Blog posts

Incorporating Virtual Reality (VR) into Online Courses

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

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

 

Groningen
Busy street

 

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

 

University of Groningen
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.

Roadmap
Blackboard Learn Roadmap

 

Mobile Roadmap
Blackboard Mobile Roadmap

 

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
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.

Leeds
Leeds learning spaces

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

by John Ramsay

Learning Technologies Logo
(c) Learning Technolgies

On Thursday 4th 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
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.
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.

 

Panopto Conference 2015: The future of video for learning – 21/10/15

Amidst a slew of Back to the Future quotes, images and analogies the Panopto 2015 conference looked to focus on “The future of video for learning

If it did manage to pass you by 21st October 2015 was the day Marty and the Doc travelled to in Back to the Future II… See Wikipedia for more details if you are interested!

1(Photo: Universal Pictures)

The conference this year was held at the America Square Conference Centre, an interesting feature of the conference centre is that it is built over part of the original London Wall (one of the largest construction projects carried out in Roman Britain) and this has been exposed and displayed in the refreshment area.

2(Photo https://twitter.com/adamrgb/status/656821987977928704)

The morning started with an introduction from Panopto’s Head of Marketing Rebecca Avery. Welcoming the new and prospective customers, last year customers from 60 EMEA institutions attended, this year there were attendees from over 90 institutions. The hashtag #panopto15 was requested to be included in all tweets about the day.

The first talk of the day came from Panopto Global’s Managing Director Tom Davy. His theme was Education then and now – and what’s to come.

Tom focused on current trends for a return to physical objects where a digital emergence had threatened to replace that object. The primary example was a return to buying physical books rather than e-readers and the popularity of book reviews by vloggers. (PS if you are going to name check a youtube vlogger, please check how they pronounce their handle, there will be fewer confused people in the audience!)

While trends amongst our incoming digital natives are quite often the hot topic of conversation I found myself questioning the quality and appropriateness of the examples given in this talk. While book sales may be up on past years and e-reader sales are down on previous years, is that really a sign of a return to using physical books, or have e-readers reached market saturation? The same report this information came from (by Waterstones) also suggests sales of physical books are higher due to a higher sales revenue, not really a fair comparison given many eBooks sell for significantly less than their physical counterparts.

While I agree that we are seeing a renaissance of quality physical items I would happily put the topic up for further debate as to the cause and effect of the digital/physical divide.

Tom’s talk was followed by the Keynote given by Graham Brown-Martin. (Author of “Learning {Re} imagined”) While largely a plug for his book Graham did cover a similar theme to Tom of “has the death of physical been exaggerated” (although I would like to have countered most of the arguments made with “is technology just not immersive enough yet”) also some interesting challenges faced by the Higher Education sector today. With video interviews with some forward thinking voices from within the educational community, Graham poised the question of what universities now offer when MOOC’s and Open Learning Materials give a similar education away for free. How can universities adapt to stay valid in that kind of environment? What will set a university education apart from other types of education on offer when having a degree is no longer a guarantee of a job?

3(Photo www.grahambrownmartin.com)

The fourth talk of the morning came from Simon Eder from Voxburner. Panopto had commissioned Voxburner to survey students on their views on learning, technology and video… Unsurprisingly while the results were still fresh off the presses and compilation had not yet finished, the initial results showed that students love lecture capture.

This was followed by the first of the panel sessions; students. Panopto have gathered a student panel in previous years and it has often yielded unsurprising revelations of how much students appreciate being able to revise and play back lectures in their own time and at their own pace to really help re-enforce the learning. Interesting threads that did appear through this year’s panel was that there was an increase in using video submission as a means of assessment, an appreciation of flipped or “bite sized” videos from tutors that they could use for revision and video guidance from tutors for getting started on assignments etc.

After a short break we returned to the Staff panel. The staff panel covered common concerns of academics being recorded, fears of student’s not attending lectures and “Box Set” watching the series of lectures at the end of the course. Interestingly that particular point had been covered in the student panel and the students felt that they did get more from physically attending the lecture and having that engagement with the lecturer. Lecture capture being used for mainly for revision or as a much appreciated catch up if something had prevented them from attending the lecture.

Eric Burns (Panopto CEO) completed the morning talks with an annual rendition of Moore’s law and how the falling cost of technology was making lecture capture almost free…. Billing Panopto’s vision of the future to be aiding institutions in making a “living library of institutional content” akin to the great libraries of centuries past. He highlighted that lecture capture is moving from the stage of “delight” of students getting a new technology to an “expected” mainstream part of their HE education. He also hinted at a number of potentially exciting developments to come, see the day’s twitter feed for some of the highlights.

After lunch parallel sessions were run for “service/technical focus” and “use case/teaching and learning focus” I attended the “service/technical focus” sessions.

The first afternoon session was “How has Panopto developed since the last conference? What’s coming next? Andy why should it matter to you?” This session was run by Neil Burdess and Eric Burns from Panopto.

Highlights of this session were:

From the past 12 months –

Panopto currently cloud host 400 customers in the US and 30 in the EU. There are currently 10 customers in the process of migrating either from self-hosting or US hosting to the EU cloud. The migration was being offered for free.

Folder and session date range restrictions

An option for video upload is being added to the Android client.. While you can record directly from IOS devices Android hardware is too varied to be accommodated by their app, so a post-native app recording can be uploaded through the Panopto client instead. (Panopto version 4.9.1)

Live streaming can be viewed through the Panopto app on IOS

Coming soon –

The ability to “quick copy” and create a “shortcut” to a recording in folders other than the one it was recorded to.

Live broadcasting from the Mac client

Ability to record multiple sources/screens with the Mac client

Nesting folders throughout the interface, web and recorder client, removing the current scroll of death from picking a folder to record to.

Addition of a “on air” style “LIVE” indicator in the viewer so students can see when they are watching a live broadcast.

The ability to instantly rewind a live stream in the viewer

The ability to edit in the viewer

Questions and Comments in the viewer will be combined in to a “Discuss” area.

Remove the need for Silverlight in the UI entirely including the editor.

The second afternoon session I attended was “Ask/Tell the experts”

Highlights were:

Customers can now request a 6 month product roadmap

New releases will come in time for the “Winter break” and the “Summer break”

The windows recorder will be updated in a future release to “tidy up” after itself and will not require the user to manually delete the recordings from their local disk.

Panopto will look in to if it’s possible to make uploading from IOS devices faster

Panopto will look in to making it easier to copy schedules from broken remote recorders to working ones.

A future update will make it possible to assign “ownership” of a remote recorder to individual users.

It was requested that streams to be recorded should be possible on a “per schedule” basis

Improved functionality for students to change the layout of the viewer will come in a future update.

In the final session of the day Ben Steeples from University of Essex gave a talk on “Using Panpto’s API for scaling lecture campus-wide and recording a specialist medical use case”

Ben gave a demo of a custom interface that he has written for the university that links Panopto with their time tabling system. Providing a time-table based UI to the students and scheduling captures to happen from the time table to Panopto remote recorders.

Ben also gave an overview of a custom interface for assessing medical students that interacted with Pan/Tilt/Zoom cameras in a mock hospital environment so that their interactions with simulated patients could be recorded via Panopto with control of the cameras and then shared with tutors, the student and assessors.

Due to my location in the room I was unable to easily take any photos of these sessions. I noticed Panopto staff were recording the sessions so if that content gets made available I will update this post with additional information/links.

Update – 28/10/2015 – Blog post from Panopto http://panopto.com/reflections-on-the-panopto-annual-conference-2015-the-future-of-video-for-learning/

Sadly this conference didn’t require me to drive at 88 miles an hour, hook-up a cable to a clock tower in the middle of a storm or fly a DeLorean or a hoverboard. That being said the future of e-learning still looks exciting!

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

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).
Bb Mobile 2015 Roadmap
Bb Mobile 2015 Roadmap

 

Mobile App Screenshot
Mobile App Screenshot

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!