Page 16 - Campus Technology, October 2017

IT RELATIONS
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | October 2017
Center of Teaching Excellence as well as a faculty member, had discovered a few crossed wires at her institution.
The only people required to use Blackboard were those delivering online courses. Others were handing in student grades “willy-nilly.” All the grades needed to be posted into Jenzabar SONIS, the student information system, but they might arrive in the form of spreadsheet data, via Blackboard data or inserted directly into SONIS. However, when a student would dispute a grade, all the college had to work with was the final grade itself and none of the particular details of the student’s assignments. Discrepancies proliferated: Points were used vs. percentages, assessments weren’t linked to the right categories, grade posting wasn’t done in a timely manner and gradebooks weren’t being backed up. That drove students crazy.
Then, two student and faculty surveys done between fall 2015 and spring 2016 as well as an analysis of Blackboard usage data exposed a few somewhat shocking surprises. A biggie: For some courses, it appeared there was a lag between the beginning of the semester and when students heard from their instructors. In some cases faculty took time to prepare for the course but failed to interact during the first week of an online class.
During a time when retention had become a major part of the college’s five-year growth plan, those problems became “a huge issue,” Manley said. She emphasized that instructors
may have been communicating with students outside of the LMS — by e-mail or some other mechanism — but there was no evidence of the interactions.
That was when Goodwin administration dropped the hammer: Blackboard would be used in all classes, online and face-to-face. While gradebook usage was the “big push,” according to Manley, faculty were also encouraged to post their syllabi and announcements on the LMS.
Training Starts the Transformation
While both institutions wanted to land at the same place and came up with similar tactics for achieving their goals, they approached the overall solution with unique perspectives. The use of the LMS Gradebook was mandated by administra- tion at Goodwin. While that could have been tried at UAFS as well (and there were conversations about doing so), Tanner said, “I’d much rather have faculty willingly use a tool because they believe it’s helpful, because it’s providing some level of service or value to them in their class.”
The big tell: It’s all about the training.
Over the course of just a few months, Goodwin’s instruc- tional design team came up with an asynchronous environ- ment in which to host nine lessons for instructors in three modes: video, video transcript or PDF. Lessons covered the basics: working with the grade center, creating assignments, deploying tests, setting up weekly units, creating announce-
ments and posting a syllabus. If the instructor has any experi- ence with Blackboard, it’ll take about three hours to go through the training, and a little longer if not, Manley said.
Initially, to move from one unit to the next, the instructor had to pass a five-question quiz. The original pass rate was set at 100 percent, but “that didn’t go over too well,” recalled Manley. “During one of our faculty senate meetings, they were giving me their input on the initial start of this and were squawking about the 100 percent, [saying that] nobody’s perfect.” She offered up an 80 percent pass rate, which they found acceptable.
When the training was done, a screen filled with confetti, a certificate of completion was printed out and the Center of Teaching Excellence was notified about the accomplishment. By fall 2016, Manley estimated, everybody who was teaching that semester had gone through the training. Now it’s just a continual effort as new instructors come on board.
UAFS started from a different place. Traditionally, training was required for anybody embarking on teaching an online or hybrid class. Faculty members had to get “certified,” which meant attending in-person training once a week over six weeks. By the end of that, they were expected to produce either a module of content or a full chapter’s worth of material to show they knew how.
That stipulation “became a barrier,” said Tanner. “Trying to get multiple faculty across campus to be able to attend