Blackboard Vista

Draft

Definition

Blackboard Vista is a commercial learning management system. Blackboard Inc. sells several products. A first LMS branded "Blackboard" LMS was available in 1997. This entry describes Blackboard Vista (2008), just one of the products and that is rather based on WebCT VISTA (if we understand right ...)

The purpose of this article (initially) is simply to take some notes while configuring BB VISTA to support a presence course.

Interfaces overview - designer, teacher, student and my

Course designers, teachers and students can use different tool sets available through different views. A course designer/teacher has access to all three views. In some institutions, teachers may only have access to the "teach view". Here is a short overview:

Course designers (Build view)

• Course tools: contents, communication and evaluation tools
• Designer tools: in particular "manage course" to configure course tools (e.g. remove/add from the available list), appearance, file management, etc.

Teacher (Teach view)

• Course tools (the same as above)
• Instructor tools: course, assessment, grading management, tracking etc. plus the "manage course"

Student (Student view)

• Course tools: same as the course designer and teacher
• My tools (student tools): evaluation and progress tracking

Finally, each user has a "My Blackboard" page.

• It can be configure to include various "channels" (tools). e.g. Course list, Aggregated calendar, some bookmark tools etc. Channels can be made mandatory or not inaccessible by the site administrator.
• Allows to change the profile
• The "Content Manager" tab gives central access to all files created

Course design

Course tools

A course is arranged either around "Course Content" (first item in course tools) or around the course menu containing various tools or both. These tools are avaible to designer, instructor and student (although in different ways). Items of the course tools menu can be hidden from students and you may link to some tools (or instances of these tools) from various places. E.g. from a course content folder you may link to specific forum. WebCT/Blackboard terminoloy is a bit confusing. E.g. "tools" are called "contents", "pages" you create are called "files" etc.

There exist four families of course tools:

1. Available content tools
   1. Create (and move) folders (and sub-folders)
   2. Insert a file, i.e. create file or insert a file from various places, e.g. from the internal file manager or from you own computer.
   3. Learning modules (are multi-page XHTML documents plus links to course tools organized into a tree)
   4. SCORM modules (you can insert)
   5. Some communication tools, in particular discussions also can be used to create contents.
   6. Links to other contents (i.e. course tools)
   7. Web links manager (students can be allowed to add links)
   8. Library (this can be site-wide configured, e.g. organize access to restricted resources)
2. Available communication tools
   • Announcements. A tool to make announcements visible in a central local
   • Chat.
   • Discussions, i.e. Forums (threaded topics), a collective blog, or journals.
   • Mail
   • Who is online
   • Roster. Students can edit their profile, e.g. add a picture
3. Tools for learning activities. There are 3 sorts:
   1. Quizzes, test, surveys
   2. Assignments
   3. Discussion tools (see above). These are gradeable.
   4. Goals tool (define goals for students to achieve, can be linked to contents)
   • There exist (in the release I am working with) no "construction tools" like collaborative wikis or concept maps
4. Organizational tools
   • Calendar
   • Search
   • Syllabus

Depending on how permissions are set up, you can can configure most of these course tools. "Build view" gives more options than "Teach View". There are 2 places:

• When you use a tool as designer (e.g. discussions)
• In the "manage course"/ item of designer/instruction tools you can trough "Settings" give various rights to user categories (e.g. students and teaching assistants) for given tools. E.g. possibility to delete contents, to grade, enable topic creation for students, etc.

Course organization

Organization of contents can be done in several ways:

• You may just decide to use just a small selected subset of course tools (e.g. forums and assignments) and then add a folder with some contents. In this case students will use various tools according to their needs (e.g. click on assigments). This is a recommended minimal configuration for classroom teaching.
• Use the course content tool to sequence a course through learning units represented by folders. E.g. you can organise a class by topic or lessons (week 1, week 2, etc.). You then can add course tools ("add content links") to each folder. In this case, one could hide (not remove) course tools in the menu.
• Alternatively you could use learning modules. These work a bit like folders. You can create a mix of pages, headings and course tools and organize them in a hierarchical tree. Slighly more complex than folders and the result will show to the student as menu tree.

Notice on sequencing:

• This software is based on the idea that you assemble files and activities in folders or learning modules. For each created folder or learning module you then can add various assets (resources and activities) through the "Add Content Link" menu. In other words, you may assemble your course like a traditional instructional designer: Firstly created materials and upload these through the File Manager, then sequence by assembling these materials and activities.
• To put just "text" on a "folder" page, edit the header and/or footer in the Page Options. E.g. when you create a folder that is called "week 1" you can describe week 1's purpose by editing the header and then just link to few tools. Of course, this still means that various elements can't be linked togehter, but you have to live with it.
• If you use a lot of external resources (web links), then you should consider replacing the single "external resource icon" by customized ones (e.g. PDF, Wikis, etc.).

Designer and teacher tools

Designer tools

As a course designer you will use the "Build" Tab. It will give access to

• All the course tools (see above). You mainly will work with "course tools", e.g. create learning modules or arrange/assemble coursecontents.
• The designer tools

Manage course

This tool allows you e.g. to

• add/remove course tools available
• Define skin and icon set
• Define behavior of some tools
• It also contains one bit of useful information, the Course URL.
• A very nice tool is date rollover. It allows to prepare a course for a new term by adjusting dates and times.

As a newbie course designer you can ignore this tool for starters ....

File manager

• Upload/create assets to be included in teaching materials
• Notice: You may upload files from various places and tools. All these uploads will end up per default in the file manager's top directory. The same is true for files you create.
  • So you might as well start being a bit systematic from start and sort out files as soon as you upload.
  • If you move files around through the file manager, links will be maintained I believe, e.g. if you link to a file from a folder or a learning module and the move the file to a subdirectory, the link will stay alive.

Grading Forms

You may as a designer, create grading forms and rubrics. Not tested, but seems to be quite practical.

Instructor tools

(stub section)

Also includes "manage course", see above

Assessment manager

• View and grade completed quizzes

Assignment dropbox

• Manage assignments, i.e. view, mark and (if needed) return for revision

Gradebook

View, enter and manage grades

Groupmanager

• Organize students in group to organize teamwork

Tracking

• Allows to track various student activities, i.e. it's a report generator

Blackboard and WebCT as major players

Blackboard legal issues

Blackboard is known for getting US patents (e.g. patent 6,988,138 on "Internet-based education support system and methods") that granted them rights for a combination of things that have been done with prior systems. In the opinion of Daniel K. Schneider, a model case for something that is deeply wrong with American patent law. See Alfred Essa's blog posts or Blackboard Wikipedia page for more details.

For more information, use google. There are thousands of posts regarding this controversy.

History

I, Daniel K. Schneider, don't really know enough WebCT and Blackboard history to understand how their products evolved. I remember having played with WebCT in 1997 and bought a WebCT license in 1998 (Sparc Solaris 2.5 distribution) and before that we played with TopClass, a commercial variant of WEST, the first web-based e-learning platform. Back in 1995, Blackboard (the company) didn't exist and if I recall right, there wasn't any Blackboard product in 1997.

Date: Sat, 04 Jan 1997 10:07:50 +0100
From: "Murray W. Goldberg" <goldberg@cs.ubc.ca>
Subject: Tool for Publishing Courses on the WWW
To: cm-collab-learning@mailbase.ac.uk
Reply-to: "Murray W. Goldberg" <goldberg@cs.ubc.ca>
MIME-version: 1.0
Precedence: list
X-Unsub: To leave, send text 'leave cm-collab-learning' to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk

Hi everyone. Over the last year we at UBC have been working hard
on a tool that facilitates the creation of sophisticated web-based
educational environments by educators with little or no technical
expertise. We are looking for beta testers.

The tool is called WebCT (http://homebrew.cs.ubc.ca/webct). 
.....

Links

Blackboard, the company

• Blackboard

About BB's legal claims

• The NOSE Excellent blog posts about this case.
• Blackboard Inc. (Wikipedia)
• Blackboard Learning System (Wikipedia)

Tutorials

• BlackboardQuick Tutorials (a set of Flash movies).