Why did you choose to use Blackboard?

I decided to use Blackboard for a variety of reasons. The ability to easily enhance communication with my students appealed to me. The features I find to be most innovative over existing e-mail and web-site capabilities, however, are the assessment and survey features in Blackboard. I try to assess my students learning frequently and in many different formats. The problem with frequent assessments is that they require a significant amount of time for grading and evaluation. The ability to have my students take short, open-book quizzes (homework, really) in Blackboard and have them graded automatically convinced me that I should adopt the system in all of my classes.

How have you integrated the technology into your teaching?

I have incorporated Blackboard into all of my classes. I use Blackboard most heavily in Biology 515 (Marine Invertebrate Biology, 26 students). The system makes it relatively easy for me to give a weekly multiple-choice quiz. This sort of homework assignment helps motivate some of the students to complete the daily assigned reading on time (or at least open their book to look up answers to the quiz questions!). I also use Blackboard to have students complete a weekly survey of how they spent their study time during the previous week. I use these Weekly Time Reports to help individual students refine their study methods and manage their time effectively. In previous semesters, I had students turn in paper copies of these reports; Blackboard has made the process easier and saved a lot of trees! I also update the Gradebook regularly to provide students with feedback about their performance.

The fact that e-mail in Blackboard is linked to the class roster makes it very easy to email the entire class with confidence. This feature paid huge dividends during the October 2004 fires. I had scheduled a coastal field trip for the afternoon of Sunday 26 Oct. When the fires began that morning, I needed some way to reliably inform the students that the field trip was canceled. Similarly, Blackboard made it easy for me to post daily announcements and e-mails, updating the students about how the campus closures during that time altered the previously planned topics and activities for Biology 515. Many students thanked me (and Blackboard) for this high degree of organization and communication during the chaos of that disastrous week.

In Biology 600 (Seminar in Marine Community Ecology, 10 graduate students) I use the Discussion Board to establish forums for students’ questions and for exchanging files and discussion outlines. The major assignment in the discussion-based seminar course is the writing of NSF-style research proposals, which I have the students peer review in written and panel-discussion formats. I use Blackboard’s Digital Drop Box to have students submit their peer reviews and for me to distribute written reviews to the appropriate student review panels. The Digital Drop Box makes this sort of file exchange and distribution very easy and paper free! I considered using the Groups feature to facilitate some of the interaction between the two “Review Panels” I established for the peer-review assignments, but with a small class of 10 grad students and only two groups, it wasn’t really necessary. I do plan to incorporate some Blackboard Group activities into my courses in the future. 

How is your use of the technology innovative or different?

The Discussion Board, Assessment, Survey, and Gradebook features of Blackboard provide tools that are not easily incorporated into standard course web pages or e-mail communications. My use of these features in my classes is driven by my desire to promote and employ a variety of active-learning strategies in my courses and to gain a better sense of exactly what students are and are not learning. As far as being “innovative”, I am unaware of any other SDSU Biology faculty who survey how students spend their time studying and provide students with first-hand experience in the process of peer reviewing research proposals.

What parts of Blackboard have worked the best for you? What hasn't worked?

Most of the Blackboard features I have used have worked very well. In particular, the e-mail, Announcements, Discussion-Board, and Gradebook features have been flawless and very valuable. I also use the automatic date-setting feature to establish when assessments are available.

The Assessments features in Blackboard are not as user friendly as I would like. Initially, I had some trouble creating multiple-choice quizzes (or Pools) by cutting and pasting text from an existing Word document (some of the pasted answers would not appear and would need to be re-entered; there seemed to be no pattern as to which text would fail to appear so I was forced to re-type all of my quiz questions and answers). A few of my Biology 201B students had problems being locked out of a quiz after viewing it once, even though the quiz was set to allow multiple attempts. This probably was due to the student’s particular computer, but it would be helpful if the Blackboard software were more compatible with older operating systems and browsers. In my Biology 600 seminar, I used the Digital Drop Box extensively. It would be helpful if there were a record of the transaction after had I sent a particular file to a particular student’s Digital Drop Box; there’s no way to double check at a later time.