Hello and welcome to "Tips for Making your
Blackboard Space More Student-friendly."
I'm Hope Greenberg from the Center for Teaching and Learning.
We at the CTL hear from faculty
that while students can find Blackboard confusing,
they tend not to ask for help in using it.
So, I thought it would be useful to pull together
my favorite tips for organizing Blackboard courses
to make students--and you too--
feel more comfortable about using it.
First, let's consider why thoughtful design and
and organization are important.
Steve Krug, author of "Don't Make Me Think:
A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability" discusses how
discusses how a poorly designed interface
wastes the viewer's "cognitive energy."
If too much initial time and energy is spent on
trying to figure out how to navigate the site,
or to find an assignment or reading materials,
then students will already be negatively impacted
before they can even begin to work.
I am sure we have all been there.
And as we and our students spend more time online,
we feel less and less able to combat this cognitive drag.
However, there are some simple things you can do
to help make your Blackboard course less of a drag--
uh...a cognitive drag, that is.
Steve Jobs is quoted as saying
"Design is not just how it looks and feels;
design is how it works."
But I like my colleague Inés's quote better:
"Good design improves readability,
find-ability, and credibility."
We want our Blackboard courses to be a staircase that,
while it may have turns, is always leading them
to the course goals.
But too often the students see something
more like the Escher print—it’s fun
but it’s anything but straightforward.
So, what are some design choices?
I'll start with one, a visual one
that is simple yet effective.
At first, it seems like an extra flourish,
a nice touch but not important.
But, consider it this way
Here are screenshots from 3 course home pages.
Which one would you consider most
recognizable at a glance?
I hope you say it's the one with the banner.
I have to squint to tell the, uh, the difference
between the other two.
With a banner, your students will quickly realize
if they've opened the wrong course.
Next, let's consider the Course Menu.
Its organization is a key factor
in preventing confusion.
Blackboard makes it so easy to add things here
that it's tempting to do so
without thinking of the overall impact.
Consider these three examples.
The left-most menu has a limited number
of easily differentiated links
and they’re grouped together with the use of horizontal lines.
The center menu isn't too bad
but it takes a bit more visual work to find
a specific link. The third menu is
well, OK, I created this one to make a point
but I have seen courses where
that many links are listed.
The names may mean something to you
but the sheer number will probably
overwhelm your students, even after they
begin to get used to it.
Another place where a small bit of care
will pay big dividends? Naming conventions
Look at the first list.
Are these several different types of items?
Are lecture notes the same as class notes?
And the last two on the list:
"Class Notes 2/23" or "3/2 Notes"
Are they two different things?
or simply a typo in the date.
So, choose one format and stick to it.
Saves your students some confusion
and saves you extra emails to explain it.
The same approach applies to the books, articles,
or web resources you refer to in your course.
I know, and, since you already saw this
this reference earlier, you may guess, that
that "The Krug book" or "That useability book"
or the title "Don't Make me Think"
all refer to the same thing.
But if your student encounters these in a
variety of places in the course,
will they make the same assumption?
Again, would you rather they use time
figuring this out or would you prefer
that they get right to the reading?
Now, take a moment to jot down a few ideas.
How do you typically organize a course?
For example, do you organize it by week?
Or by broad themes? Or themes with
their own assessment.
Or, are you are simply using Blackboard to store
some materials like lecture notes or readings
or instructions for assignments?
Blackboard's primary way of organizing material
is as a series of folders that live on what it calls
Content Areas, that is, an empty space
upon which you can place folders.
In Blackboard speak, you create or start with
with an existing Content Area like
the one named "Course Materials"
In this example the folders are named with
with date ranges: May 22nd to 28th, May 29th
to June 4th and so on.
You click in the name of the folder to open it,
but you can add some additional, optional,
information below each folder name
that describes what’s inside the folder.
Now, look at how you described your course.
If your course is generally broken into weeks,
then you could make a folder for each week.
If you break it into themes or topics,
each with some form of assessment,
then divide your course up according to those
chunks of content with their assessment.
In either case six to fifteen folders is
probably the most you should have just in terms
of scrolling through them. That's not a hard and fast
or technical rule--just a personal preference
that I think many share.
So, what goes in those folders? Well, you can
create sub-folders but most often you
create Items or links to tools.
Let me also take a moment to consider a word
that will help make the written areas of
your course easier to read: chunking.
Here we have an image from the 35th
Gutenberg Bible printed in 1454.
The text is very dense but they’ve used color
and a large drop-down letter to specify a new section.
570 years later we still use this same idea,
only in our case we usually use headings and
sub-headings or bullets to break up the text.
It’s all about visual or
machine-readable audio cues
for consistency and pattern recognition.
Blackboard uses Items to hold the text
you write in your course.
The Item itself can be chunked in the same way
that you would break up any print material
to make it more readable.
Items are denoted by the paper icon
in the upper left corner.
This first Item is titled "Overview of the week"
and it's chunked into 4 sections, as a sort of
outline of what is to come.
Overview, Objectives, Required Readings and Viewings
and Assessments. Further down the page,
each of those sections has its own Item.
I use this example for two reasons:
it shows you the best practice of
starting each module with an overview
of what will be covered.
It lists the Objectives for that module,
then provides links to the readings and assignments.
Thus, everything the student will need for this
module is both described and then included.
No wandering around the course wasting time.
The second reason is to highlight
the use of Objectives.
Students complain about busy work.
Now, I'm sure you don't start creating a course
by saying "hmmm...where can I add some
useless busywork?"
But students may need some help
in making the connection between your objectives
and what you have asked them to do.
This is no time to be mysterious.
The more obvious that connection is
the more likely that students will not see the work
you have asked them to do as busy-work.
By the way, the previous example of an Item
comes from Continuing and Distance Education's
Blackboard Course Shell. The Course Shell provides
a starter structure that can be imported into
into your course and built upon. You can read
more about the Course Shell in UVM's
Knowledge Base at uvm/it/kb.
Blackboard has a host of tools for student work
and assessments: tests, journals, assignment tool,
blogs, discussion board, with ways to use
all of those in group work. All the tools allow for
writing, embedding links, attaching files and images
and for grading...but choosing the right tool
will make things better for you and your students,
so think about details. Will they be graded?
Will you provide feedback? Will these be
individual or group activities? Will students be
commenting on each other’s work?
If there are multiple parts, will each piece get a grade?
Thinking through these kinds of questions will help you,
and help us help you, choose the right tool for the job.
Oh dear, a caveat: one of the maxims for making
your course more user-friendly is to not use
too many tools. So, use the right tools for the job,
but don't use all of them [at once]!
In addition to the tools that are built into Blackboard,
we also have access to other applications
and materials. For instance, a Student
Response System like iclicker/Reef--it can collect
student responses then put their grades
directly into Blackboard. There are also
publisher materials that you can connect to
through Blackboard. We have two others that
you may have heard of so I'll mention them here.
Again, these are completely separate programs
with their own way of working, but you can
connect them to Blackboard and pass grades to it.
They are: Perusall, a communal,
collective e-reading and collaborative
annotating program. And Yellowdig, a
Discussion Board alternative for
conversations and sharing.
You don't want to overwhelm students with
too many apps, but if one of these seems to fit
your needs better than the Blackboard tool,
it's definitely worth taking a look at.
Then there is Microsoft Teams.
It has a robust online meeting tool with
breakout rooms and now with polling.
There’s chat, there’s channels, and collaborative
editing of files. It will no doubt continue to add
features and they will be competing with Blackboard.
So, I will leave you with these
and hope they spark some ideas.
Thank you for your time and attention.
And if you have any favorite tips for making
Blackboard more student-friendly,
please share them with us at ctl@uvm.edu.