Course-Related Information Management

Blackboard is a Course Management System, a software package that allows us to develop and deliver online courses. The tools that help us to deliver online courses also provide valuable information management tools for our traditional courses.

Course-related information management can be extremely time-consuming, especially when we teach very large courses. Many of us maintain a class Web site to post course materials and assignments. We keep a student email list, or perhaps manage a listserv to communicate with our students outside of the classroom. We devise and maintain a "code name" scheme in order to post grades. We sometimes divide our classes into groups for special projects, requiring us to maintain yet another set of information.

So much information in so many places! Blackboard provides a valuable service by allowing us to keep all of this information in one secure area. Listed below are some of the Information Management services that Blackboard can provide.

• Current Enrollment Information. Student accounts are created and "enrolled" in your Blackboard course. The student information in your course is always current; it comes directly from Banner and is updated nightly. The current student information populates the student areas of your course.
• Roster. Blackboard provides a class roster that is populated with current student information, as described above. As an instructor, you have the option of making the roster public to all students enrolled in the class.
• Announcements. You can post announcements, easily, from any computer with Internet access.
• Course Materials. Blackboard provides an easy and fairly flexible way to post your course materials. You can even post all of your course materials ahead of time, then make them "visible" as you cover the material in class. Your materials are secure: only students enrolled in the course may view them. Copyrighted materials may be securely posted in Blackboard. Since courses may be archived and recycled, you can save time by reusing some or all of your course materials from semester to semester without rebuilding your course.
• Online Gradebook. The Online Gradebook allows you to post grades securely. Each student may access his or her grades by logging in to Blackboard. Since a student's grades are associated with his or her Blackboard account, you don’t have to come up with a special scheme for posting grades! The Online Gradebook allows you to weight grades, categorize grades and view the information in a variety of ways. You can export the Gradebook to Excel if you want to conduct a more advanced statistical analysis of the information.
• Email. Blackboard allows you to send email to an email address that the student maintains. You can send email to all students or select single students. Optionally, you can make this feature available to students so that they may communicate with one another. Since the email feature requires students to select the recipient’s name from a list, email addresses are kept confidential.
• Discussion Board. While Blackboard’s email feature provides good one-way communication it is not a good way to conduct multi-way communication. The Discussion Boards provide a good means of "public" communication, allowing instructors and students to post and reply to messages. Documents can be attached to Discussion Board posts. Discussion forums can be used for assignments, FAQ's, collaborative work, peer critique of work, etc.
• Group Pages. Blackboard facilitates online study groups or project groups by giving students a "private" area to work collaboratively. Group pages include an area to share files as well as a private Discussion Board and a real-time chat utility.
• Quizzes and Surveys. Blackboard's Assessment Manager allows you to create online surveys and quizzes. The quizzes provide the student with immediate grading information and feedback, and are automatically entered into the Online Gradebook. Surveys allow you to collect information anonymously. Both surveys and quizzes allow you, as the instructor, to view a detailed analysis of the responses.