For most, January might be a month of quiet consolation, with that weary post-Christmas feeling hanging heavy…
But not for the nation’s E-learning teams however: each coming January means the Durham Blackboard Users Conference!
The focus for the 19th Durham Blackboard User conference was “Fail, Fad or Future”, asking users of Blackboard to be honest with their experiences with Blackboard, acknowledging that some ideas will fail – some are just a passing fad – but some will be integral to the future of how we support and use e-learning systems.

The conference was opened by Rosie Jones, the Director of Library Services at the Open University. In her invigorating talk she placed an emphasis on play, a matter that was obviously close to her heart, as within five minutes we were all busy drawing pig diagrams(!?). She explained that we should all be allowed the freedom to fail, as this is where you learn the best experiences and encourages creativity & innovation. She explained that a major culture shift needed to take place with regards to how look at the world of e-learning and using systems in pioneering ways to continually adapt to a changing technology environment and to also meets the needs and desires of the students and staff.

Below are some of my highlights of the conference and for each one, we were asked to rate them as Fail, Fad or Future. In my opinion, they all made the Future category, but that isn’t to say that ones that didn’t were Fails!

 

“MBA in Your Pocket” – Mobile social learning for work-based learners

John Brindle – University of Liverpool

Liverpool described how in the future they are looking to adopt a “mobile first” learning approach. They have recently introduced their “mobile-first platform” (Blackboard Ultra – SaaS), with the aim of creating a blended learning module for post-experience learners and garnering 100% online engagement. They used the reasoning that the uptake should be high and overall successful as users don’t need an incentive to go on phone. This bore out specifically in the increased use of the Discussion Forums via Mobile phone.
John made a strong case for mobile-first learning as a go-to tool for busy work-based students. He noted that it was important to consider pedagogical decisions carefully to ensure a smooth transition of the new technology on a course that was previously face-to-face only and that training for Academics to interact with Blackboard more is essential for an endeavour such as this.

This might seam like a Fad but it is definitely the FUTURE!

 

It’s All About the Base (Navigation) -Northumbria University’s Move to Blackboard Ultra

Kristen McCartney-Bulmer, Lee Hall & Harriet Walshaw -Northumbria University

Northumbria shared some of their experiences from their recent move to Blackboard Ultra. The brave souls have taken the plunge, with the battle cry “Change is the only constant these days” and made the switch to Ultra. They explained that the scale and scope of change required to move to a new VLE means that getting it right at the beginning avoids difficulty further down the road. Rolling out a new VLE, especially one that nobody else is using has an appeal but also can be a scary prospect! As with any large scale change, managing expectation, training, and communication is key to successful to implementation and adoption of the service by staff and students.

Whilst Durham were more than happy to point out the Fails they encountered, overall they believe that Ultra is the FUTURE!

 

An Allied comparison of Ally

Claire Gardener (Derby), Kristen McCartney-Bulmer (Northumbria), Maria Papaefthimiou (Reading) & Susi Peacock (Queen Margaret)

A master-class in presenting here – four “Allied” universities discussed their their plans for implementing the much talked about Blackboard Ally. Over the past year many universities have started to implement Blackboard Ally: a tool that looks at the content in a course and considers the accessibility of that content. Engaging with the Ally European User Group has shown that there are many pathways to implementation and this collaborative presentation from Universities who have all recently implemented Ally shared their approaches, challenges, opportunities and goals.

As I cannot replicate the entire presentation here I would recommend anyone who is looking down the BB Ally route to get in touch with the individuals named above concerning subject ranging from creating a business case; BB Ally implementation strategy; communication, support and training methods; engaging and acting upon user feedback and how to take the project forward in the future.

This feature makes content better for the end user, so no doubt its the FUTURE!

 

The future starts today, not tomorrow

Neil Cocklin –Aston University

Neil Cocklin gave an engaging talk in which he looked at the issue behind Universities spending heavily on technology but investing significantly less on training and support. The education sector is slowly running the risk of running into a lack of digitally skilled workers in the near future.
As a reaction to this, the Technology Enhanced Learning team at Aston University, embarked on a series of initiatives to provide deeper, broader and more flexible teaching and learning support for their digital learning platforms.

Neil guided us through formal and informal approaches, exploring various techniques such as guided and self service, online and face to face. His team tried their hardest to adopt a multifaceted approach that was designed to fill in the gaps, re-invigorate and demonstrate the commitment of the academics and support staff.

His presentation was very insightful, especially from a support perspective, and explored a range of approaches that Aston has developed for supporting staff in technology enhanced learning development. Particular emphasis was placed on the drop-in sessions that were arranged for staff.

Hopefully elements of this are already in place, but if not then support and training should be something to look to in the FUTURE!

 

Thanks to Durham for an excellent user group (and of course for the three course gala dinner in Durham castle) and hope to see you again next year.

Read 19th Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference 2019 in full

This spring, the E-learning Team let Lee and Dev jet off to sunny Manchester to attend the TFL Europe 2018 Blackboard Conference.

Hosted at the prestigious Manchester University, the conference kicked off with the 2 day DevCon on Monday 9^th April with the 3 day event starting on the Tuesday. Over the  the five days, a busy schedule of talks, workshops and events was arranged for the avid attendees from across the globe.

The city of Manchester itself was a joy to visit and a great place to host the conference. Manchester University was a short walk from the city centre and the conference was well facilitated thanks to TLC and the use of the extremely useful AttendeeHub App, which let you organise your schedule really easily.

In addition to the conference, Imperial’s representatives  also intended to visit as many Manchester pubs as possible that were listed in the Good Beer Guide and naturally sample the products that they had to offer. Cheers!

Welcome to DevCon

First up DevCon, the morning introduction discussed the development of the Developer Portal for Blackboard and the progress that it has made with the interest accumulating.

In 2017 there have been 1323 new developers registered for the developer community, of a grand total of 2133.

55 Production groups have delivered 62 application, 50% are in Education, 26% in Businesses and 24% in Open Innovation Initiative.

In 2017, the community was receiving requests for up to 10 new developers registering a day.

The Blackboard REST and LTI Developer Amazon Machine Image (“AMI”) is an image of a Blackboard Learn server available in the Amazon Marketplace.

Allowing users to create a standalone copy of Blackboard, to build applications using REST APIs/LTI’s to integrate with different versions of their standalone BB Learn.

REST+LTI 101

It was only a week or two ago that I was registered to the Developer Portal to gain access to REST API, this session explores the Blackboard Developer Portal in more depth, giving a brief overview of the REST API integrations that can be used. Information on how to register users, manage applications, managing groups and an understanding Rate Limits is discussed.

This session on the REST API offers the opportunity to discover how to make requests to obtain a range of information. Eg. Course/user/roles/content all readily available. This could be used to create a web application offering a solution to some of the requests we receive via ServiceNow. An option would be to create an application that would allow users to create thier own courses.

LTI Advantage

As the Building Blocks have been the primary integration framework for learn, they are not best suited for SaaS and Ultra. SOAP Web Services have provided a limited set of integration points for Learn Hosted environments or SaaS and are not suitable for Ultra.

In 2016 Blackboard Learn moved to REST APi’s for integrating with all products, Learn Collaborate etc. This has been beneficial when working with IMS LTI specification, which when used in conjunction with REST API provides a deeper experience than LTI alone

Integration Migration

There are 3 integration frameworks for Blackboard, SaaS, Ultra and Learn. These can be delivered in a Self-Hosted environment or a Managed-Hosted environment.

For optimal integration of Building Blocks, SOAP Web Services and REST API all must be considered.

• Building Blocks : no longer supported on Ultra / Saas
• Web Services SOAP no longer supported on
• REST API : Suitable for both delivery models and UX

REST+LTI In-Depth

Building Blocks are problematic, as they require a server restart when installing or updating, which can impact system downtime. They require a controlled technique for improving the existing code to run on Saas and are not client installable on Sass, they also require Java programming expertise and are not compatible with Ultra.

SOAP is dead to Blackboard, they currently present performance issues in large scale applications and often suffer from ‘session sickness’. SOAP is not compatible with Ultra and at some time later this year will start to be decommissioned.

REST is now and the future…
REST is the integration model for all BB products from now on, applications run externally to LEARN. The application may be developed in any language supporting HTTPS (PHP, NodeJS, Java, JavaScript), using the same system resources as HTTPS requests via the browser and it is compatible across all Learn platforms.

LTI plus REST enables access to data not supported by LTI, it enables a deeper integration without the need for supporting SSO in your application and is compatible across all Learn platforms and user experiences.

How to Work Best with Blackboard Support

Presented by Andy Hulme.

Andy informed the group what the best steps to take are, when dealing with a Blackboard issue. He provides an example and takes us through each step that is necessary to resolve the issue quickly.

Logging Support Tickets

Example 1. We have an error in assignments. Please access and fix

Do not just provide user admin and password.

Timeline the problem and provide threaddumps while the problem is occurring if possible.

Take SQL Performance reports

Install new relic

Try and replicate the erorr so we can instruct BB support

Clear and easy to follow steps with a screen capture where possible

• include the setup as well as the action that causes an error or question
• include the full stack trace from the error
• check the bb-servies.log or stdout-log file
• check the app server you are using with /webapps/portal/healthCheck

Functioning as Designed

If support says a function is (Function as Design) FAD and you disagree.

Re-open the case

Escalate via the support channels

Help us understand this more so we can push for this is to be redesigned

Got the ideas exchange and post your view. Tag Andy within the ticket, or email him directly.

Collaborate API

Grade Traffic Controller is a middleware tool that sits between the Student Record System and Blackboard Learn.

Efficiency Gains	Improve Quality	Academic Staff
Reduced admin workload	Better Reporting	Powerful workflow
Duplication of effort	Marks handled securely	Improve Quality
Time Saving	Reduced error rate	Clarity of marking
	Secure transfer of grades	Work Backed up

 

Developer Roadmap

To end the DevCon 2018, Mark O’Neil (Senior Product Manager) highlights the API and future enhancements. As we start to create more self- service applications at Imperial College London, it has an interesting end to the conference.

2018 (by the end of the year)	2019
Content Download	User Calendar
Memberships with optional User Data	Course Copy with Ignore Membership option
Course Calendar	Observer Management
Original Assignments and Attempts	Discussions
Rubrics	Search Object Modified
Grade Weight Formulas	Batch Requests
Course announcements	Hierarchy/Activity Stream/Notifications/Logs
Institution Calendar	Localization and accessibility data

SaaS

Much of the conference was understandably dedicated to SaaS, with a lot of Blackboard customers considering moving over to the SaaS service in the future. SaaS offers Blackboard Learn delivered via the cloud, with the option to enable the new features that Blackboard Ultra boasts, as well as many improvements to maintenance, updates and service.

With SaaS, Ultra can be used for either navigation (with courses staying as they are in BB Learn) or changing completely and using Ultra for both navigation and courses. The Activity Stream is a major selling point and does indeed look impressive:

The system hasn’t been without its teething problems however, with the functionality of the building blocks quoted as being “not quite there yet”. We shall watch this space.

 

Gamification

Malcolm Murray from Durham University gave an excellent and insightful presentation on using Gamification in Blackboard.

He presented many innovative ideas that he had incorporated into his courses, including:

• Padlocks – Used to tease users to progress through the course and “un-lock” content
• Progress bars – Users can gauge how far they are into the course and how long completion will take
• Scoreboard – Display grades and attainments in the course visibly so that users can reflect on their achievements

The presentation went on to highlight the benefits of individual targeting, which helps with retention. Techniques included mentioning them by name and awarding badges. These helped to show a clear representation of how the user is progressing in the course.

More information can be found here: Tinyurl.com/bbtlcgamification

How do students use BB

Imperial’s very own star Learning Technologist, Katie Stripe, gave an excellent presentation about measuring engagement with students at the National Heart and Lung Institute.

The key topics she discussed included:

• How the different approaches to building content have an impact on student outcome and that these are varied as people learn in different ways.
• That students know what they want in terms of course design but they do not know what is good for them. Students will take the path of least resistance.
• Course creators should explain their decisions around why the course is structured in a specific way, to the student taking the course. The use of signposting and transparency is important.

And finally:

• That students are entitled to the best content! Raising the concept that “If you put garbage in – you get garbage out!”

Best Pub Award

Of the pubs visited, the most highly recommend is the City Arms with The Briton’s Protection coming a close second. Both are lively pubs with well-kept beer. The City Arms served an excellent pint of mild, which turned out to be the perfect aperitif to pie, chips and gravy.

In The Briton’s Protection, Lee met a man whose aim was to visit every Weatherspoons pub in existence. He was fairly drunk and quite close to completion of his epic task.

Read Blackboard Teaching & Learning Conference 2018 in full

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.

Read Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference 2018 in full

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.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

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.

 

 

Read Blackboard Learning & Teaching Conference 2016 Review in full

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).

 

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!

Read London Blackboard User Group Meeting Review – 31/07/15 in full