Have you noticed that the calendar in Blackboard is… bad. Well, no longer. Blackboard has just released an update (their first significant update to the calendar tool, perhaps ever) to the Calendar tool now that Service Pack 10 is out, which makes calendaring finally useful. Drag-and-drop functionality to move calendar events, the ability to create events for multiple courses from one interface (although not all at once, sadly), automatic calendar entries for anything you set a due date on, even iCal feed functionality! This new calendar may not “have it all” but it is a serious step...

There’s a new version of Blackboard out, which is now live on the BbSandbox environment, and which should go live for Summer 2012 on the Palomar production Blackboard environment. The single biggest change you’ll see in the system is the visual appearance of the system; given the number of complaints I’ve heard over the last year-and-a-half about how things look (I kinda like the green buttons, myself), there should be at least a few cheers at that news. Blackboard has been working on a new look for their system for quite some time now, and have rolled out this new look with...

So OK.  I’ve now imported all the posts from Dave’s old “Blackboard for Faculty” blog which had been maintained at WordPress.com to the new one (this one).  Recall that we are consolidating all our departmental blogs into one.  We will still maintain less formal, personal blogs, but that’s another story. The same goes for Dave’s blog as with Haydn’s, the one I imported yesterday.  The articles are now merged into the back catalog of this blog.  Since they may be a bit hard to find, I would like to draw attention to the more significant ones here.  They...

Here it is about three weeks away from our new semester starting and I’m planning a new, revised, and totally better online discussion board for my online classes. Never mind that I really don’t know our new Blackboard 9 system that well yet or that I’ll be teaching an online class that I haven’t taught in a couple of years – I mean I’ve got three weeks! I’ve been a big supporter of online discussion boards for a long time so I was intrigued by an article in a recent Faculty Focus Special Report. The article by Rob Kelly was titled “A Plan for Effective...

With final exams coming up soon I want to return to a topic that virtually all online instructors struggle with: how to provide fair, convenient, comprehensive tests to online students. Academic cheating has always existed of course and some reports suggest that the extent and scope of the problem has increased over the last few decades. Kitahura and Westfall (2007) provide these data: a 1999 survey – over 75% of college students “admitted to some form of cheating;” a 2002 survey – 74% of high school students admitted to cheating; a 2003 national survey – 41% of students...