BbWorld16 Thursday July 2016

These are my interest notes not full notes – I’ll try and clean them up after the conference and please feel free to share with me your comments and corrections.

Higher Education Rocket Sessions for faculty and instructional designers: Interesting stories, FAST!

Communication quality over quantity.

A positive social presence from an online tutor is key to success of online courses.

Self-disclosure with a bit of humor helps humanise you.  Humor must be comfortable for both student and staff.

—

Student keep their mobiles with them everywhere they go: to class, to home, to bed, the the toilet!

Students are driving the demand for mobile learning.

Studies show most people will teach the way they were tought.  When most academics grew up there were no smartphones.

Students can make use of the powerful camera on their device – have them photograph what they’re doing / what you’re doing.

—

When you are asked to design course environments and get asked for the strange and or impossible don’t say “No” ask what it means to them to have these things and what is it they are trying to achieve?  It might be more doable than you initially thought, but might just not be the way they initially asked for.

General Session: Innovating for the future: customer-centric solutions

Amazing session! I just had to stop everything and listen to Commander Scott Kelly who has been to space 4 times and happens to also be Gabby Giffords’ husband.  I really hope Bb publish the recording of the session as I think everyone should listen to his story.

Workshop: Small data with big impact: Making the most of Adaptive Release and the Performance Dashboard

Adaptive release on:

• User / User Group
• Date and Time
• Grade Center Attempts / Scores
• Review Button Status

You can use the performance dashboard to have an overview of the review buttons. You can also see if content is visible to users.

They tried in one course setting a review status on EVERY item in the course.  This isn’t something that is recommended.

Try hiding easter egg review buttons in your course to see how attentive your students are.

Blackboard’s mobile strategy roadmap

Push Notifications – keeps student up to date without them having to go check.  Students get notifications when assignments are due and when  assignments are graded.

Clicking on these can take the student to the assignment.  Students can complete the assignment / test from the app. If the student did their work /stored their work in Google Drive then they can submit that from the app too.

They can use the phones voice to text dictation to complete textual areas.

Discussions boards are a new item on the app. They have their own dedicated space.
This could be great for use at Keele and revitalise the discussion boards in Bb.

We can now link to Bb Student from our own app (App to App launch).  Details of the links available on the Bb website.

Bb Instructor being worked on NOW.  Firstly they are working on Bb Collaborate integration.  Secondly is Grading.  The goal is to allow instructors to have a really easy way to grade students work.

Discussed Bb Planner – Allows the student to explore career and degree pathways, Scheduling (module selection), insights for advisors to guide the students, and connections allowing communication with advisors.
I’m not sure how this would map on to the UK HEI environment.