Blackboard Blogs

BbWorld Program Update: First Pre-Conference Workshops Announced

Greetings from the BbWorld planning team! 

As previous BbWorld attendees know, the event is an important opportunity for networking and knowledge sharing that can go a long way toward helping attendees find greater success in their day-to-day work. That networking is part of why BbWorld remains the most valuable training and development event of the year for Blackboard^® users. And BbWorld’s pre-conference workshops are where the most intensive, roll up your sleeves, hands on training takes place. This week, details on Blackboard-led workshops were announced, marking the first major BbWorld program announcement. 

Beginning with the End in Mind

By Jon Mott, Assistant to the Academic VP – Academic Technology, Brigham Young University

When teachers or instructional designers apply technology to their teaching (and to their students’ learning), the goals they start with are vastly more important than the technologies or the tools they use.  We’ve probably all seen extraordinarily powerful tools used poorly and vice versa.  The challenge before us to match the right tools to the right teaching and learning challenges/opportunities.

I have had the opportunity to serve as a director in the Blackboard Exemplary Course Program for the past four years.  One of the most important lessons I have learned by reviewing the hundreds of courses that have been submitted is that the technology should always come second.  This might seem an odd assertion given that the award program is about effective use of a technological product, i.e. Blackboard.  However, it has been almost always immediately obvious when I've encountered a course that seems to have been designed merely to use Blackboard, and not necessarily to pursue some other set of teaching and learning goals.

Exemplary Courses, Exemplary Instructors. How Did We Do It?

By Marie-Pierre Huguet, Ph.D., Senior Course Developer, Office of Undergraduate Education, Center for Educational Innovation, Research, and Outreach, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

As a course developer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, I have the privilege of working with very talented faculty – three of whom have won the Blackboard Exemplary Course award: Professor Danchak with GUI Building in 2003, Professor Wright with International Business in 2005, and Professors Haley and Steiner with Nuclear Phenomena of Engineering Analysis in 2007.

Three courses. Three departments. Three delivery modes. Three instructors. As different as they possibly can be. How did we do it?

Did we discover the perfect formula? Unearth the magical blend of tools and techniques? Concoct the absolute cocktail for success? Did we design a flawless template? Identify every educational nook and cranny? Embed effective practices? Did we master the rubric? Encapsulate the criteria?

No, not really, but it would be nice to think so. Still...how did we do it?