Online Computing Online ComputingDuring the past few years, the collection of network-based applications commonly
used by faculty and students in support of 
classroom-based
teaching and learning has included e-mail, discussion groups, and websites.
The predominant model for creating course websites at most higher education
institutions has been an informal one in which enterprising teaching faculty
members develop their own web-based education tools. Using their own personal
initiative, along with university resources, student employees and a variety
of software applications, faculty members have created course-related websites
that range in quality from fair to excellent.
In the year 2000, NYU's Information Technology Services introduced Blackboard--a commercially available course development and management system currently in use at numerous American colleges and universities. Presently, Blackboard software products and web services reach more than 6,500 institutions in each of the 50 states and in more than 70 countries. Upwards of 3.5 million people worldwide teach and learn in online education environments powered by Blackboard. The principal features of this versatile course delivery system include web browser compatibility, a course template, use of text and multimedia content, search tools, student home pages, threaded discussions, chat rooms, e-mail, file sharing, whiteboards, student grading, test authoring, assessment tools, access control, class roster, and a built-in help manual. During spring 2000, 30 faculty members began using their new web-based Blackboard course shells to post announcements, syllabi, and course documents, and to host after-class discussions among their students. Through vendor presentations and hands-on training with ITS, dozens of faculty members learned the basics of navigating, authoring and managing a Blackboard-based website.
In June 2000, ITS and NYU EQUAL partnered together to use Blackboard to deliver an Online Institute course for faculty, designed to assist instructors in learning to use the Web to enhance their teaching of classroom-based courses. The Online Institute course was offered again in the fall semester, as the number of faculty members using Blackboard rose to just over 200. These faculty members were responsible for more than 300 classes, with enrollments numbering over 4,000 NYU undergraduate and graduate students.
Blackboard is a hybrid product. It contains a score of features that are also found in the software market as independent, robust, and fully-developed products. Helping faculty members determine which software product best fits their needs is one of the roles of the Instructional Technologists at the ITS Faculty Technology Center (FTC). For example, a faculty member who is only seeking a discrete software functionality for supporting after-class online discussion groups and e-mail lists, is likely to be best served by NYU's Lyris forums group software. Another faculty member's needs might be met by a simply constructed website for posting office hours, a class reading list and syllabus. With the addition of Blackboard to the software "menu," it was important for the FTC to understand what features of the software faculty members found most useful for their fall Blackboard-implemented websites.
Therefore, at the conclusion of the fall semester, ITS Academic Computing Services conducted a survey of the 200 faculty members who had just completed their use of Blackboard. Fifty-three responded, of whom 72% were first-time Blackboard users. While 81% of the respondents primarily use MS Windows, their range of software experiences varied. Faculty reported that their prior computer and Internet experiences were distributed as follows:
Eighty-nine percent of faculty respondents reported posting documents to their Blackboard websites during the semester. Of these faculty members, 25% reported spending one to two hours creating content or documents to "build" their site, while 40% spent five hours or more.
The kinds of material posted by faculty were reported as follows:
Overall, 91% of faculty responded that they plan to use Blackboard again. Seventy percent of faculty reported that they were satisfied or very satisfied with Blackboard. As one survey respondent expressed it, "Blackboard is a fantastic tool to help professors." Although we did not conduct a student use survey, 64% of faculty estimated their students' overall response to Blackboard was in the satisfied to very satisfied range. However, 47% of faculty respondents believed that student participation using Blackboard was lower than they had anticipated.
One faculty member stated:
The use of Blackboard incited students to explore the Internet in a mindful and eventually savvy manner...It also generated discussion about accessing different sites and the difference between primary data and popular culture data on the Internet. Students shared resources and even read a novel to which I posted a link online. (It is not otherwise available.) They communicated with museum directors, artists, and scholars all over the country to do their work. We easily sent one another images and favorite websites during the course of the semester. Blackboard instigated students to expand their research horizons beyond the books and journals in the library. I also posted many announcements about exhibitions, plays, and lectures as I found them in various places.
Implementing Blackboard has also involved a fair share of growing pains. During the fall semester, many students and faculty experienced system performance slowdowns, software bugs, and difficulties with ITS business processes. "Blackboard was extremely unreliable," one faculty member complained. "It was so unreliable that I was too discouraged to actively use it. I had high hopes for it but it fizzled."
The main cause of these problems was the new version 5 of Blackboard, installed just prior to the fall semester. Although NYU signed up as a beta-tester of the new version in May 2000 so that any problems could be worked out over the summer, software development delays held back testing and the full release of Blackboard 5 until late summer. When Blackboard 5 was finally released, it contained bugs that the developer worked to fix over the course of the fall semester. Additionally, unresolved inter-operability issues among web browsers, Java, and PC operating systems negatively impact the usability of many web-based applications, including Blackboard. Unfortunately, the problems caused by Internet software complexities will surely affect many program implementations for years to come.
Further complications which negatively affected Blackboard use arose from local issues, such as integrating Blackboard and NYUHome, unifying ITS account authentication and creation processes, and the migration of is*-type Internet accounts to NYU-Home accounts. As the spring semester progresses, however, these issues have been completely overcome or minimized through the efforts of ITS staff. Integration of Blackboard and NYUHome has been accomplished; the migration of is* accounts to NYUHome has been completed; and the request for new accounts has been aided by new software tools and a web-based request form.
The spring semester offers a new collection of online courses for faculty and students. For example, the spring 2001 Online Institute class for faculty, led by Tisha Bender, Ph.D. of NYU EQUAL, has just begun. This semester's class enrollment focus is directed at faculty teaching humanities courses, with additional support from the Humanities Computing Group of ITS Academic Computing Services. The Group, led by Lorna Hughes, will support faculty learning and participate in developing content for the course.
As Connect goes to press, approximately 275 spring classes have active Blackboard-based websites for their enrolled students, and additional departments and programs are expected to submit requests for new Blackboard class accounts in the near future. Our efficiency in account creation and in technical support for the first two weeks of classes has vastly improved from last fall. We believe that this is directly attributable to our new business processes, support structure, and Blackboard's software update.ITS has also established an e-mail address for Blackboard questions and problem reports: blackboard.problems@nyu.edu. Inquiries directed there will be answered within one business day. Of course, the staff of the ITS Faculty Technology Center (212-998-3044) and the ITS Client Services Center (212-998-3333) continue to provide support by telephone.
Overall, the past twelve months have provided us with many important lessons and experiences in the use of online learning for classroom-based courses. It is clear that both faculty and students find value and promise in their experiences with learning management systems such as Blackboard. Most people involved appear to be optimistic about these early trials with technologies that are rapidly evolving to meet the expanding needs and expectations of the higher education community. During the next twelve months, we plan to leverage our collaborations and partnerships with eLearning software vendors, the NYU Libraries, the NYU Center for Teaching Excellence (NYU EQUAL), and NYU Online to expand the available resources for supporting Internet-based technologies for teaching and learning at New York University.
To learn more about Blackboard, please visit www.nyu.edu/its/ftc/, or contact the Faculty Technology Center at 212-998-3044.
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Posted February 16, 2001
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