Using Blackboard to Manage Students’ Projects

Philip Barker

University of Teesside, UK

Abstract: Practical projects play an important role in developing students’ problem solving skills and enhancing their knowledge of a specific area of study. However, from a course-supervisor’s perspective, their management and assessment can be a highly labour-intensive activity. This paper describes some research that we have undertaken relating to the use of a virtual learning environment (Blackboard) in order to automate some of the management tasks and problems inherent in project supervision - while increasing the quality of students’ learning experiences.

Introduction

Practical projects are an important mechanism for providing undergraduate students with opportunities to develop knowledge and skills that are not easily presented in or derived from lectures or course-reading material. A practical project usually involves a student performing one or more tasks in a suitably designed study environment - for example, a laboratory, a simulation, a virtual reality setting, a field trip or some other form of off-campus expedition. The type of environment that is used for practical work will often depend critically on the subject area involved and the skills and knowledge that are to be acquired. For example, medical students will often undertake ‘practical work’ within relevant parts of a hospital environment while budding chefs may be exposed to experiences within a hotel’s kitchen. Obviously, project environments and the resources to support them need to be carefully chosen in order to ensure that students derive maximum benefit from them.

There are three main generic types of project experience to which students are likely to be exposed during their courses of study:

  • First, there is the type of project that acts as an adjunct to a main course of study (Barker, 2004; 2006a). For example, a course XYZ may be organised into a series of lectures, a collection of reflection periods, some tutorials and a set of practical classes within which students undertake small projects related to the main topic areas with which the subject is concerned. For example, in a computer engineering course, typical practical projects might involve developing a piece of software, performing a task analysis as part of an interface design and producing a printed-circuit board.
  • Second, is the type of project in which a student chooses a topic of study and then researches this topic with the ultimate aim of producing a relatively new ‘contribution to knowledge’ or a tangible product that can be manufactured or used to improve the quality of people’s lives. This type of project is often referred to as an ‘individual project’.
  • Third, is the kind of project that involves students becoming involved in cooperative and collaborative work with other students. These are often referred to as ‘group projects’ - sometimes called ‘team projects’. In this type of project a small group of students (usually involving 3-6 people) work together in order to achieve some pre-defined objective - as defined in the project specification.

Each of the above types of project has its advantages and disadvantages. Furthermore, each type can be used to foster and enhance particular kinds of learning and teaching activity. Of the three types of project described above, this paper deals with management issues related to individual projects from the perspective of a project supervisor’s role. It describes and discusses how a virtual learning environment (such as Blackboard) can facilitate the management of undergraduate final-year projects.

The Components of an Online Learning System

Bearing in mind what has been said above, it is important to consider the types of learning environment that are available for the support of the activities involved in managing project students’ practical activities. In most academic organisations electronic learning is becoming a prominent mechanism for delivering educational material to students (Holmes and Gardner, 2006). Indeed, a virtual learning environment (VLE) is now often used to control many aspects of the delivery of educational resources to students. However, it is important to realise that the nature of the various systems and sub-systems that make up an educational environment are quite varied and complex. Each component interacts with other systems in quite sophisticated ways. Figure 1 illustrates a typical example of the sub-systems involved in an online learning environment and the ways in which they interact with one another.

Figure 1: Organisational resources to support electronic learning.

At the top level in this diagram, the ‘world-wide’ (W/W) sub-systems include the Internet and other private global communications networks. The central campus-wide (C/W) systems shown in this example involve the organisation’s library, its student administration system, different types of media centre, various sorts of virtual research environment and, of course, its VLE. In this diagram, Blackboard is used as the example () - but many other such systems are often commonly used (for example, Moodle, FirstClass and WebCT). From the perspective of learning and teaching, the interaction between an organisation’s library and its VLE is an extremely important one (Secker, 2004; Catherall, 2005).

Another important type of system depicted in Figure 1 is the departmental-wide (D/W) system. These are used for providing and administering subject-orientated resources to students that have enrolled in courses that a given department provides. One of the most useful systems in this category is the departmental intranet (Barker, 1999). This type of facility can be used to make available online course documentation and provide a software-download capability which students can use in order to obtain copies of any software items that are essential for their study activities.

Using the Blackboard VLE

Although it suffers from several limitations, Blackboard has become a popular online environment for the delivery of digital learning resources to users in corporate organisations and to students within academic environments. Within my own organisation, for example, each of the five schools (Computing, Business, Arts and Media, Science and Technology and Social Science and Law) that make up the academic structure of the university makes use of this system for delivering some of their courses. In some schools (such as Computing) where there is substantial elearning expertise, the entries in the Blackboard course catalogue usually often consist simply of links to teaching and learning resources that are held on a departmental intranet. In the case study that is described in this paper, some of the supporting course resources are embedded within the Blackboard system while others are held on either an intranet facility or an external Web site,

Course Design

In order to create a Blackboard module to facilitate the management of student projects it was first necessary to identify the basic activities and functions which made up the essential ‘core tasks’ involved in the management functions that were to be undertaken. The major activities involved were as follows: (1) communicating details of project-related material to students (for example, rules and regulations relating to project submission dates, assessment criteria, report-writing guidelines, and so on); (2) undertaking two-way communication with students (using both face-to-face and electronic discussions) on matters relating to the progress being made and the problems being encountered; (3) monitoring students’ progress (through the use of appropriate documents - both paper-based and electronic) and providing appropriate feedback; (4) acting as a mentor to enable students to ‘test out’ their ideas; and (5) ensuring that students keep appropriate project-related documentation throughout the life-cycle of their projects.

Bearing in mind the above requirements, and the facilities available for their realisation within the Blackboard VLE, a system design similar to that depicted in Figure 2 was created.

Figure 2 Course navigation facility.

The structure depicted in Figure 2 was mapped directly onto a Blackboard module (called ‘PGB-Projects 2006/7’) in order to produce a top-level entry page similar to that depicted in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Entry page to the ‘PGB-Projects 2006/7’ Blackboard module.

As can be seen in this figure, from a student’s perspective, the top-level end-user interface to the Blackboard VLE consists of two essential display areas: a course-menu area (shown on the left-hand side of the screen) and, to the right of this, a content-delivery area. Sometimes, depending upon how they are designed, certain learning resources will use additional and separate display windows for the presentation of their content. Using this approach, it is possible to create quite powerful blended-learning environments that utilise a number of different resources in a sequential and/or simultaneous fashion (Barker, 2006b; 2006c).

Users of the module depicted in Figure 3 navigate through its resources using two basic techniques: selection of various options from the course menu; and by activation of the various hyperlinks that are embedded within the various display items. Some examples of embedded hyperlinks can be seen within the content-display area shown in the diagram. Naturally, the course menu is a particularly important resource for students. Considerable care therefore needs to taken in order to ensure that its design is appropriate for the needs of the course in which it is used. Usually, a course menu is produced from a default template provided by the Blackboard VLE; items can be removed from or added to this template in order to tailor its contents to the needs of any particular course.

Tailoring the Course Menu

Naturally, each course that is delivered via Blackboard will need to have different course-menu options that are related to the nature of that course, the facilities that its users need to access and the activities that they need to undertake during the course. System designers can modify the contents of the course-menu area using the ‘Manage Course Menu’ option within the Blackboard control panel. Table 1 shows the course-menu options used in the Blackboard ‘PGB-Projects 2006/7’ module.

There are various ways in which the menu options listed in the course-menu area can be implemented. For example, links can be made to resources held on internal/external organisational web sites or to material and resources that are available through (or embedded within) the Blackboard system itself. Thus, in Table 1 the ‘Announcements’ and ‘Project Areas’ options are each internal to Blackboard while the ‘F2F Meetings’ and ‘WebDocs’ options are, essentially, links to external Web sites containing HTML and various other types of document. Similarly, the ‘Ethics Forms’ and ‘Projects Documents’ menu options are links to items that are held on a departmental intranet server (see Figure 1).

Table 1: Menu options and their associated functionality.

Menu Option / Function
Announcements / Gives access to broadcasts from tutor
Email / Provides electronic mail facilities
Project Areas / Links to students’ individual project areas
Journal and Wiki / Access to electronic resources
F2F Meetings / Timetable for face-to-face meetings with students
Ethics Forms / Notes about completing ethics forms
Diary Sheets / Template for weekly diary sheet report
Project Documents / Links to relevant intranet documents
WebDocs / Links to relevant external Internet documents

Project Areas

Undoubtedly, one of the most important resources within the ‘PGB-Projects’ elearning environment was the project areas that it contained. These were organised into three basic types: an individual private area for each student; an individual private staff area for the course tutor; and a general area to which all students in the cohort had access. The private individual student areas were intended to be used to support computer-mediated communication between a specific student and the course tutor. The communal course area was intended to be used for group communication so that students could communicate with each other and share experience in an ‘open’ public way.

Embedded within each project area there were two essential Blackboard resources: a discussion-board facility and a file-sharing capability. There was also an email facility but, as is discussed later, its use was not encouraged unless some ‘exceptional’ circumstances warranted its use. The relationship between these resources is depicted schematically in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Important resources for computer-mediated project management.

The file sharing capability depicted in Figure 4 enabled each student (and his/her tutor) to upload and download files of any sort. Therefore, files that a student wanted a tutor to see could be placed in this area for viewing. Likewise, any files a tutor wanted a specific student to see could also be placed in this area. General file sharing (within the whole cohort) could be achieved via the file-sharing area within the general project area to which all students had access.

The discussion-board area depicted in Figure 4 was the mainstay of the computer-mediated communication that took place between the course tutor and the individual students (or the group of students as a whole). We have made extensive studies of the use of electronic dialogue for supporting students’ learning within the Blackboard VLE (Webb, 2006). Logically, the important entities that make up any given discussion board are: forums, threads and postings. The formal relationship between these may be expressed as follows:

<discussion-board> ::= [<forum>]{1:N}

<forum> ::= [<thread>]{1:M}

<thread> ::= [<posting>] {1:P}

<posting> ::= <student-to-student> | <student-to-tutor> | <tutor-to-student>

Essentially, the postings are the basic messages that are sent to a given discussion thread within the context of a particular forum. On each individual discussion board, the forums were organised into a standard structure to reflect important events or activities taking place within the execution of a student’s project. The ones used in this course were as follows: Personal Issues, Project Specification, Project Planning, Project Report, Important Milestones, Deliverables, Semester-1 Tasks and Semester-2 Tasks. Within the environment created for this course, only the tutor could create forums. However, both the tutor and the students could create threads within any given forum.

Within the notation used above to describe the relationship between the discussion-board objects, it is important to emphasise that <student-to-student> postings can only occur within the context of the general discussion-board area - to which, all students have access. Of course, the other types of posting can occur within any discussion-board context.

Use of Weblogs and Wikis

Both weblogs and wikis have become important tools for sharing ideas and documenting knowledge (Clyde, 2004; Klobas, 2006; Ebersbach, Glaser and Heigl, 2006; Barker, 2007). It was therefore felt important that these tools should be made available for students to use within their practical projects. Bearing this requirement in mind, the entry in the course-menu area labelled ‘Journal & Wiki’ (see Figure 3) was used to provide students with access to their individual weblog area (called a ‘journal’ in Blackboard) and the communal wiki area (dubbed the ‘Team Site’ in Blackboard parlance). The appearance of the root page of the project wiki is shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: The root page of the communal project wiki.

As can be seen from this diagram, each student in the course cohort (and the tutor too) was allocated a ‘home page’. The links to these individual pages are represented in Figure 5 by each user’s name (shown underlined). There is a special page (called ‘FunkyDunky’) that anyone in the group can use as a sort of ‘sandbox’ area for testing purposes. Clicking on one of the hyperlinks depicted in Figure 5 (apart from ‘FunkyDunky’) would result in the display of that user’s home page. Thus, selecting the user ‘Philip Barker’ would cause the tutor’s home page within the wiki to be displayed - as depicted in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Wiki home page for the course tutor.

The page illustrated in Figure 6 was intended to be used as a sort of ‘model’ that students could use as a basis for the entry page into their own personal project area within the wiki. That is, each student was expected to post a small pass-port size photograph along with a short description of his/her practical project and a short list of keyword descriptors related to the project. The latter were intended to facilitate information retrieval using the wiki’s search facility.

The weblog capability in Blackboard provided a useful journal facility for students to document their project observations, findings and reflections on their work. As part of their project reporting requirements, students were required to complete weekly ‘diary sheets’ that had to be ‘signed off’ by their project supervisor. In previous years students used paper versions of the diary document. However, during the current academic year, they were given the option of using the Blackboard journal facility to make time-ordered entries that the tutor could see and, if necessary, comment on. Most students used and preferred this latter approach. However, one or two did prefer to use paper diary sheets due to the difficulty of printing out diary entries from within Blackboard.

Course Implementations

Experiments with the use of Blackboard for use as an electronic tool for helping to manage students’ projects commenced two years ago. The first (prototype) course was implemented during the 2005/2006 academic year. The second implementation of the learning environment was realised during the current academic year - 2006/2007. The underlying design was identical for the two course presentations. Indeed, the courses only differed in respect to the use of additional resources (wiki and weblogs) in the more recent implementation. A third presentation of the course is planned for an upcoming 2007/2008 cohort of students. This will involve the use of additional tools - such as an online chat facility. It is also intended to explore the use of SMS texting (via mobile phones) in order to provide an ubiquitous alerting and reminder mechanism for course participants.