Don’t go back to the drawing board – share our experience with Blackboard! Becky Jones

1. Don’t go back to the drawing board – share our experience with Blackboard! Becky Jones

2. Background • Assistant Librarian supporting the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences • De Montfort University • Leicester and Bedford (UK) • 3 campus university • 6 faculties • Approximately 19000 students and 1600 staff

3. Information skills via Blackboard • The initial Blackboard project in March 2005 was part of a Professional Skills module for Biomedical and Forensic Science students • There were 4 x one hour sessions in Library with assessment counting for 7% of module mark • The Blackboard group were taught alongside a control group where traditional methods were used for comparison.

4. Traditional structure • How to tackle an assignment – emphasis on using OPAC • Using databases to find journal articles • Using the Internet for research • Creating reference lists & bibliographies

5. Why Change? • Blackboard gives the opportunity to get the students more involved making the sessions fully interactive • Opportunity to keep the content but radically change the format therefore contextualising it • Marked assessments are worthwhile but time consuming for staff

6. New Structure • Three sessions following the old structure - each with citation firmly embedded • Each session introduced by a brief lecture then students work through the Blackboard content following links to resources • Each session ends with a quick online quiz to test understanding and prepare for the assessment

7. Online assessment • Controlled conditions – all students checked on register • Assessment made active for specific time slot and password protected • From a pool of 60, selected 12 questions for each group • Random generation of questions within the group

8. Online assessment The mean marks for the assessments were: • CHEM1061 – 52.8% (Blackboard group) • PHCO1312 – 65% (Control group taught using traditional methods with a paper based assignment)

9. Positive Experiences • Received a Vice-Chancellor Curriculum Development and Innovation Award (May 2005) • Students interacted really well with the technology, having two windows open to move between the library web pages and Blackboard with ease • Excellent student feedback:

10. Student Feedback • “Found sessions very useful and they gave good, easy to find reference points.” • “The assessment on Blackboard was very user friendly and easy to understand.” • “The test was a good way of testing if we really knew about citation and how to use the internet and library for information”

11. Negative Experiences • For this project, the content had to be created in Frontpage and the HTML code transferred to Blackboard for the use of fonts and colour • Fear of technology collapsing during a session –OPAC and PCs • Glitches – questions were set to display one at a time, if students Cancel rather than Submit, they are thrown out of the assessment

12. Outcomes • Students were very comfortable with the Blackboard environment • Only one student posted something on Discussion Board but over 40 read it • All students turned up for the assessment, even those who had not attended previous sessions

13. Outcomes • Marking for a class of 150 takes approximately 37 hours less than by traditional methods! • Module has also been developed for Year 2 Biomedical Sciences • Module can be easily customised for other subject areas, with or without assessment

14. Project team Becky Jones (rjones@dmu.ac.uk) Jacqui Weetman (jweetman@dmu.ac.uk)