EdTech @ ADW

To extend the skill set of faculty who have taken the Blackboard Basic Designer and Instructor training that was run by the Ed Tech department, Advanced designer and instructor sessions will be offered during the second half of this semester. As a pre-requisite to taking part in advanced sessions, participants must be shown to be competent at the basic level.

The topics to be covered in the Advanced Designer training sessions are File management, Learning Modules, Assessments and Assignments, Selective Release, SCORM and Crosslist Management.

The topics to be covered in the Advanced Instructor training sessions are Gradebook, Assessment and Assignments, Group Manager, Selective Release and Crosslist management.

Keep a look out for the start dates of the Advanced Designer and Instructor training at ADW.

As an extension of the Blackboard Basic Training, ADW faculty can improve their knowledge of Blackboard Vista by completing a set of simple competencies that are aligned with the training sessions that have already been offered. The competencies are a collection of simple tasks that will allow participants to practice the skills that they have learned in the PD sessions they have attended. Alternatively, for faculty who haven’t taken the training, they can use the competencies to overview the contents of the sessions and then choose which PD sessions they need to attend to improve their skill set. In certain cases, faculty who already have basic blackboard skills can request to complete the Basic Competencies without having attended the training sessions.

If you want to complete the Competency assessment tasks you need a site to complete the tasks in. Please contact Padraig or Brian in Ed Tech who will register you in your site. Keep a look out for some PD sessions where you can drop in and complete your competencies where help is close at hand! When you have completed them contact Padraig or Brian in the Ed Tech department who will arrange that your competencies are checked for completeness.

The Advanced Blackboard Designer and Instructor training due to start in Week 10 of semester 2 will not cover the content that was covered in the Basic training. Therefore, the competencies will be a pre-requisite to attendance on the Advanced training course.

I have been heavily involved in planning and delivering Blackboard sessions for nearly a year now - well it was WebCT when I started! Many people have taken the training and are using Vista with their students. Others are preparing content. I am hearing that this training has been well received by faculty.

• I wonder was it the structure that was very clear from the start - 5 Instructor sessions or 7 Designer sessions.
• Maybe people like the continuity
• Maybe it was the skills based approach (with practically no mention of Pedagogy)
• Alternatively, maybe the content of the sessions was relevant for the learners.
• Maybe it was none of these and something else altogether

I do plan on collecting feedback before the end of the semester from the participants which has risen to well over a hundred by now.

As you probably know, I have attended two Blackboard conferences in Dubai in the past few months. I presented a number of topics and participated in other sessions. It is quite common that over the course of a conference day of say 6 sessions, that there are only one or two that really are either useful or thought provoking. How common is it to regret choosing a particular session and saying that I should have attended the other one?! On my long and lonely drive back to Abu Dhabi, I was wondering how things could be improved for us conference delegates!. Obviously one improvement is having the conference in Abu Dhabi (which would brighten up the day quite considerably).

Here are some questions that are currently in my head.

1. How can we improve the hit rate of useful sessions at a conference?
2. Leaving with just new information after a days work seems to be quite pedagogically un-rich. Can anything be done to improve the types of interactions/collaboration that happens at conferences?
3. Is there a place for a ‘blended conference’?
4. How could Web 2.0 add value to what can be learned at conferences?

I know, too many questions but what the heck!

When I attended the Elearn 2007. conference, I saw a demonstration of UDUTU. This can accessed for free at www.udutu.com. It allows you to create an interactive course online, export it as a zip file, and upack it into a SCORM module that can be imported into Blackboard.  It can also be saved a simple website and accessed online, where it is hosted on the UDUTU servers.

I’ve tried it out and it is very easy to use. However, I am running into errors when I import it into Blackboard. I am not sure yet if this is my fault (choosing the wrong settings or the like), or some incompatibility in the application. If we could get it working, it might prove to be a useful authoring tool. It is not much harder to use than Course Genie, and creates an attractive package.

Jean