iSean

at least once a year, i use Blackboard for an entire course. i never use it for my Technology in Education course, but this past semester I was teaching a technology related graduate class for special education teachers. Typically this class has many more students who are not as comfortable with using technology as my undergraduate students are. So, I use Blackboard to keep things simple and to keep me updated on how BB is evolving.

i still hate the online discussion forum in BB. it’s poorly implemented and it doesn’t look a whole lot better in the beta version of BB i now have access to (our university is switching in May). Notice how the forum still defaults to a threaded view (click to view larger version):

one of the features in BB that has some promise is the Discussion Grader. this is a tool that allows an instructor to easily view a student’s participation in the online discussions. here’s 2 screen shots showing a students who participated well versus a student who quickly added some posts (click to view larger versions):

the tool even gives a word count. while i am not one to tell my students how long a post should be, i do require that my students contribute substantively to each discussion and i define “substantive” so there is no confusion.

in contrast, i use phpBB forums. these forums have many more features that i feel enhance the experience for students and for me. notice the contrast between BB above and my forum here (click to view larger version):

the phpBB forums have avatars so we can “see” each other. the phpBB forums have signatures so i can see names easily and we can quickly ascertain what folks intend to teach as that might help to understand their perspective on a given topic, etc. and, all of the messages automatically appear on one page, which makes it easy to read a whole discussion without needing to click and click and click. there are other features as well, but this gets at some of the bigger ones that appeal to me.

that being said, i don’t like using phpBB forums when it comes time to grade. i can view all of any user’s posts quite easily, but the tool only shows me a preview as seen here (click to view a larger version):

sometimes i can tell whether a post is substantive or not, but other times i have to physically open the thread to view the posts contained therein.

fortunately, phpBB is easily modified and i am sure that a module has already been written to fix this issue. i’ll take some time next semester to find a module to show complete posts in this view rather than snippets. i have already used modules to turn off the ability for anyone to view my user list and thus view any user’s posts. only i can see this view. i used this forum for 2 years before i found that tool. while the message board was closed, a spammer could still see the user name list and that sometimes contains last names, etc. much safer now.

Technorati Tags: Blackboard, online learning, phpBB