the introduction of the wizard has seen a vast reduction in support queries (specifically related to forgetten passwords). With the increase in support staff, Turnitin hope to have an SLA of 24 hours by next year. However, with the goal of having 100 million learners and a billion submissions, I am little sceptical if they can realistically achieve this target. In terms of hosting, another success has been the move to Amazon Web Service (AWS). According to Caren, the move has helped improve up-time and greatly improved security and flexibility. Finally, the welcome ended with a note on how important the UK market is for Turnitin. He used the example of multiple markers being a huge requirement in UK and so far they have failed to deliver on this. The company hope to tailor the product more to the needs of regions once they role out Feedback Studio next year.

Customer-Centric Vision

Following the CEO was a presentation by Claudia Dowell from Turnitin on the ‘customer-centric vision’ of the company. After looking back at the successes over an 18 year period and comparsions against rivals (see image below), Claudia noted that communication between Turnitin and users is not great and needs to be improved. One of the methods suggested to improve communication is to build a user community. I suggested to the VP of Turnitin that they should look at Behind the Blackboard as a template for how it could be set out. It seems that there was a big demand from those who attended the summit for the development of a community.

Technology Keynote

Ron Park, CTO of Turnitin, began his presentation by noting that the company had over promised and under delivered in the past. He argued the key for the future success of Turnitin is to improve speed, power, flexibility, accessibility and security. To help reach these five goals, the company have made many improvements, including investing in a new $5 million Data Centre. Ron used the analogy of an iceberg to demonstrate some of the other big changes happening within the company (see image below).

Iceberg ahead! - Recent changes at Turnitin — Iceberg ahead! – Recent changes at Turnitin

Feedback Studio

One of the main reasons for attending this summit was the opportunity to view Feedback Studio in action. Mark Rickson, one of the chief designers of Feedback Studio, was on hand to demo the system and run through some of the main features.

One of the new features has been the development of a web crawler called ‘Walker’ (Turnitin trying to be funny with the name…). A web crawler is what Turnitin use to scan and index new and existing content from the web in the Turnitin database. The problem with the previous crawler was it did not go deep into web content and struggled with java script content. Furthermore, it previously could not crawl SSL secured pages. Walker on the other hand can crawl SSL pages and is also significantly quicker. For example, previously it would take 17 days to crawl through the whole of Wikipedia. The same process can now take place in 5 hours.

The main goal for the designers of Feedback Studio has been to make it easier to use (for both staff and students) than previous versions of Turnitin. In particular, they have put a lot of effort into re-jigging the interface when providing student feedback. In Turnitin Classic, you have different feedback options in every corner of the page. Feedback Studio on the other hand consolidates all the options into one tool bar at the side of the page. You can view this and other changes in the demo video below;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIKjBzJIe2g

Edinburgh University gave a short presentation discussing their findings on using Feedback Studio. Edinburgh have been involved in the beta testing and have been using the system for the last four months. To date, there have been 5952 submissions using Feedback Studio. User consultation has proved positive and despite having the option to revert back to Turnitin Classic, Edinburgh have found that users are sticking with Feedback Studio. In addition, 85/90% of their users use Feedback Studio with the Blackboard Learn integration. Rather positively, they haven’t reported any issues with this.

Nevertheless, despite the positivity surrounding Feedback Studio, Turnitin still have not addressed some key requirements that users would like to see in the new system. There still appears to be no delegated grading or option for double and blind marking. This seemed to be a concern for most users at the summit. On a positive note, they have recognised this is an important issue and are in the process of developing a solution to support multiple and blind marking. Turnitin are currently looking for beta testers for this. Information on this can be found here – https://guides.turnitin.com/01_Manuals_and_Guides/Feedback_Studio_Success_Kit/Multiple_Markers_(Beta). Realistically, it will probably be a couple of years before these features are included in Feedback Studio.

Feedback Studio – Launch Timeline

In August 2017, Feedback studio will become the default service, as Turnitin classic is fully deprecated. To help users with the transition to Feedback Studio, Turnitin have created a Success Kit (https://guides.turnitin.com/01_Manuals_and_Guides/Feedback_Studio_Success_Kit) which contains resources needed to get started with the new system. This includes a section on how to trial Feedback Studio with a subset of users and email templates to send to staff.

All in all, it was a useful conference to attend. Turnitin seem keen to keep their UK customers happy and they hope the introduction of the Feedback Studio and a potential user community will help them achieve this. However, it was also somewhat dissappointing that they have not addressed the issue of delegated, multiple or blind marking. There is clearly is a huge demand for these features so hopefully they will appear at some point in Feedback Studio. If they don’t, I’m sure any new community of users will have a lot to say on the matter.

Incorporating Virtual Reality (VR) into Online Courses

John Ramsay

15 July 2016

This is a short blog post on the potential of using virtual reality (VR) content in e-learning courses. I recently attended the Learning Technologies Summer Forum at Olympia in London. This was the second Learning Technologies event that I have attended this year, following the conference & exhibition that took place in January. Although I found the event slightly disappointing due to the lack of seminars, one area that stood out was the growing number of exhibitors demonstrating e-learning content through virtual reality headsets. Furthermore, the exhibitors from Kallidus managed to win over the crowd by giving away free Google Cardboard before their seminar entitled ‘Getting started with VR: myths, realities and practicalities’ which you can download from this page.

The key characteristic of VR is that the user can view 3D images that create a simulated environment. This immersive experience can allow a user to interact in a 3D world. The availability and quality of VR content has improved rapidly over the last couple of years and this is due in part to the mass (and cheap) production of Google Cardboard (https://vr.google.com/cardboard/) and a growing number of apps that it supports. By using Cardboard and a smartphone, you can now enter an immersive world that was previously only accessible via clunky and expensive headsets. So, how can VR be used effectively in online courses? During his presentation, Tim Drewitt from Kallidus suggested the following benefits;

Simulate dangerous or risky situations within a safe controlled environment
Offer accurate and realistic simulations to solve real-world problems
Offer exploration of virtual scenarios as experience for real world scenarios
See the world through someone else’s eyes
Use visualisation to simplify complex concepts and theories
Reduce the cognitive load and improve retention and recall
Allow learning objectives to be measured through observation
Cater for large numbers of learners in different locations
Demonstrate learning innovation and a “wow” factor

In terms of applying VR to courses, you could find it really beneficial if creating content related to the following areas.

Dangerous Environment

VR could revolutionise online safety courses, particularly fire training. It is not advisable or practical to create a real fire for training purposes (obviously). Using a VR fire simulation would provide a visual imprint that you can’t really get from face to face training or from a picture embedded into an e-learning module. Furthermore, if you take a risk in the VR simulation, you will probably have a greater recognition of the consequences of your action than you would get from taking a fire safety quiz. G4S have created the following trailer for their Health & Safety training VR to give you an idea of what it could potentially look like.

Sense of Presence

VR could also be great tool for practising public speaking. For example, you could create an interview simulation for an online recruitment course. Alternatively, you could create a VR lecture theatre allowing the user to experience public speaking without the fear of having to do so in a real-life situation. Click on the example created by VRARlab below to get an idea of how this could look.

Induction/Tour

Users could potentially access a VR simulation that gives them access to a tour or induction. This could be particularly beneficial to new starters (staff and students) to help them get a sense of their environment before they arrive. In addition, it could also potentially benefit overseas students who may find it difficult to attend open days for logistical reasons. Kallidus have produced the following example of a VR tour of Cannon Street station.

https://youtu.be/q6XNsXXW_xQ

Nonetheless, despite the potential benefits of using VR in online courses, there are a number of challenges that need to be considered. Although you can purchase Google Cardboard for around £10, it could be costly (in terms of both money and time) creating a VR simulation. A great deal of work would need to go into the planning stage and storyboards would need to be used. The Kallidus presentation also highlighted other potential barriers;

Lack of knowledge of how to use VR
Lack of cultural appetite, or scepticism from leaders
Lack of suppliers/designers working in this area
Possibility of motion sickness/disorientation for viewer
How do you measure effectiveness

Overall, it is still too early to say if using VR in online courses is the next big thing or a ‘flash in the pan’. There are many potential benefits for adopting and embracing VR, particularly if you are trying to replicate a dangerous environment or situation. However, creating a VR simulation for an online course could be costly and time consuming. It will be interesting to see how VR continues to develop over the next couple of years.

Blackboard Learning & Teaching Conference 2016 Review

John Ramsay

21 April 2016

Groningen in the Netherlands recently hosted the 2016 Blackboard EMEA conference. The three day conference was the biggest that Blackboard have held in Europe and featured over 420 delegates from 19 different countries. Before discussing the conference, I must say that Groningen was a great location to hold the event. It is a small picturesque town dominated by University of Groningen and surrounded by canals and ‘car free’ streets full of cyclists. Furthermore, the town also hosted the fantastic ‘David Bowie Is’ exhibition and Blackboard delegates were given free access to this after hours.

Groningen at night — Nosferatu making an appearance in Groningen

Bowie exhibition — Starman outfit from the ‘David Bowie Is’ exhibition

University of Groningen – one or two bikes in the foreground.

I’ll now focus on some of the key events from the conference.

Blackboard Learn 9.1 Roadmap

So what do Blackboard have in store for the year ahead and beyond? Would we finally be getting a glimpse of Ultra? Unfortunately no. There was actually very little talk of Ultra at the conference. The roadmap, which you can view below, focused entirely on Learn 9.1 and mobile app developments.

Firstly, in development and coming in summer 2016, is a brand new modern theme for Learn 9.1. This new theme is apparently inspired by the Ultra experience. Unfortunately we didn’t get to see this though. Also in development is a more responsive optimization for 9.1. This is inspired by the Blackboard student app and should lead to improved navigation on different devices. From a technical viewpoint, Blackboard have made a few infrastructure improvements in the Q2 2016 release. These changes include moving from Java 7 to Java 8 JDK and updating SQL 2012 to SQL 2014.

In the design stage, the team are working on improvements to the delegated and anonymous marking feature in 9.1. One of the problems Blackboard have recognised is that if a tutor has to re-upload an anonymous assignment for a student (if they have permission to do so) then how do you find the original upload if the name is anonymised? Blackboard have built in a pull-down menu of names so you can find the student and add the assignment that way. In addition, they have also created reminders that will be emailed to anyone who has not submitted an assignment.

One feature that is available now and that Blackboard were particularly proud to display, is the enhanced cloud profile feature (see image below). This profile supports student from undergraduate studies to employment and documents grades, work experience and achievements. The aim of his feature is to improve employability of graduates. Roughly 2 million students from 1000 institutions are using this feature. Students can determine the openness of their profile and they can also link it to their CVs or LinkedIn sites.

Enhanced cloud profile

Other developments include improvements to the Blackboard Student app. This includes making the app more responsive when ‘stacking’ content. In other words, if you make the page smaller or larger the content should move correctly to the centre of the screen and not stack to the side as it has done occasionally in the past. Tests and assignments have also been restructured for mobile devices so that they render correctly. Unfortunately, Blackboard have not made any improvements to the look and feel of discussion boards, blogs or wikis in the app. It is now available in more than 100 countries, in 26 supported languages and available on iOS, Android and Windows phones and tablets. In addition to the student app, Blackboard are also in the process of developing an instructor app. The aim is to release this on iOS and Android later this year. Unfortunately for Windows device users, there is no roadmap at the moment.

So that covers the plans for the upcoming year. I will add the full roadmap presentation to this blog once it has been released by Blackboard.

Blackboard Learn Search Engine

One feature that many users feel Blackboard is lacking is an adequate search engine. In this day and age when we can easily search the internet, smartphones, computers for relevant information so why is it difficult for users to do so in Blackboard? The University of Leuven’s solution to this problem was to build their own search engine using the open sourced Elasticsearch.

Is this something that Imperial could potentially introduce/create? Well firstly, this was a huge project involving a large number of people (system admins, Java developers and project managers) that took roughly 500 ‘man’ days to create. This is a lot of time and resources to dedicate to a function that you can ultimately live without. Other questions relate to how good the search engine actually is. For example, it doesn’t recognise adaptive release and you cannot search for anything that is set to ‘hidden’. Furthermore, search relevance does not work and results appear in Elasticsearch order. Finally, only content items are searchable so if you are looking for announcements, blogs, discussion posts etc it will not recognise them. Since this presentation, it transpires that University of Brighton have created their own search engine with a limited budget. Anne Cross from Blackboard was hoping to get them to demo this at the next Blackboard User Group meeting in April 2016.

Building Institutional Readiness for Learning Analytics

Another interesting session focused on analytics and in particular, encouraging institutions to go from a general view that learner data ‘might’ be important, to understand how data can be used to address particular issues. For example, if a student is on course for a C grade, what is the background to why this has happened? The presenters of this session argue that Blackboard is not, in its current form, adequate for producing analytics. JISC are working with Blackboard to produce a new learning analytics platform (Jisc Learning Analytics Discovery Service) that they hope will ultimately ‘improve the learner journey’. One of the key features of this is to produce a variety of reports. For example, one report can show students how they are doing in comparison with the rest of their course. This might lead to a sense of competition between students and improve motivation. Another report can improve technology adoption. For example, you can look at each department at an institution and work out what features in Blackboard that they are utilising. This could potentially influence professional development with more focus being placed on tools not being used. These are just two examples of reports you can create using learning analytics. The main thoughts coming from this session include, what kind of stats/information do staff want? How many different types of reports can you produce that will satisfy all departments? Finally, will Ultra (when it arrives) have improved learning analytics built in?

You can read more about the JISC learning analytics project here.

How do you Encourage Active Learning?

The closing keynote speech by Professor Neil Morris from Leeds University was an interesting look into Leeds efforts in adopting technology to enhance learning. It was a good opportunity to compare Leeds with Imperial in this area. Leeds developed their digital strategy partly based on the need to modernise, meeting student expectations and recognising the Teacher Excellence Framework.

Digital strategy — Leeds Digital Strategy

One of the first changes was to introduce lecture capture using Panopto. Leeds now have 250 Panopto enabled classrooms and have had roughly 2 million views since introducing lecture capture. 25,000 out of 30,000 students have logged in and accessed recordings and 73% of lectures have been recorded. Leeds also offers an opt out policy for any staff who do not want their recordings made available. The increased use of Panopto at Leeds has had an impact on academics adopting a flipped classroom approach to teaching and learning. For example, staff are now editing their lecture recordings into short manageable videos.

In addition to lecture capture, Leeds are radially transforming all their lecture spaces. The aim is to remove all blackboards and whiteboards from rooms and replace them with IWBs, visualisers and projectors. Below is an image of how they plan to make rooms more interactive. Each desk will have a built in tablet and microphone for asking questions.

Although the plans look and sound great, I could imagine that there would be a lot of complexities and challenges, particularly maintaining and updating the AV in these rooms.

In addition to transforming the physical classroom, Leeds have been developing the virtual classroom using Blackboard Collaborate. The feedback they have received is that students, particularly those who are not as confident speaking in a physical classroom environment, are more involved in online discussions and are more engaged. Leeds have also been keen to harness mobile technologies and have developed an app. The app allows attendance monitoring, polling which can be used during lectures/seminars and module evaluation.

So what does the future for Leeds hold? They are continuing to work on MOOCs and developing new credit bearing online courses. The idea is that the user builds up credits at their own pace until they have enough for a qualification. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

So that is a brief snapshot of the 2016 Blackboard conference. I will add the relevant slides and videos from the conference once they have been released.

Learning Technologies 2016: Authoring Tools Review 4/2/16

John Ramsay

24 February 2016

Digital Education

by John Ramsay

On Thursday 4^th February, I attended the Learning Technologies event at Olympia in London. Learning Technologies is a showcase for organisations to demonstrate the latest advances in workplace learning and learning technology. With over 140 free seminars over two days, I decided to focus my attention on the latest e-learning authoring tools to see if they offered a viable alternative to established products such as Adobe Captivate and Articulate Storyline.

The three main seminars that I attended were;

WMB: E-Learning is Dead!
eLB: Become an E-Learning Rockstar
Appitierre Ltd: Enabling Everyone to Create Multi-device E-Learning Content

You can find a short summary of each presentations below.

E-Learning is Dead! WMB Presentation

This was a bit of a misleading presentation title from the company e-Learning WMB. Nevertheless, this somewhat pessimistic title certainly helped to draw a large audience to the seminar. What the company were suggesting, is that the world of e-learning is moving away from paradigms of old and much of the lexicon used today should be revised. In other words, technology has moved on since the term e-learning was first defined/used and therefore this term should be re-evaluated.

WMB presentation at Learning Technologies 2016

So what does the company e-Learning WMB offer? The company have created a cloud based authoring tools solution (Jackdaw Cloud), bespoke ‘off the shelf’ e-learning courses and an open source Learning Management System (Open Elms). On first impressions, the Jackdaw Cloud authoring system looks like it can create some nice looking interactive content. You can click on the links below to view some examples of courses built with Jackdaw;

The Jackdaw Cloud tool has a few advantages over other competitors, such as there are no software downloads or licence restrictions. Therefore, anyone in an organisation (who has the correct permissions) can create courses or edit existing ones. With licences for software such as Articulate restricted to one licence per user, this more open approach to creating content could result in more collaborative work. However, a potential negative of this approach is that if a whole department can edit content then you might get a ‘mishmash’ of ideas and content produced. Furthermore, how would you stop somebody editing or updating your content without the original creators permission? This was not clear in the presentation.

Jackdaw Cloud uses Adobe Flash to create content. WMB emphasised that this can be exported to HTML5 at any time, which is crucial due to the massive usage of mobile devices that do not use flash. Content can supposedly be exported easily to a flash file SWF, HTML5 or iPhone or android app. Overall, WMB gave a good pitch for their products and the Jackdaw Cloud tool created content that looked striking and engaging. However, I do believe that this tool would probably be more suited to a developer creating ‘CPD’ type training courses.

Become an E-Learning Rockstar: E-Learning that is Engaging, Inspiring and Interactive

This was a presentation by the American company eLearning Brothers (eLB) who specialise in producing eLearning templates and designing custom e-Learning courses. The company have produced around 20,000 e-Learning templates and assets (terminology for games, quizzes, interactions, cut out people, stock images etc) that can be opened and edited using a number of authoring tools software including Articulate Storyline, Captivate and Lectora. The company believe that their templates can help you create professional looking content quickly whilst at the same time, increase software developing skills.

eLB presentation at Learning Technologies. Pictured are some the products that eLB’s templates are compatible with.

Similar to the ‘E-learning is Dead’ presentation, eLB emphasised that an advantage of their product is that it can elevate an entire team to create excellent content. In other words, the templates are so easy use that you no longer need to rely on one ‘expert’ in a team to create good looking content. You can view some of the more popular templates via the link below.

http://elearningbrothers.com/25-popular-elearning-templates-2015/

Although I liked the look of the templates that were demonstrated, I have to question if it is worth the cost. A one year full ‘master’ membership (per designer) costs $1399. Therefore, If you are using Articulate Storyline, is it worth the additional cost to pay for the eLB templates when you already have a number of these that come free when you purchase Articulate Storyline? Furthermore, websites such as E-learning Heroes https://community.articulate.com/downloads provide a number of downloadable templates that are also free to use.

Enabling Everyone to Create Multi-device eLearning Content

The final presentation (and the first that I was able to get a seat for) focused on the Evolve authoring tool created by Appitierre Ltd. The company have tried to create a low cost, easy to use authoring tool that outputs HTML5 and works effectively on desktops, tablets and mobiles. Click here for some further information about the Evolve product.

Appitierre use what they call ‘interactions’ when creating course content. For instance, Presentation Interactions would cover interactive video content, sliders and flip cards in a course. Question interactions cover a range of different question types, including drag and drop and multiple choice. Some of the key features include being able to easily update the look and feel of your courses. The ‘Theme Editor’ function seems straight forward to use and you are able to tailor all the ‘interactions’ in your courses. They have also made branding content straightforward for users that need to use specific logos and colours in their courses.

Another key feature Appitierre were keen to demonstrate was the use of gamification features in Evolve. Gamification is the concept of applying gaming techniques to a task and the company feel that this can encourage learners to fully interact and engage with e-learning content. By adding ‘achievements’, learners can gain points, collect stars, earn badges and lose lives. They believe this function will encourage competition for each learner. Although it is an interesting development, I believe that there are a number of potential problems with introducing gamification to e-learning courses. For example, if it is a poorly designed course then it could potentially lead to disengagement and confusion for the user. It also has the potential to distract the user from learning objectives.

Although Evolve has some nice features, I felt that the content did not look as striking as what WMB and eLB had produced. However, it did seem more competitively priced than the other products (£25 a month per user or £99 a month for a team of 5 users).

In conclusion, there seemed to be a running theme with all the authoring tool presentations. Each presentation emphasised that you do not need to be an e-learning developer wiz to use their products effectively. They also encouraged the need for sharing the usage of these authoring tools within a team instead of them being the sole responsibility of a single user. It is argued that this can potentially elevate an entire team and offer the opportunity for larger groups to learn new skills. Nevertheless, despite the pitches from the three companies, I still feel there are better authoring tool alternatives available such as Adobe Captivate 9 and Articulate Storyline. These are the two that would be top of my list when creating new e-learning content.

London Blackboard User Group Meeting Review – 31/07/15

John Ramsay

10 August 2015

Review by John Ramsay.

I recently attended the summer 2015 London BUG meeting at Regent’s University. The theme for the event was ‘Enhancing Blackboard with Plugins and Building Blocks’ and below are some of the key points that emerged from the meeting;

BbStudent app – coming soon
Blackboard Collaborate – Ultra Roadmap released
Turnitin: Next – new look for Turnitin
Bb roadshows in November 2015
2015 Bb World slides- now available

I will now look at some of the key points from BUG in more detail.

Blackboard World and Ultra Updates

Ashley Wright from Blackboard started his presentation by speaking briefly about the recent BbWorld conference from Washington DC. Some of the key sessions and highlights from the event are now available from this link – http://www.bbworldlive.com/all/. Included in the link is the latest Bb advertising campaign for their New Learning Experience which you can view below.

The next Bb World will be taking place in Las Vegas in July 2016. The next Bb roadshow will take place on the week commencing 16th November in either Dublin, Edinburgh, Amsterdam or Birmingham. The definitive location will hopefully be decided in the next few weeks.

Ashley went on to discuss some of the exciting updates coming soon to Blackboard. You can view some of the selected highlights from the Blackboard Learn Ultra Experience roadmap below.

Available Now	Planned: In Development	Planned: In Design
Announcements	Tests	New Tabs & Modules
Notifications	Learning Outcomes	Audio and Video
Course Content	Group Management	Enhanced Profiles
OneDrive Intergration	Rich Page Editing	SafeAssign Integration
Calender	Rubrics
Discussions	Integration Framework
Messages	Local and Language Selection
Assignments
Grades

One key feature that stood out in the presentation is that instructors can choose between creating new courses in either the original or Ultra Course Experience format. This could potentially lead to issues of confusion for staff and students if they are switching between potentially radically different course styles.

Other key areas the Bb team are currently working on include;

A new video tool that can be accessible in China.
Grade journey to help institutions manage an efficient exchange of grades between Bb Learn and student information systems (click here to access a webinar on this).
A student App that is currently in Beta (the Mobile roadmap and a screenshot for this app can be viewed below – click on the images to make them full size).

There is still no release date for the Bb Student app in the UK. Jon Kolko, who is the VP of Design at Blackboard, has written an interesting blog that highlights some of the key developments and features in the new app. Click on the link to view it – http://blog.blackboard.com/bb-student-a-mobile-app-for-learners-designed-from-the-ground-up/?lang=uki.

Ashley also gave an update on the new look Bb Collaborate. Although this is not currently used at Imperial, it might be worth looking into in the future. The whole product has been redesigned with the aim of making collaboration between students and instructors simpler. One of the key developments is that the tool uses webRTC technology, meaning there is no longer need to download plugins such as Java. Integration with Learn 9.1 and the Student App is still in Beta at the moment. Other planned developments include integrating mp4 recordings, introducing polls, breakout chatrooms and at some point in the future, uploading movie files. You can view a Bb Collaborate demonstration video below.

Overall, the changes to Blackboard do sound and look impressive. The tools look slick and the interface appears more modern than any previous versions of a Bb product. Not having to download plugins for these features will be a huge benefit (and relief) to users. The one area that I am slightly skeptical about is the option to create either new courses with the ‘Ultra’ look or the original look. This could cause confusion for users, especially if they have a mix of courses using both styles.

Turnitin Integrations with Blackboard

Gary Finnigan from Turnitin spoke at length about the ‘Turnitin: Next’ project. Once completed, ‘Turnitin: Next’ will enhance the user experience thought innovative new features and a simpler, clearer user interface. Although there is no definitive timeframe, they hope to have it rolled out in the next 12 to 24 months. This is a massive project for Turnitin and Gary kept reiterating that they wanted to ‘get it right’ before it is rolled out to the masses. The Bb plugin will replace both Basic and Direct (V1 and V2.5). Furthermore, all the features of ‘Turnitin: Next’ will be available through the plugin.

A ‘Turnitin: Next’ demo video was shown to the BUG group and the new layout did look slicker than previous versions. Unfortunately the video is not available online at the moment. A couple of (bad quality) photos of the student and staff grading platform can be viewed below (click on the images to make them full size).

Instructor view - Turnitin: Next — Instructor view – Turnitin: Next

Student view - Turnitin: Next — Student view – Turnitin: Next

Apart from a significantly different look and feel from previous versions of Turnitin, another key change is that ‘Turnitin: Next’ will no longer have the revision assignment option. This will be replaced with a new multi-part assignment feature. Another area that seems to have been slightly ignored is analytics. However, Gary did assure the audience this is an area Turnitin want to look into in the future. One key feature of the new system is its responsiveness to different devices. For example, it will recognise what device type you are logging into and adapt the screen to reflect that device. ‘Turnitin: Next’ will also be able to evaluate any submitted work including coding and music.

Using the ‘Tweaks’ Building Block

Out of the ‘show and tell’ presentations, the most interesting was the demonstration of the ‘Tweaks’ building block by Chris Boon from City College Norwich. In the simplest terms, Tweaks will allow you to alter the Bb course interface by adding your own templates and customising the course design. For example, you can add your own banners to a course, change icons to your own graphics, add quizzes and choose colour sets for different sections. You can view a full list of Tweaks features (including some demo videos) via this link – http://tweaks.github.io/Tweaks/description.html. Although I was impressed with the course customization using the ‘Tweaks’ building block, with the impending changes to Bb Ultra, it has to be questioned whether its main features will be redundant in the new version of Blackboard.

That concludes my blog from BUG. It will be interesting to see how all the Blackboard and Turnitin developments turn out over the next year. I hope to add links to all the presentations on this page soon.

Thanks for reading!