Blackboard. We all know it as the website that basically runs the life of an average Longwood student. If it is not on Blackboard, it throws the student into a whirlwind of panic and despair.
The uses for Blackboard vary from announcements that let teachers inform their pupils about changes to the curriculum, to discussion boards that allow students to ask questions they wouldn’t normally ask in class to a section purely devoted for posting grades online. Yes, it does run a great deal of life for a large portion of the student population.
But, the odd and very frustrating thing to members of the 4,833-student population is this: there are many Longwood professors that choose not use Blackboard! Well, at least not entirely in a way that the student would appreciate.
“Well, I do use blackboard to send out emails to the class,” said Professor Bradley Boswell, lecturer in Spanish.
“The reason why I didn’t use Blackboard [last semester] was because I was a new teacher and I had a bunch of other things to get under control here first. Also, we use iLrn a lot and, as you know, iLrn covers a lot of the online assignments. We can do a lot or as much with iLrn as we can with Blackboard, and so I was pretty satisfied. I realize that most of you would have preferred that I did Blackboard grades at least and I am trying to do that this semester,” he said.
iLrn is an electronic program used by professors of foreign languages in the Department of English and Modern Languages in order to help students learn. The program comes with assignments, flash cards, pronunciation help, online tutoring and practice quizzes. It even comes with an electronic textbook, though for some that might hinder rather than help. But how difficult is Blackboard in comparison?
“Blackboard is a fairly easy system to get to know, but there is a lot to it,” said Dr. Larissa Tracy, associate professor of English.
“Sometimes it doesn’t work as well as it should and, personally, I think that the new version of it doesn’t work as well as the old version. But, it’s a pretty easy system to use. There are problems with availability, there are different levels of making classes available to students and you have to know exactly what’s changed when they’ve updated the system,” said Tracy.
Blackboard was just recently updated during summer 2012 and Blackboard, like many online services, gets updated frequently—maybe around every two to three years—and just like every other online service that’s offered, when Blackboard gets updated, there might be some complaints.
Think of it this way: recently, Tumblr updated its services. The minute it hit, there were complaints and petitions for Tumblr to be straightened out.
“I’ve had instances where students couldn’t find things or where I’ve had to transfer things over and it’s gone in a different place,” said Tracy. “But that doesn’t happen very often. For the most part, things run fairly smoothly with Blackboard.”
In the case of learning Blackboard as a new professor at Longwood, it all depends on whether you knew it in some form at your previous job.
“I already knew [Blackboard] when I was teaching at American [University],” said Tracy. “I taught a course that had an online component when I taught a graduate seminar [at American], so I had already become familiar with Blackboard. I used Blackboard more and more when I came to Longwood. I didn’t used to do my grade book through Blackboard, but now I do.”
“Well, I used to be a high school teacher, and high schools have software that a lot of times is practically free, and it’s a lot more user friendly in the interface for putting grades online and things like that,” said Boswell. “From what I’ve been learning, putting grades online with Blackboard is a lot more technologically difficult than it has to be with other software.”
