Page 17 - Campus Technology, October 2017

IT RELATIONS
training sessions at a given time is kind of impossible.” It also led to an antagonistic relationship between faculty and instructional support staff. “This requirement put [support staffers] in somewhat of an adversarial or watchdog role that wasn’t really very positive,” she explained. “They all agreed they’d much rather be seen as a resource on campus where
faculty would willingly come and seek their assistance.”
To do that, the existing training needed to be revamped in two ways: It was “modularized” into short training courses and placed online. “It sounds simple enough, but that was a major culture shift for that particular development need that we had
on campus,” Tanner noted.
The result was twofold: The instructional support team
could spend its newly freed up time working more directly with faculty, and faculty now had a resource they could go to any time for training.
The only threshold became the completion of an “essentials training” bundle, which explains the simplest activities in Blackboard, such as working with the Grade Center. Once a person has been “certified” in the essentials, he or she can take more advanced training in designing and changing up courses.
Next Up: Deeper Infiltration
Now that Goodwin has become master of the Blackboard grading universe, new ambitions have formed, such as
having faculty use due dates in the LMS and having students upload their assignments there so that all of it can be backed up. Instructors have use of the mobile app, which allows them to access student and course data on the fly. Plus, the institution is adopting Blackboard Predict, which Manley expects will provide “richer information” for the college’s retention work.
Likewise, the changes undertaken at UAFS have led to benefits beyond broader LMS usage. Now, for example, “faculty across campus are willing to be in the same room as the instructional design team,” Tanner wryly suggested. “They understand that we’re trying to help them.” This bonding has led to greater use of online training as well as brief “information sessions” in which
the instructional support team introduces faculty to “some of the cool stuff they can do in class,” activities that hit at the heart of student engagement.
By this fall, 723 of 1,453 courses at UAFS had begun using Blackboard at some level, whether hybrid, online or “web-enhanced” — amounting to about half of the total. “Not bad, really,” asserted Tanner. But the goal is still to get to 100 percent. Until then, she said, “We’re just looking for other positive ways to expand that use of Blackboard so it’s not quite so foreign to faculty. Hopefully, the comfort level will increase.”
Dian Schaffhauser is a senior contributing editor for Campus Technology.
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | October 2017
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