While unaware freshmen waited in eager anticipation for their iPod delivery this summer, Blackboard Learning System, the class management program familiar to so many upperclassmen and faculty, was receiving a not-so-extreme makeover.
With most of the collegiate clientele of Blackboard, Inc., having already upgraded from version 5.5 to 6.1, Duke had to give its communication and information interface a facelift in order to maintain tech support. The new version is expected to bring flexibility and new options to students and faculty.
But many students returning to Duke, like junior Jennifer Gurevich, did not find the changes extremely noticeable. She said there were “minor changes, like how it looks, how it’s structured, but not necessarily whether it’s easier or harder or better.”
One major change is the ability to control which classes appear in the often overflowing “My Courses” window of the “My Blackboard” home screen. The new feature can be applied by clicking on the pencil icon in the upper-right corner and then deciding which courses to be displayed.
A drawback is that these courses, which accumulate as students progress toward graduation, cannot be removed from the website unless professors do it themselves—something many professors lose track of at the end of the year.
Amy Campbell, project manager of Duke’s Blackboard system at the Center for Instructional Technology, said there have been other major benefits, at least from the faculty’s perspective. “The teachers have flexibility in the way the menu is organized,” she said. “Now a faculty member could label the course menu all in French if he wanted to. So they can customize the organization of the course. Whether they are doing that yet is another question.”
The ability to use some of the minor advances in class postings, such as italics, spell check editor and text formatting has not been enough to elicit great excitement from several instructors. “Mostly what I noticed are pretty superficial changes. It has a different look to it,” said Amy Sayle, a lecturing fellow in the First Year Writing Program.
Campbell believes that the new features of the upgrade will be seen more and more as teachers decide to use and explore the new depths of Blackboard.
Several Duke students, who said they check Blackboard anywhere from two to 35 times a week, seemed to have complaints about the upgrades. Critiques ranged from the minimal, such as sophomore Pulsar Li’s observation that “it was fine then and it is fine now,” to immense frustration due to a lack of unification among science labs, lectures and recitations.
The most noticeable problems with the new system have been several recent Blackboard crashes and failures, which Campbell said “have overshadowed some of the new features.” She added, however, that the technical problems were not uncommon to any system upgrade and that CIT has the situation “mostly figured out now.”
Technology personnel hope that Blackboard 6.1, which was developed by the same company that provides the DukeCard system, will help connect the 60 percent of courses that currently do not utilize Blackboard’s course communication—or at least coax professors into considering the idea.
“We in the CIT want to make it clear that Blackboard is a tool for faculty to use, and not a requirement,” Campbell said. “It is there to be a support tool and really there to help faculty solve teaching problems, to help bring interactivity to the courses where they want it.”
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