Lunched and Learnt
Lunch was eaten (very nice crisps) and things were learnt at today's Lunch and Learn session in Staff Development.
Katrina Dalziel and Lori Havard talked about how they have used a variety of e-learning tools and processes in teaching information literacy skills - storyboarding, clickers, Blackboard, Course Genie
On the subject of storyboarding, it was suggested that using a wiki to facilitate the storyboarding process would be useful for busy academics. An excellent idea Geertje.
Chris Jobling talked about ‘The Blackboard Quest’ - how to encourage students to explore the various features of Blackboard while at the same time getting them to actively review your course materials. You can find his presentation here - http://eehope.swan.ac.uk/dokuwiki/blackboard_quest
Thanks once again to Katrina, Lori and Chris.
The next session is on 13th May and is entitled 'Do Hedgehogs Steal Ice Cream? Embedding Critical Thinking.'
Labels: e-learning, lunch and learn, showcase
posted by Chris Hall @ 3:12 pm
2 comments
2 Comments:
I ran across your post today and I have to say I am not all that familiar with what it is you do, but a few key words caught my eye. As a student in my senior year of Public Health, I want to tell you students hate Blackboard. It crashes all the time, and I get that it is probably our school's server, not BB, but at any rate, the design is horrible, it's hard for professors to use, and the UI is painful. Clickers are also another thing that pains us students. I think the concept is wonderful - getting students to interact in the classroom, and save paper - but we pay over hundreds of $'s on books already and at least at my school a clicker is around $70. They usually cause a distraction in the classroom too, as professors have a hard time setting up the system, and students always have about a 50% chance that theirs wont work for some unknown reason on a given day.
I love the idea of getting access to information to be a more open space, and I love the idea of e-learning. But I do have to say, Blackboard is hopefully only the beginning and as a student, it's a nightmare that I am ready for an ending to.
Sara Joe makes a couple of valid points as a content consumer we, as content providers, should take on board. Blackboard is a pain to use as a provider and all that I can say as a long-term user is that you discover the work-arounds and learn to work within its constraints. Exploiting Blackboard's features to provide more than a glorified password-protected documents folder is more of a challenge.
From the point of view of a School or University, I assume that the principle advantage of using Blackboard is that it controls access to materials; can monitor, to some extent, student engagement with the materials; and has commercial support.
I myself have found it advantageous to take some materials out of Blackboard and put it into a wiki where it becomes much easier to maintain and opens up the materials to student contributions (although I've not noticed much evidence of this actually happening!). Others have similarly found that using Blackboard to host materials produced with another tool, as for example with the Course Genie materials discussed in this blog article, can provide better experiences for students.
The disadvantage of external hosting (which is usually by external links) is that the materials become visible to Google and hence discoverable, if not modifiable, to others outside my institution. I don't necessarily think that this a bad thing, and there are good examples of prestigious institutions making their materials available for free, but my Institution may be less keen (if it knew about it). And there are additional issues, particularly if you have to use copyrighted materials from textbooks, etc, which limit the extent to which you can do this.
I have no experience of the use of clickers but I see why having to buy your own and the corresponding problems of getting them to work, would be a distraction.
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