Turnitin at Leicester

There is an interesting discussion of the use of Turnitin at Leicester with responses (so far) from Swansea and Reading.

Blackboard Seminar in York

Combining face-to-face teaching with on-line activities is a challenging task. Blackboard and York University have partnered to provide this one-day workshop which aims to outline a range of models which may be employed to create an effective blend, with a specific focus on approaches to collaborative learning. The workshop will be relevant to lecturers / instructors, course designers and support staff who are committed to the production and delivery of quality learning experiences in blended courses.

The workshop is delivered in two parts. In the morning the focus will be on learning theory and design principles for blended courses. The afternoon session will be devoted to a more applied discussion on group-based collaborative learning for students and how this can be supported through the use of e-learning tools.
This training has been developed for staff who are interested in fully exploiting Blackboard to deliver the learning objectives of their course(s). Would you please also pass on this message to any of your colleagues or any other staff in your institution who you think may be interested to participate in this training.

If you would like to participate, please download and complete the registration form and send it to academic-training@blackboard.com.


The cost of the training is $350(US) which includes refreshments and lunch.

Adding a Wiki to Blackboard and Jing!

In today's excellent lunch-and-lean session, Matthew Allen told us how to take the fear out of e-learning by thinking about how traditional teaching methods may be enhanced by technology. In other words, we should regard e-learning is a means to an end, and not the end itself. These insights are worthy of wider dissemination, but I have something else to share here.

In the conversation over lunch, someone wondered if there couldn't be a demo of how to add a wiki to a Blackboard site. Someone else mentioned that Jing might be a quick way to get demo into video form that could be distributed to students. As a member of the learning lab community, I thought "I can Do That!" So here I am killing one bird with two stones by using Jing to create the wiki demo. In another blog article over in @the.coalface I explain how I to use Jing to create a screen cast of an e-learning activity and embed the resulting flash movie video into Blackboard.

The resulting screencast is a bit big to embed on this page, but you can reach it by following this link.

I found this useful little tool the day after the lunch and learn session which highlighted useful eLearning tools - ahh well that is no excuse not to share it.

In blackboard there is a send email facility available to instructors through the course control panel - the box you get does not include the normal inline wysiwyg editor just a text box that will accept text or HTML code.

If you are a Firefox user then there is now a useful plug in available called Xinha Here which enables you to pop up a WYSIWYG editor to edit your emails (you can also use it in any other text box you come across on the internet which doesnt have an editor) Just right click in the white space and select Xinha Here - then exit away an click ok when you are done. This puts the html code into your text box ready to submit - it's that simple!

It is really easy to use and can be downloaded here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1449 this entry was edited using the tool!

Introducing Blackboard, Pebble Pad and LEAP

Some of you may of heard of the Blackboard Quest that we use in the School of Engineering to ease our first year students into our MLE of choice! This year the quest was expanded a little to take in brief tours of Pebble Pad (the new Personal Learning System which replaced Oremi this year) and the University's LEAP provision. I used Flowgram to create a presentation/site demo that will go on Blackboard after I've presented this live in a lecture next Monday. I found Flowgram very useful for this combination of PowerPoint and live web sites. Hope it inspires you to try something similar youself.

Follow Up

One issue that I noted was the fidelity of reproduction of the web pages for the University was not good in Flowgram's live interactive view. I'm not sure if this is a feature of the way the CMS works at Swansea, but the pictures are missing which means that big chunks of the functionality is missing too! Work around is to use screen grabs or screencasts but that rather defeats the object!

Blackboard - the future

Blackboard inc have released some video presentations about their Project NG (Next Generation) this is the hybred product that includes the final best of breed integration of WebCT and Blackboard into a single product. The presentation is not yet complete and more will be released as it becomes available. Nor is there as yet any formal release date - though at the BBWorld Europe confernence in Manchester Michael Chasen CEO suggested that it would in fact be version 10 sometime around end of 2009 early 2010 with some of the changes hitting version 9 early in 2009.

If you can bear the american hype as the presenter gets "really excited..." about every feature, it is worth a look as it illustrates the new drag and drop structure along with the context sensitive menus for course editing. You can view the presentation here it is an improvement on

Really Simple Surveys with Google Docs (cross posting)

Today I was looking for an alternative to Blackboard's survey manager when I stumbled upon this great suggestion from Technology Bites. All you do is go to Google Docs (docs.google.com), create a new Google Docs Spreadsheet and share the spreadsheet with your students via a web form. It's really quick and easy to use. See my @the.coalface article for the full story. Other ideas for creating on-line student surveys or experience of other alternatives to Blackboard welcome here or in the comments to that article.

Blackboard tips from the coal face

Colleagues and readers may be interested to know that I have published an article on using Blackboard's External Links to quickly create a useful presence on Blackboard. I think that the tip will be particularly useful if the thing that's preventing you migrating course materials to Blackboard is the effort needed to upload your documents and maintain them thereafter. I have a few other suggestions and short cuts that I've learned over the years and I hope to share these with you over the coming week and months. You'll find the tip and the future tips in my new Swansea Blog blog @the.coalface. I look forward to your comments.