The Classroom Experience

Rhonda Blackburn, Associate Provost at the University of Texas at Dallas, gave an interesting discussion about improving the classroom experience.  At her university, she facilitated a project where they took a traditional classroom and put new furniture and moving whiteboards into it, making it very collaborative and more engaging for students.

They found that while a few immediately thought the changes were wonderful, the majority of faculty found the changes chaotic and unstructured.  It wasn’t until the faculty were shown how to use the furniture to their benefit that they began to see how it could benefit both faculty and students.  

For example, one professor found that in a row-based room, students who sat in front tended to participate more while those in the back did not.  In the more flexible room, the teacher could easily make the back of the room the front.  That enabled the instructor to challenge and engage those students.

The key to success was the attitude of the faculty.  The students tended to pick up on and follow the attitude of the professor in the classroom.

She then pointed out that when you design a class in blackboard, it’s important to make it similarly open, collaborative, and welcoming to students.

Like furniture in a room, we make a class more collaborative by the use of groups, discussion boards, and a variety of social communication options.  When furniture was arranged in pods versus rows, teams could be put in those pods so they could work together or discuss ideas together.

She concluded by stating that the two most significant essentials to a successful blackboard course is that (1) it has a clear structure so that students can find what they need, and (2) it is collaborative so that students can get help and communicate with the instructor and other students.

Mini-session: Social Media in the Learning Management System

David Lloyd from Georgia Southern University

Unfortunately this session was in far too small of a room! There was a huge line waiting to get in, and I was able to squeeze in with only two chairs left. The presenter was great, I picked up a number of great things – I think it is very possible to embed social media into a course without requiring that your students use and social media themselves!

Take away #1 – adding widgets into your course such as the Google Voice widget. This will allow students to call you without you having to give out your phone number or without your students having to give you their number!

So many of the different social media tools have widgets you can add right into your course. Another one shown by the presenter was your twitter feed. He added it to the footer of his course homepage – this would be very useful for an instructor to use twitter to send quick updates and announcements to their students who can view the updates in the Blackboard course or on twitter all without requiring students to have a twitter account. With all of the twitter widget options, you can embed various tweet searches for specific topics by specifying hashtags such as #BbWorld11 for Blackboard World 2011.

Another big take away for me was embedding items in the description/instruction area of discussion threads. I had never seen this, but it is so cool! An instructor could embed a specific YouTube video (or any embedable social media widget) into any part of their course in which html is allowed. In the picture I took, David embedded the YouTube video of yesterday’s keynote speaker Steve Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From. The possibilities are simply endless.