Technology & Instruction for UNEX

The new podcast features in Blackboard 7.3 are actually part of the Podcast Learning Object from LearningObjects.com . This learning object makes it possible to easily add podcasts to your course and syndicate them to your students using an RSS feed. In English, this means your students can subscribe to the podcasts you make available, whether you create them yourself or download them from someone else. This way, students will be automatically updated with the latest podcast in your course and they can listen/watch them on an iPod, Zune(!), or a computer. Here's a 4 page overview of the podcast tools [PDF]. You may also find these resources useful: A tutorial from Dave Taylor on subscribing to podcasts in iTunes. Create your own Podcast (CNET). Kirk's Eight Rules of Effective Podcasting .

An early warning system sounds like a great thing for earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis, but it's also useful for instructors in online courses. When students don't set aside time to do their online work, they can quickly fall behind and may end up dropping a course. Blackboard 7.3 has a new feature, the Early Warning System, which can be used to keep tabs on student performance which may be a sign of potential problems. Rules can be created based on test scores, late work or course activity, and it's easy to monitor student progress and send warnings via email. A summary of the features of the Early Warning System in Blackboard is here [PDF].

With the recent update to Blackboard, it's a good idea to test your computer system for compatibility with Blackboard. Saginaw State University has a nice page which will run through a number of tests and give you an easy to read report on your setup. Check it out at their Blackboard Browser Test page .

The Discussion Board is one of the areas that changed quite a bit with the update to Blackboard 7.3, although many of the changes are just restoring functionality that was available in previous version of Blackboard. Here's a 2 page summary of some of the changes [PDF].

One of the add-ons that showed up with the update to Blackboard 7.3 over the weekend is a podcasting learning object. It doesn't help you create a podcast from what I could see, but it does allow you to upload one and distribute it. The uploading part takes place in a course content area using the learning unit menu. In the Control Panel under Course Tools you will find the Manage Podcast option. I'll be adding a tutorial on how to use podcasts in Blackboard later this week.

Today's Washington Post has an article about using clickers and PowerPoint in large class lectures . There's no agreement on whether either of these is an improvement, but there are some interesting points in the article. I'm not a fan of the huge lectures myself, but they do exist at most big universities and they might be considered a labor-saving device. I don't think they do much for learning myself, but maye the clicker at least keeps students awake and helps the lecturer cover the right material so most students understand it.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has summaries of the ways five people in higher education are using Second Life in instruction . Campuses created by many colleges in Second Life mirror their real campuses. But Phillip D. Long, associate director of the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, envisions the virtual campus as a student-led laboratory. Only about one-quarter of MIT'S island resembles the university's actual campus. The rest is dedicated to student projects. Mr. Long designed the space, and the New Media Consortium did the construction. MIT "wants to do this in strong collaboration with students," he says. "And we don't want to get ahead of them or project whatever idealized notions we might have, as people who work here, onto what we think the cultural practices and interaction styles of our students might be." In one part of the island, speakers can mount a dais and address a crowd thr...

Software updates give and software updates take away. I know I heard lots of complaints about lost functionality in the Discussion Board feature with the 7.0/7.1 update. You wonder why some of the features were removed...Well, some are returning with the 7.3 update. Here are some key changes: Restoring the capability in release 7.1, the Instructor can again view the Course Discussions in a Tree View, in which the post titles to a particular thread are visible. The use must select the Tree View icon located on the right side of the Course Discussions page. Selecting a post from the Course Discussions page will navigate the user to the Thread Detail page and will display the post as well. On the action toolbar, there are new icons. Mark as Read and Mark as Unread allow the Instructor to classify which forums have been read or not. The Search area has been rolled up into a graphic icon of a magnifying glass. Selecting this icon will drop down the search area. Within the Search tool, it i...

There is online help available for UCR Extension students who are using Blackboard , but not all of them may be aware of it. An easy way to make sure students can find the help is to add a button to the course menu which is a link to the Getting Started with Blackboard page. I've put together step by step instructions which go through how to add the button [ PDF ].

Blackboard will be unavailable from about 10 AM Saturday until 10 AM Sunday while UCR upgrades the system. If you are an instructor in an online, hybrid or web-enhanced course, please let your students know about the upgrade.