Faculty’s embrace of Blackboard
triples since tool's campus debut

by Mark McGowan

More NIU faculty are embracing Blackboard and its myriad possibilities, according to three-year usage statistics that reveal the number of courses using the Web-based tool has more than tripled since its introduction.

Statistics for Fall 2004 show more than 1,110 courses taking advantage of Blackboard. Fewer than 350 courses incorporated the Web course management system in Spring 2002.

Eighty-four percent of the courses using Blackboard last semester featured online content, a usage that had reached 94 percent at this time last year.

“Students are demanding it,” said Murali Krishnamurthi, director of the Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center, who attributes its success to the collaborative efforts of Information Technology Services, Faculty Development and Records and Registration. “Students are starting to expect immediate responses. They think it’s like a cell phone or handheld technology.”

“If there isn’t a Blackboard component to a class, students want to know why,” agreed Carol Scheidenhelm, assistant director of Faculty Development. “The neatest thing about Blackboard is that it’s not just new faculty using this. It has spread through tenured people who’ve been here for years, people who’ve just started and people in the middle. I haven’t seen a gender issue. I haven’t seen an age issue. People are just excited about teaching in new ways.”

Blackboard, which first appeared at NIU in 2000 and made its official debut in the fall of 2001, enables faculty to post course materials online easily – and without designing and launching their own Web pages. An upgrade is planned between the spring and summer semesters.

Faculty use the program for online-only courses and for traditional classroom courses, which Faculty Development then calls “blended.” (It saves money for academic departments during times of tight budgets by eliminating the cost of producing handouts.)

It allows for online discussion, both synchronous (a chat room) and asynchronous (a bulletin board). Professors also can join the discussion and monitor progress of group activities taking placing via the Internet, issue announcements, survey students, give tests and figure and post – albeit privately – grades.

Students can share documents, conduct group work without needing to find a common meeting time and access their course materials and syllabi from “anywhere in the world where there’s Internet access.” It also gives students the chance to float their ideas in front of a small group before unveiling them to a full classroom, Scheidenhelm said.

As professors progress in their understanding and use of Blackboard, many start to post multimedia files, including audio, video and PowerPoint presentations. They can record narration that computer users can listen to at any speed they choose and, of course, play it back again.

“Blackboard allows faculty to be more flexible with how they instruct,” said Dan Cabrera, multimedia coordinator in Faculty Development. “They can somewhat tailor their instruction to the needs of their students.”

Despite the rising use, however, challenges and questions remain.

Chief among them, Krishnamurthi said, is the changing tastes of students regarding technology.

“The trend right now is toward handheld technologies but, interestingly, Blackboard is coming up with a handheld version for PDAs (personal digital assistants),” Krishnamurthi said.

“It means faculty must look ahead to these issues pedagogically for developing course materials and communicating with students. From the other side – offices like ours, ITS and the support units – we have to look ahead for supporting these technologies we see coming. Three or five years from now, a lot of this could all be handheld technologies. What do we have to do now to get started for that?”

But, for now, Scheidenhelm and Cabrera press faculty to think long and hard about what they want to accomplish with Blackboard.

“When faculty come to me, we start by looking for the rationale. I have them ask: ‘Why would I want to use it?’ It does take some investment of time,” Cabrera said.

“Like anything, it has to be set up properly,” Scheidenhelm said. “It’s so helpful if faculty come to the workshops we offer, not just on how to use Blackboard, but on the pedagogy of teaching with technology. That’s so important. Using Blackboard puts more of the responsibility of learning on the student.”

2-14-05