What is it?
Blackboard is known as a VLE which is a Virtual Learning Environment and is aimed at students. It is focused on making life easier for the student to see deadlines, lecture materials and possible announcements for your given subject. As well as it being easier
for a student, it makes life for the teacher/lecturer a lot less complicated as they can just put some work onto Blackboard and the entire class will get it.
Why choose it?
For the student, Blackboard gives you access to everything that your course is all about. One of the strongest factors about Blackboard is the ReCap feature. This allows a student to ‘revisit’ a past lecture and it’ll be there. On the screen, it shows whatever is on the PowerPoint or on the overhead projector accompanied by the lecturers’ voice. This means that if you miss a lecture for whatever reason then you can catch up on the missed work or if you are stuck doing work yourself then you can look back at the lecture when you went through it and have it explained to you again. This is Blackboard’s strongest feature due to the fact it can be accessed at anytime, anywhere.
Another key feature is that there is an announcements page for every module. This can also be useful as it can notify the students for a room change, upcoming test or in some cases the vast majority of students could be experiencing the same problem and posting an announcement from the lecturers point of view could be easier than sending a group email.
Students can be students and will inevitable lose lecture materials like notes they’ve made or a handout given out. Well Blackboard also has this covered as lecture notes that are given out are uploaded to the ‘Course Materials’. This means that there is always a digital version of the notes handed out which can be printed out as many times if the student has access to a printer. As well as having material that was handed out in the lecture, it also offers the chance for extra reading into topics via YouTube links or links to an educational website. Therefore, if a student needs extra help or is invested into the module then Blackboard provides the grounds to further their studies. Furthermore, it allows the lecturer to provide students with past papers and more examples which will reinforce what they have learnt while at the same time giving them an idea of how their exam will be laid out.
Every lecturer has different teaching methods but most will agree on the fact that communication between the students can be just as important. Joseph Joubert once said “To teach is to learn twice over.” (Wikiquote, 1883) Therefore, if the students explain something to a confused student then both will end up better off. Blackboard has made it so that forums can be created where teachers and students can discuss whatever topic they choose with the aim of benefitting everyone.
But what are the drawbacks?
The main criticism that blackboard gets is because of its feature ReCap. This is because it arguably gives the students a ‘get out of jail free card’ in missing a lecture since they can just have a look at it online and have that lie in that they so desperately wanted. This criticism however is not directly targeting Blackboard itself, it’s more directed at the students and if they don’t want to learn then it’s their fault. Following on, the different pages can get a bit messy as there might be too much on one page or the headings aren’t exactly clear. However, this is down to how the lecturer has designed their module’s page so again this isn’t a direct critique towards Blackboard.
With experience on the app for Blackboard, I’ve found it to have the odd glitch where I’ve had to back out of a few options so that it can reload it. This process becomes a bit repetitive but again it’s something you can quite easily manage. Even when on Wi-Fi, the app runs a bit slow compared to other apps on my phone and the quality feels grainy. Another problem that I found was that if a lecturer added more material or if a homework was added, the notifications were delayed. The delay occurs from anywhere between the matters of hours to days so I’ve had to learn to just check Blackboard on the regular.
Overview
Depending on how you look at it, Blackboard only has positives. Its sole design is to benefit students and that’s all it does while doing it very well. All the criticism that has been said are all user based or technology based and the biggest most successful companies experience these problems. As a student, Blackboard has been so useful with my harder modules because I can constantly run through the examples with what my lecturer is saying. I also use it to write more notes because I tend to write very brief notes in the lectures due to how fast the lecturer goes through the content and then write things up after the lecture.
Referencing
WikiQuotes (2016), https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=Joseph_Joubert&oldid=2014449, accessed 16/11/2016.