Developers+

Guest post by Paige Brooks-Jeffiers, eLearning Technology Coordinator, Kentucky Community and Technical College System and a member of the Ask Dr. C program, a free question and answer service for Blackboard users. If you teach courses using Blackboard, you are probably aware of the grade center and its functions. For those not familiar, the feature allows instructors to centralize their grading and student assessment digitally, while at the same time, provides students access to their progress on individual assignments in the course. All of this is well and good, but as the educators, we need a tool to help manage not only each individual grade but also to identify students who are falling behind and, sometimes, spot exceptional achievers and encourage them to push even further.

Dr. Malcolm Murray is the Learning Technologies Team Leader at Durham University. Please join him for his session “Letting the Lunatics Run the Asylum: Students Developing Code for the Production Environment,” on Tuesday, July 12, 2011, 8:30-9:15AM, Titian 2303. Dr. Murray will also be presenting at BbWorld. To learn more about that session, read his earlier blog post, “Rethinking Student Feedback.” Last summer I got the opportunity to try something that I’d been wanting to do for the last five years – get some students working on building blocks! What began as an apparently simple task soon revealed itself to be far more complicated – perhaps the term “lunatic” I have used in the title of the presentation applies more to me than the students! That said, ultimately this was one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done.

This summer marks Blackboard’s 9th annual Developers Conference in Las Vegas, on July 11-12, just before BbWorld. DevCon has come a long way since its roots as a developer workshop meetup at Georgetown University. DevCon has evolved through the years to meet the needs of all of Blackboard’s technical community. It is the premier professional development opportunity of the year to learn about the technical capabilities of the product and get your technical questions answered. Sessions this year focus on topics including:

• Performance, reliability, and security
• System administration, capacity planning, and back office integration
• Open Standards, interoperability, and change management
• Building learning tools that make course administration easier and facilitate evolving pedagogical models

Stephen P. Vickers is the Technology Enhanced Learning Manager at The University of Edinburgh. Please join him, along with Simon Booth from the University of Stirling, during their presentation, “A Plug and Play Learning Application Integration – Seamlessly Connect to Learning” on Thursday, July 14, 2011 from 10:15AM-11:10AM in Titian 2205. Many go to Vegas in the hopes of a big win.  Well come to Vegas next month and I can guarantee you a win-win-win.  The IMS Basic Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification truly delivers a win-win-win.  It is a win for teachers and learners.  It is a win for Blackboard system administrators.  And, it is a win for developers of elearning applications. One of the great things about the second week of July is that thousands of people with a common goal all come together in a single place.  The common goal is enhancing the student learning experience.  This year promises to be even more exciting.  Not only do we have OSCELOT Open Source Day 6, DevCon and BbWorld, but also the Blackboard Collaborate Connections Summit. This breadth of activity is perfectly mirrored in the impact of Basic LTI on the eLearning community.

Guest Post by Nancy Webb, Instructional Designer, College of Southern Nevada and a member of the Ask Dr. C program, a free question and answer service for Blackboard users. Often, when we think of online course instruction, and the usage of a Learning Management Systems (LMS) to facilitate it, the usage of a combination of face-to-face and online learning in the same course is overlooked. This latter method of instruction is called hybrid, or blended, learning. In short, a portion of the class is delivered via face-to-face instruction and the rest is done through an LMS, like Angel or Blackboard Learn, Release 9.1.  At the College of Southern Nevada, where we run Angel, I encourage our entire faculty to explore the usage of this teaching style.