improving the design of Blackboard courses for mobile devices. (view:all)
A very “now” question is, what can Blackboard course instructors do to enhance the potential of mobile learners within their courses? This can be addressed through various approaches one of which is usability. However, it does involve the initial work of identifying how academics are currently using Blackboard, in terms of the types of activities that they are trying to promote and the tools that they are using. The following develops a framework by which we can discuss how people are using their courses. This is developed from two previous pieces of work, Mason (1998) framework for considering the different way of using a VLE to support or deliver courses, and Cook (2002) simple to complex model of using a VLE. I have “tweaked them”
Mason (1998) identifies three models;
• Content and support model – where pre-prepared content is delivered in print or online and support is provided online. Content and support are not integral to one another, ie., online support is an optional extra and is not integrated into learning activities. This is relatively easy to establish but does not fully exploit the benefits of online learning.
• Wrap-around model – where there is a mixture of pre-prepared content and online learning activities. The learning activities involve online discussion and collaborative activities.
• Integrated model – where most of the learning takes place via collaborative online activities and content is largely determined by the learners, either individually or as a group. Learning is very much student centred and highly collaborative.
Cook (2002) developed a “simple to complex use” which was presented as a table. The focus is on mapping the type of tasks that people might achieve using their VLE course. I’m assuming this should not be viewed as a spectrum of use as a criticism would be that the reader might implicitly assume that there is a progression from the simple to complex. I’d view it more as an opportunity for the Blackboard instructor to “pix and mix” the use of the VLE to meet their specific needs. I’ve revamped the way this is represented, and added a few new tasks to account for this being developed a while ago.
The following diagram outlines a quick and easy way to categories the different ways of using a VLE within the institutional learning space. It then links these uses to the tools within our current Blackboard installation.
The next stage is to use this framework as a means of representing use in a School at the University of Bristol as a snapshot. So that this will contextualise are good practice in terms of what the course instructor needs to do to make these uses easy on a mobile device for the on campus student.
Figure 1
original powerpoint slide