At MiraCosta, the tech folks set up a Blackboard class for every section, on-site or online, whether we like it or not. It’s set as unavailable, but students email asking where it is, and many use Blackboard like a portal. The result has been recommendations that we use our Bb course to guide students to our course if we use other places instead (i.e. Moodle, a blog, etc.).
My workflow for undoing a Bb class in four steps:
1. Create a standard web page with basic class information, including the URL to enter the real course.
2. Go into the course in Bb, Control Panel. Using Manage Course Menu, add External Link (with Name “This course is not in Blackboard”), linked to your information web page.
3. Still in Course Menu, Remove all other items.
4. In Manage Tools, Tool Availability, unclick all boxes for Communications Area and Tools Area. (This prevents fruitless clicking around the tools in the Tools box part of the Menu, which appears automatically otherwise.)
The result is a Bb page that shows your info page only, and from which students can go only to links you’ve got on that page. It’s even simpler than in previous versions of Bb, where you had to reset the entry page and could only modify menu items.
So go ahead. Lead them the heck out of there.
Lisa,
Considering the cost per year of Blackhoard, the solution makes for an expensive reference page to an open source application. It must be crazy making for you to consider the waste of resources $&time down the BB hole!
B-ob
Hi B-ob! At the moment, we’re lucky to have Moodle and ETUDES-NG also paid by the district as alternatives. When those go, perhaps folks will want to use more web apps. And certainly there are plenty of folks using BB and happy enough with it (read: invested in it, with their quizzes and materials stuck in the system) that the resources are being used.
Just brilliant – I like the title in particular
I’d be interested in finding out how many other insitutions that mandate BB usage are experiencing the same sorts of creative tactics.
We had a BB rep come by to present the app to us a few weeks ago and actually talked about how “open” BB is. I could hardly contain myself.
I wanted to ask him if the openness works both ways, or if you can only suck in data, but not use it outside the environment, and/or what support was available for exporting of work/course contributions to encourage life-long learning once students graduate or otherwise leave the institution – but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself LOL.
Hope all is well!
Cheers,
Mike
Hello
Our patrnership of HEIs in the UK have committed to Blackboard for the next two years at least, because we have received funding for an eLearning Project and some of this funding has covered licence fees, technical training and so on. Nevertheless, we are trying to encourage use of a variety of other Web 2.0 tools and applications in conjunction WITH Blackboard and not in spite of it(!) as we attempt to ‘embed technogy into our learning and teaching strategies’ – the ultimate goal of the Project.
I’ve been circumventing Blackboard for seven years. OK, I do use it – more as a portal page for my online students, but I do the same think you do, Lisa, and create my own lecture webpages, with all the material students need for the course on my webpages. Trying to create a decent webpage on Blackboard is a nightmare, so creating my own pages and housing them somewhere other than with Blackboard has been helpful. And it allows me to be more creative, too.
Happy New Year!
Good luck this semester.
Linda