Blackboard system

A brief history of Blackboard.
Blackboard LLC was founded in 1997 by two education advisors, Matthew Pittinsky and Michael Chasen, as a consulting firm to provide technical standards for online learning applications. Blackboard LLC was contracted to the IMS Global Learning Consortium, a worldwide non-profit organization within the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative of Educause. Blackboard’s vision was to provide a user-friendly means by which college professors could put course information, including syllabi, reference sites, and study guides, on the Web.
In 1998, Blackboard merged with CourseInfo LLC, a course management software provider and startup company at Cornell University, and the merged company soon released their first software product for online learning. Blackboard’s continued growth and the expanding public profile was driven by acquisitions. In March 2000, Blackboard Inc. acquired the Richmond-base competitor MadDuck Technologies. In January 2001, Blackboard purchased CampusWide Access Solutions Inc. from AT&T and CEI SpecialTeams from iCollege Inc. In 2002, another online learning competitor, Promethius, was purchased from George Washington University, and then in 2003, the assets of the transaction system company, SA Cash, were acquired.
Finally, Blackboard released plans to raise up to $75 million in an initial stock offering and went public in June 2004. Since then, Blackboard Inc. Merged with the rival e-learning software company WebCT and together it is estimated they control up to 80 percent of the academic course management system market in North America. Blackboard is used by more than 70 percent of the U.S. colleges and universities named to theForbes.com Most Connected Campuses’ List. As of June 2006, the Blackboard empire includes over 12 million users in over 60 countries. Products are offered in 12 languages to over 2,200 learning institutions and contain more than 2,500 supplements from educational publishers. Blackboard Inc. (BBBB) is traded on the NASDAQ exchange and through the course of 2005, the trading price approximately doubled. With metrics like a renewal rate approaching 90 percent and a continued trend of moving clients from lower level services to higher level licenses, investors are positive on the prospects of Blackboard Inc.

Blackboard portfolio of products. Blackboard Inc. offers two comprehensive product lines which are termed the Networked Transaction Environment (NTE) and the Networked Learning Environment (NLE). [2,3] The NTE product is the Blackboard Commerce Suite which contains the Blackboard Transaction System, the Blackboard Community System and Bb One. The Blackboard Suite provides software for the establishment and functioning of universal financial and data accounts for students, faculty, and other members of the campus community, enabling clients to track commerce and access transactions on campus, off campus, and online within a one-card program. The NLE product is the Blackboard Academic Suite which contains the Blackboard Learning System, the Blackboard Community System and the Blackboard Content System. This single platform integrates data and applications for e-learning. The Blackboard Learning System is the heart of the NLE and it enables instructors to create and manage course matter, employ publisher content, communicate with students, and evaluate performance.

Benefits of the Blackboard Learning System
Students and faculty may benefit from course management systems such as the Blackboard Learning System. Potential benefits include: (1) increased availability, (2) quick feedback, (3) improved communication, (4) tracking, and (5) skill building.

Increased availability.
Blackboard can be accessed from the internet at anytime and anywhere. Students can retrieve all of their course materials including assignments, lecture notes, slides, internet hyperlinks, and audio/visual aids. They can submit their assignments as soon as they are complete. It is this accessibility that most appeals to students. In a 2004 survey conducted by Duke University, students were presented with a list of 10 Blackboard functions. The students were asked to select those functions that were most useful to them. The number one choice for 85% of students was “easy access to course materials and readings.” In 2005, Bowdoin College in Maine conducted a Blackboard Pilot Study of students in web-enhanced courses using Blackboard. Of the students who responded, 61% indicated that Blackboard was most helpful “in terms of increasing my access to course materials.” Availability is paramount for students.

Quick feedback.
There are two principal types of feedback provided to students via Blackboard: faculty-initiated feedback and automated feedback. Instant grading, and therefore instant feedback, can be provided when using Blackboard’s Test Manager function for quizzes and exams. If the instructor selects the appropriate feedback options, students can take their tests and have all objective-based questions graded and scores available immediately after they submit their responses. Even if there are essay questions on tests, which must be graded individually, students can see sample answers and thus have a good idea of their outcome on the test. Students can submit their homework assignments from anywhere and see if the assignments they have submitted have been graded. Using the Blackboard Gradebook, assignments can be returned to the students and grades can be viewed confidentially. Faculty using Blackboard can also get instant feedback through the Blackboard’s Survey option which allows students to respond immediately and anonymously to multiple choice or true-false questions about the class.

Improved communication.
There are several features of Blackboard that allow for communications with students. Four of the more distinctive options are announcements, discussions, virtual classroom, and email. The announcement function is available to students immediately after log on in the Blackboard system. This assures that all students are current and this minimizes administrative work for faculty. As for the discussion function, the literature indicates that asynchronous discussion within course management systems develops collegiality among students and provides a means of support for students. The Blackboard option, termed Post a Question, encourages students to respond to fellow students’ questions and allows instructor surveillance. The virtual classroom is a synchronous environment which supports text-based chat and allows live interaction among participants. The email option within Blackboard is very flexible. Each student’s email address can be stored within the student’s profile area. Blackboard provides the ability to send email to individual students, to groups of students, or to all students.

Tracking.
Blackboard tracks student usage of courses and posts these results in the course statistics area. Instructors can obtain statistics on all students or individual students within the course. Individual assignments can also be tracked. Date and time stamps are included in the Last Submitted/Modified section of the submitted assignment, allowing for easy identification of late assignments. Students can also track their own progress by viewing the Gradebook.

Skill building.
There are several additional skills that are promoted with the use of Blackboard. These skills include organization and time management, which go hand-in-hand in helping students carry out their assignments efficiently. Blackboard provides the ability to include a calendar for each course in which a student is enrolled, thus optimizing students’ efforts to match course expectations. Current entries for each course are displayed in the Welcome area that the student sees after login. All documents posted by the instructor can provide start and end dates and times. The use of these dates and times for all documents, including tests and assignments, encourages students to use their time wisely. Likewise, checking the Course Calendar or the Gradebook, where all assignments are listed, allows the student to allocate time efficiently. In summary, course management systems like the Blackboard Learning System are beneficial to student learning. Donna Patterson, Associate Administrator of Technology at Valparaiso University School of Law, summarized a survey in her paper encouraging faculty to use technology in teaching and stated the point well: “The students felt that technology helps them feel more organized, absorb more material, and decipher the information with greater ease. The number one response from the student surveys was that they find learning with technology more interesting than sitting in a classroom with a dry erase board.”

Drawbacks of the Blackboard Learning System
Some of the drawbacks or limitations associated with the Blackboard Learning System include:
(1) the software is harder to learn than expected, (2) certain options may be restricted to specific operating systems, (3) there are inefficiencies in bandwidth use when materials have to be downloaded every time access is sought, and (4) cost.

Blackboard is hard to learn
A survey of 730 faculty, staff and students in the University of Wisconsin System, the majority of who use Blackboard, found that course management systems are harder to learn to use than expected. The survey represented 10 percent of the total faculty and half of those using course management systems. Faculty members found course management systems “time-consuming and inflexible.” The study also found that despite expectations, many students were not proficient with the technology. A separate study, an evaluation of Blackboard as a platform for distance education delivery at Hampton University School of Nursing, found that the internet is often a new learning environment for those returning to University for graduate degrees. These non-traditional students are often older and less experienced with campus computational instruction tools than are resident students and find working with the online Blackboard Learning System difficult. Furthermore, an independent survey of U.S. university websites shows that most have web pages dedicated to address common Blackboard problems and to provide means of troubleshooting. Although promoted as an easy-to-use system, there is a learning curve for Blackboard that precludes full and timely utility.

Blackboard options may be restricted to particular operating systems.
As reported on dailyprincetonian.com, initial announcements by Blackboard Inc. in 2001 were that new versions of its software would provide additional features only to those running Blackboard on Microsoft NT servers. This bundling of individual programs and applications within specific operating systems has been maligned over and over by innumerable critics. Still others find that Blackboard limits creativity, technologically speaking, by confining instruction to a restricted format. Stephen Arnold, a college instructor and Gentoo Linux developer, promotes open-source tools rather than fixed platforms for supporting classroom instruction, saying “It (open-source tools) gives me the freedom to try almost anything that comes to mind.”

Blackboard system inefficiencies.
Chris Thomas, chief strategist for Intel, is an advocate of mobilized technology and a critic of portal-based systems like Blackboard. Richard Culatta’s blog summarized Thomas’ reasons to mobilize to open-source technologies in which it is noted that there are significant costs and technological impacts of wasting bandwidth with portal-based systems like Blackboard, particularly when materials must be downloaded in order to view them. Dependence on server portal solutions is always subject to network problems. When information is sent directly to mobile devices, there is no system to crash. According to Thomas, the adherence to portal-based systems like Blackboard is, in essence, teaching students with archaic technology.

Cost.
Spending on information technology by colleges and universities is expected to set a record in the 2005-2006 academic years. According to the American Council on Education, costs associated with higher educational telecommunications this past year are estimated to be $7 billion dollars, a 35 percent increase from the prior year. These costs primarily reflect prices charged by outside internet service providers and course management system providers like Blackboard. According to Blackboard executives, costs for their network environment products, including Blackboard Learning System, may start low but as subscribers integrate more functions into Blackboard, subscription licenses may be $200,000 to $400,000-a-year. [14] For these and other reasons, the Blackboard Learning System presents drawbacks for many faculty, students, and CFOs of higher education institutions. As the world of learning becomes flatter, more and perhaps better options, such as open-source learning management systems, are becoming available and these are empowering students and teachers in today’s pedagogical arena.

Applications of the Blackboard Learning System in Higher Education
Distance learning: Blackboard and the online learner
According to Dr. Curtis J. Bonk, professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University and recipient of the Most Outstanding Achievement Award from the U.S. Distance Learning Association, there are four different types of learners which he defines as R2D2, for “read, reflect, display, and do.” The first type of learner is the reader. This student is the auditory and verbal learner who prefers words, written language and spoken explanations. The Blackboard Learning System allows the instructor to easily meet the needs of the reader students. Lecture notes, audio recordings, animations, learning activities, case studies and video clips are easily added to the Blackboard system. These resources may be developed by the instructor or very commonly through the editor’s supplemental online material. Most editors provide the course cartridge download key and either the instructor or the Blackboard administrator enters the key under “control panel: import course cartridge.” The editor’s resources include the plug-in computer requirements. After the course cartridge has been downloaded, instructors can customize and individualize the course with their own specific content and requirements. The student is directed to the resources in the course documents or in the index easily located on the announcement page. The second type of learner is the reflective learner. This student is the observational learner who prefers to reflect, observe, view or watch learning. They want to see the answers. The Blackboard systems can be used to meet this students needs through the explanation of specific requirements and use of sample responses. The reflective learner likes to make careful judgments and view things from different perspectives. Blackboard’s discussion board allows the reflective learner to research an unlimited expanse of topics, make judgments and elaborate on the answers to specific questions posted either by the instructor or by other students. The third type of learner learns from display and is the visual learner. The visual learner prefers diagrams, flowcharts, timelines, pictures, films and demonstrations. The animations, video clips, audio recordings, web links and pictures embedded within specific course cartridges or accessed online meet this learner’s needs. In the Blackboard Learning System, materials in the educational publishers’ course supplements contain additional resources to reinforce lecture notes and postings to the discussion board. The fourth type of learner is one that learns best from doing. This student is the tactile or kinesthetic learner. According to Dr. Bonk this type of learner enjoys simulations, role play, creative movements, dramatization, and hands on projects. [15] The needs of this student are also met within the Blackboard Learning System as for example by using the course editor’s learning activities and case studies. Learning activities are varied, ranging from simple games like crossword puzzles, hang man, sequencing and matching exercises to online and offline reference links to advanced topics.

A blackboard-system application consists of three major components:

The software specialist modules, which are called knowledge sources (KSs). Like the human experts at a blackboard, each knowledge source provides specific expertise needed by the application. The ability to support interaction and cooperation among diverse KSs creates enormous flexibility in designing and maintaining applications. As the pace of technology has intensified, it becomes ever more important to be able to replace software modules as they become outmoded or obsolete.
The blackboard, a shared repository of problems, partial solutions, suggestions, and contributed information. The blackboard can be thought of as a dynamic "library" of contributions to the current problem that have been recently "published" by other knowledge sources.
The control shell, which controls the flow of problem-solving activity in the system. Just as the eager human specialists need a moderator to prevent them from trampling in a mad dash to grab the chalk, KSs need a mechanism to organize their use in the most effective and coherent fashion. In a blackboard system, this is provided by the control shell.Famous examples of early academic blackboard systems are the Hearsay II speech recognition system and Douglas Hofstadter's Copycat and Numbo projects.