Teaching with Blackboard: A Useful Tool and a Worst-Case-Scenario Lifesaver!

        What happens to your classes if you get sick?  What would you do if the H1N1 influenza swept through Maryland next fall or winter?  In both of these scenarios, teaching Blackboard might become our only alternative to losing days and even weeks of instruction.  If you prepare yourself and your students to use even the most basic components of Blackboard before an emergency occurs, your classes can continue even if the campus is locked down for days or weeks to prevent the spread of an epidemic, as we saw happening in Mexico last spring.

        Blackboard supports both "synchronous" and "asynchronous" contact among members of a course, but for most of us, asynchronous contact (e.g., the equivalent of email) will do just fine.  Using the "Announcements," "Course Documents," "Discussion Board",  "Groups," and "Digital Drop Box" functions, you can direct students' attention to specific tasks and topics, set up readings, manage and monitor topics of discussion, form small groups for peer-editing, and collect student papers.  This can be used to supplement a typical Goucher class, and to temporarily replace it if unusual circumstances (like the 'flu) arise.  Unlike students who sign up for courses specifically because they are taught using distance learning, often because they cannot be on campus during class hours, ordinary Goucher students may need to be persuaded to try Blackboard.  Most of them should find it appealing, however, especially because they can access it at any time of the day or night.

        Carol Pippen, who has taught "distance learning" writing courses at Towson University using Blackboard, will demonstrate how she has used the program.  To be ready with questions for Carol, make sure you have logged into Blackboard and checked out your Fall 2009 courses.  Your username on the Goucher email system is your Blackboard login name, and your email password is automatically your Blackboard password.  To access your Blackboard account, you can use the (tiny!) menu at the bottom left of the Goucher College home page (http://www.goucher.edu)  or click on this hyperlink: http://blackboard.goucher.edu/.

Carol's login: http://www.towson.edu/learnonline/

        For more PDF and video tutorials on specific Blackboard functions and uses in addition to those linked to the paragraph above, see the rest of Chadia Abras' collection for the Graduate and Professional Studies Program at this web site: http://www.goucher.edu/x28491.xml