designing an aberlearn blackboard course - Nexus

DESIGNING AN ABERLEARN BLACKBOARD COURSE Good practice guidelines and examples

The aim of this document is to answer the question, ‘Other than lecture notes, I’m not sure what to put into my AberLearn course - how can I organise it to better support student learning?’ Simple changes in structure or the addition of certain types of items can make an AberLearn Blackboard course more effective for enhancing student learning. Here we present some easilyoverlooked elements that you might want to include in your course and approaches for organising content to make it as usable as possible. Strategies for using AberLearn tools to improve student retention are also included. Key principles include:    

Reconsidering the course menu Minimising the number of clicks through the folder structure Enhancing student retention via Review Status, the Early Warning System, and formative assessment Including helpful items for student learning

For AY2010/2011, we have redesigned the default course menu for new AberLearn Blackboard courses to more closely match customs of usage at AU, however, courses that have been carried over from the previous year will retain their original structure. New users to AberLearn may not be aware that the course menu is completely customisable. A small amount of ‘thinking outside the box’ can help you to reconsider the course menu and make your AberLearn course more usable for you and your students. The Exemplary Course programme run by Blackboard identifies examples of good practice yearly. You can see examples of innovative and interactive design principles on their website http://kb.blackboard.com/display/EXEMPLARY/Exemplary+Course+Program.

COURSE MENU The default course menu structure is listed below, with notes and suggestions. Please note that this menu only applies to new courses. Courses carried over from AY2009/10 will retain their previous structure. Item Notes Home Page A dashboard with a range of alerts and announcements. Announcements The place for you to put timely announcements, usually a good idea to leave at the top of the menu. Module Outline Module outline, core texts, timetable, etc. Assignments Good for module-level assessment information such as information about the final exam or summative assignment. If you have several small formative quizzes, you may wish to put them in the content area for that unit instead of in Assessment. Linking this to feedback will give staff the opportunity to consider methods of providing both whole class and individual feedback electronically. Content Consider replacing this item with several content areas, one for the topic of each large unit of study. It is logical to put everything related to a topic together. For example, the content area for one topic might have several PowerPoint presentations or lecture notes, related links and readings, a formative quiz, suggested additional resources. This matches the student workflow. Tools The full range of Blackboard tools, including Discussion Board, My Grades, and more. Contacts Tutor information, office hours, email etc. The following are useful guidelines to consider in regard to the course menu:        

Text – Use text rather than graphical buttons for accessibility. Colour – Make sure there is good contrast between text and background, and the colour is not too garish. Short names – Make the names of course menu items as concise as possible to avoid word wrapping. Meaningful names – Change the names of course menu items to match terminology in your department. It is possible to change the names of all menu items to Welsh if desired. 6-10 items – Have as few items as possible on the menu. No empty areas – Note that any course menu folder that is completely empty will be visible only to tutors but not to students. Groups – Groups are available through Tools, but if you are making heavy use of student groups, consider adding Groups to the course menu in order to reduce the number of clicks. Logical structure – Reduce the number of clicks required to reach the actual content. Consider doing away with Course Documents and instead clustering lectures into logical units with each unit as an item on the course menu. For example, for a course in Chinese history, you could have one content area each for Yuan dynasty, Ming dynasty, Qing Dynasty, Republic of China, People’s Republic of China. This simplifies the structure and reduces the number of clicks students must make before reaching actual content.

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Using E-learning at Aberystwyth | E-learning Support | AY 2010/11

Key principle - in general, people start to get frustrated if they have made three clicks and still haven’t reached the content they are looking for, thus many web designers use the ‘three-click rule’ as a guide. ORGANISING MATERIAL Similar principles apply to organizing material within content areas as to customising the course menu. Reduce the number of clicks students have to make to reach your content, and put materials in the most logical place for students to find them. Consider grouping materials students by topic rather than type, so that all the items a student needs while studying a topic are in the same place. Cluster lectures into several groups. In modules teamtaught by several members of staff, the clusters may correspond to topics covered by each lecturer. Key principle – organise the material according to student workflow. Clicks can be reduced by minimising the number of nested folders. Within a content area, it can be useful to arrange the materials with the most current item on top, and use adaptive release to make them available incrementally over the term. It is helpful to have meaningful folder and file names. If the name of the file you are uploading is very long or does not help to identify the content of the file, you can use ‘Name of link to file’ in order to give students a word or phrase to click on. For example, ‘Week 1 lecture notes’ or ‘Ming Dynasty lecture notes’. The Review Status feature, available by clicking the Manage button, can be useful for identifying the core items in the module. Students can indicate to themselves and to you which items they have already read or worked with. If you have many items, you can control their visibility to students in several ways. The Adaptive Release function allows you to release items by date or by other criteria. When used in conjunction with Review Status, you can release items only after the student has clicked ‘Mark Reviewed’ for a previous item. Finally, it may seem obvious to you what you want them to do with the material, but it is not always obvious to the students. Putting clear instructions for each item is helpful. An example might be ‘Please read this article prior to Lecture 8 and come to seminar prepared to argue for or against the author’s opinion’. RETENTION/MONITORING/OUTREACH Several tools are useful for student retention, monitoring, and outreach. These can help you to catch students before they get too far off track in their study.


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The Review Status feature can be useful here, because you can use the Performance Dashboard see which students have marked items reviewed, and pro-actively steer the students back on track. The Early Warning System can also be used to identify students who are falling behind in their studies and need to be brought back on track. It will automatically create an email message, which you can then customise with your own content. It can flag up students based on three criteria:  

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Grade – Contact students who have done poorly on a formative assessment Blackboard quiz in order to steer them to useful revising materials. Assignment deadline – Send a reminder to students who have not submitted their assignment by a certain time. The trigger can be offset from the actual deadline. For example, if the deadline is 5pm, you can send a reminder noon to any students who have not yet submitted the assignment. Course access – Send an email reminder to students who have not accessed the Blackboard course in a set period of time, such as once a week.

FORMATIVE FEEDBACK There are several ways that you can use AberLearn to give formative feedback to your students during the learning process. Even if there are no marks directly associated with the formative activity, receiving feedback prior to assignment due dates or exam dates can help students to improve their performance on the summative assessment. To give automated feedback to students: 

Quizzes – These give feedback and can either be assessed or not assessed. Marks from a Blackboard quiz can be used to flag up students using the Early Warning System, and you can see which questions a student has answered correctly.

You can also use Campus Pack v4.4 tools to create student-centred activities that allow the tutor to make comments on individual student contributions. Both tools can be integrated into the Grade Centre and assessed, if desired:   

Blog – module or group blogs with a series of chronological entries Private Journal - individual reflective journals for each student Wiki – sets of inter-connected web pages suitable for collaborative work such as group projects

INTEGRATING FACE-TO-FACE WITH ONLINE INSTRUCTION If you bracket your face-to-face teaching with online components, you can reinforce the content, motivate students to engage with the online activities, and possibly free up some class time for more student interaction by off-loading some of the content transmission to the Blackboard course. Key principle – interlink all the components of the module. Page 4 of 8


The face-to-face component of your teaching should make reference to and build upon the online components. Unless tutors tell students explicitly what is in Blackboard and how they should use it, students may not find and make best use of materials you put there. An ideal strategy is to use class time to build upon the online elements. A good approach is to consider what you want students to actually DO with the materials you put online. Here are some ideas for things students can do with material in AberLearn Blackboard: 

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Reinforce lecture content – There are many approaches to reinforcing lecture content. Instead of just uploading lecture notes or PowerPoint slides, consider providing a brief summary of just the key ‘threshold’ concepts from the lecture, or alternatively links to materials that go into greater depth on the lecture topics. Preview lecture topic before class – Give your students a task to do prior to lecture, seminar, or practical. This can be a brief introduction to the topic, an overview of laboratory procedures, a link to a relevant news item, or a question or two that will be answered in the lecture. The principle is to prepare them for the face-to-face learning activity. Read required material prior to class – Any kind of reading that is required prior to attending lecture is a good candidate for putting into your Blackboard course. This can include a bibliography, link to the official reading list for the module through ARMS (see checklist below), online journal articles, web pages or other materials. Prepare for practical – Information to prepare students for practicals is also a good candidate for inclusion in a Blackboard course. This can include Use a note-taking aid – A worksheet, outline or advance organiser put onto the Blackboard course will help students to take notes during lecture and organise their thinking. An outline can help students to follow lecture more efficiently because it gives them the big picture of how the lecture topics fit together. Reinforce key points after lecture – Give students a way to reinforce or clarify key points from lecture by means of a short podcast summary, the ‘muddiest point’ explained, etc. Revise before exam – A wide range of materials in the Blackboard course can help your students to revise before exams.

DESIGNING A BLACKBOARD COURSE – ITEM CHECKLIST Here are some things you might consider including in your Blackboard course. These are possibilities only – it is not necessary to do all of them. Use the tick boxes when drawing up a list for use in guidelines or templates.

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Link to Modules Database record for the module http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/modules/. Detailed module outline including timetable for lectures etc. Detailed assignment guidance. Clear statement of what is expected from students (e.g. which areas of the AberLearn course to check, and how frequently, etc) and what they can expect from their tutors (e.g. response time for emails or discussion board postings). This is strongly recommended for Using E-learning at Aberystwyth | E-learning Support | AY 2010/11

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distance learning. In other contexts, information about expectations can be reinforced by the tutor in lecture as well.

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Lecture notes and/or PowerPoint slides – think through what you want the students to do with this material. Is it required or optional? For preview before a class session, or revising for exams? This will have implications for how tutors structure the material, and what they tell students about it. Some possible alternatives to putting complete lecture notes online include: o Outline of topics for students to fill in detail during lecture (such as an advance organiser). o Summary of key points for review after lecture. o Detailed factual items to serve as a reference, such as terminology, names and dates, mathematical formulae etc. o Material for students to read as preparation for an in-class discussion or other activity.

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Links to library resources such as: o Primo http://primo.aber.ac.uk/ o ElecInfo http://www.inf.aber.ac.uk/elecinfo/. o Subject page for your subject area http://www.inf.aber.ac.uk/subject/.

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Links to information skills resources: o Internet Detective information skills tutorial http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/detective/.

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Study skills resources created by your department or externally. Some useful links are listed below: o Purdue Online Writing Lab http://owl.english.purdue.edu/ includes guides to common citation styles. o University of Victoria Learning Skills Programs http://www.coun.uvic.ca/learning/index.html. o University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill Writing Center handouts. http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/. o Harvard University Writing Center resources http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~wricntr/resources.html). o Palgrave Skills4Study http://www.palgrave.com/skills4study/.

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List of core and optional resources, such as core texts, journal articles, and any online resources (include links). o Link to the ARMS reading list for your module http://arms.mis.aber.ac.uk/.

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Media clips for students to view or listen to. These can include audio recordings of lectures, sometimes called podcasts. If using audio, think beyond just recording full lectures. The Web 2.0 series training session on podcasting explores it in more depth. Be sure to check out the copyright implications.

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Articles or links to full-text articles. Again, check out the copyright implications. o To include full text digitised materials written by you or other University staff, see the University’s repository, CADAIR http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/.

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To include scanned articles from other sources, see the FAQ on digitisation http://www.inf.aber.ac.uk/advisory/faq/327/.

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Google Scholar search or a link to the article if full-text linking through the library is not available.

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Self-test quizzes created in Blackboard’s test canvas - good for giving formative feedback to students throughout the semester.

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Module evaluation questionnaire created in Blackboard’s survey canvas – good for collecting feedback from students.

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Learning objects - interactive online activities created with Wimba Create or found in repositories such as JORUM.

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Blogs or Wikis created with the Campus Pack extensions for Blackboard.

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Discussion boards for students to share information with each other or ask tutors questions. This is most useful for distance learners, but some learning tasks in other contexts are also suited to discussion boards. See the E-learning Design Series workshop Designing Online Discussion Tasks.

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Student groups for collaboration work, via the Groups function in which students are assigned to groups. Each group has its own discussion board and file sharing area.

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Electronic submission of assignments through Blackboard. o SafeAssign plagiarism detection in Blackboard is available. If your department is interested in using it, please contact E-learning Support to arrange a planning meeting [email protected]. See http://nexus/xwiki/bin/view/Main/safeassign

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Virtual class meetings through the chat and/or virtual classroom facility. Primarily useful for distance learners, these may not be needed in a face-to-face teaching context.

Staff information for the tutor including office hours, room number, email, phone, etc. Announcements and timely reminders (such as ‘meet in seminar room XXX next Tuesday, Assignment due next week, etc) created using Blackboard’s Announcements. Announcements can simultaneously be sent to students as email if desired.

WHAT SUPPORT IS AVAILABLE? 

Information Services o E-learning Support http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/is/elearning/  General e-learning queries, consultations [email protected]  Blackboard queries [email protected]  Bookmarks related to e-learning (you can search for specific key words) http://www.delicious.com/is_alto/  Gwella Nexus website (good practice, pedagogy, funding, tools) http://nexus.aber.ac.uk  Nexus resources list (peer-reviewed articles) http://nexus/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Resources


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Information Services FAQs (technical how-to) http://www.inf.aber.ac.uk/advisory/faqs/ Training in pedagogy and design o CDSAP courses http://www.aber.ac.uk/staffdevelopment/english/regulations.htm o E-learning Support consultation [email protected] Training in technology how-to o IS courses http://nexus.aber.ac.uk/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/Training o E-learning Support one-to-one quick-start training [email protected] Other resources o Your Director of Learning and Teaching o Your mentor o PGCTHE Learning and Teaching Development Coordinator

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