Blackboard Mobile Learn – one year on

In March 2012, Blackboard Mobile Learn^TM was launched at NUI Galway. At the end of September, we reported on the usage statistics after just 3 weeks of term. At that stage, the highest number of logins on a single day was 1.3K, reported on Wednesday 19th September.

Now that we’ve completed a full academic year (the last formal examination took place last Friday) we thought it was time to revisit the numbers. A view of the number of logins per day since the beginning of September 2012 is below:

From this image we can clearly see that the Mobile Learn app continued to be used throughout both academic semesters, easing off at weekends and over the Christmas period. In both semesters, there is a clear drop-off in use in weeks 7 and 8, increasing again towards the end of teaching (when assignments are due) and then falling off during examination periods.

Over the period from September 2012 until now, the total number of unique logins was 8446. More than one third of the logins were from iOS devices.

The analytics provided by Blackboard Mobile Learn tell us about numbers of logins, but don’t tell us much about what students are doing when they login.  From a survey carried out earlier this year, we suspect it’s mostly about accessing information (announcements and course notes). Taking a closer look at each semester would tend to support this.

From here we can see that, after a slow start (when users may not have been aware of the existence of the app), usage initially increases as courses and content becomes available. There is a slight drop-off in weeks 6, 7 and 8, as students settle into a routine, but for the last 4 weeks of term (as assignments become due) activity increases again, with a maximum number of logins recorded on Monday 19th November (1.81 thousand). For the first week after teaching ends, accesses remain high but decrease as exams finish and the Christmas break approaches.

Semester 2 is similar, but with one striking exception:

Here the semester starts out high, as students return to courses. Weeks 6, 7 and 8 show the same drop-off, in the middle of the teaching period. And there is a noticeable spike on Thursday 31st January, when 3.57 thousand logins were recorded. This coincides with the date that provisional semester 1 exam results were made available on Blackboard.

So, I think it’s safe to conclude that students are also using the mobile app to check results.

If you’d like to learn more about accessing Blackboard from a mobile device, take a look at our Blackboard Mobile Page.

Coming soon: the Retention Centre

In CELT we are gearing up for another upgrade of our Blackboard system during the summer. This year we will move to Service Pack 12 (SP 12), which will give improved features to staff and students.

One area that looks to be new and useful is the Retention Centre, which will replace the Early Warning System. This will be useful for instructors to identify students who may be at risk, so that an early intervention might help them to get back on track.

We’re told that the Retention Centre will be easy for instructors to use, without much set-up required, and that the features of the centre will evolve over time.

Students will be identified as “at risk” based on four pre-defined factors: missed deadlines; grades alerts; activity alerts and access alerts. Initially this will be available within a Blackboard course only, but ultimately it would be great to get reports across  all courses in which a student is enrolled.

Here’s a short video showing some of the highlights:

 

Keep an eye on this blog for further information about the upgrade.

 

Giving email access to students on Blackboard

Sending class email is one of the most used facilities by instructors on Blackboard. The advantage of not having to maintain email lists for all your students makes communication with the whole class, or groups of individuals, so much easier.

Until the upgrade to Blackboard 9.1 in the summer of 2011, the course email tool was available to instructors and students, as a default link in the course menu. However, a small number of students abused the facility. At the time of the upgrade, the default course menu was redesigned, and the email tool was removed. Instructors can still access it via the Control Panel in a course.

But, sometimes it is appropriate to allow students access the email tool, depending on the size and level of the group, or the teaching methods being used.

To allow all students in a Blackboard course to use the email tool, it can be added back onto the course menu very easily.

1. Go to the course where you want to make email available to students.
2. With the edit mode on, click the little + icon at the top left of the course menu (see screen shot). A new menu appears which allows you to add items to the menu.
3. Select Tool Link. A new form appears (see below).
4. Type the name for your new menu item, in this case Class Email.
5. From the drop down menu, select Email as the Tool Type.
6. Make sure that the link is made Available to Users, by ticking the box.
7. Click Submit, and your new menu item should appear at the bottom of the Course Menu.

What’s coming in Blackboard – improved discussion boards

New features in Blackboard are coming, with an upgrade of our system being planned for the summer. As well as new features (some of which can be seen in a previous post), there will be some much requested “fixes” and some improvements to current tools.

Here you can see how the discussion boards will have a new look and feel, with profile pictures to more easily identify, at a glance, who is contributing to the discussion.

The “post first” feature, which can be set by the instructor, forces students to post a response to a thread before being able to read their fellow-students’ contributions. It is hoped that this will increase originality, rather than having students simply rehashing the points made by others.

What do you think of the new features? Leave a comment and let us know.

 

How do students access grades in a Blackboard course?

Students, to access your grades in a Blackboard course, where those grades have been made available by your lecturer through the Grade Centre, you just need to click on My Grades in your course menu.

You will see a row for each Grade Centre item that has been made available to you. The grade may be given as a raw score or it might be displayed as a letter grade, according to the preference of your School or lecturer. In the example below, the (provisional) result is a C grade, out of a total possible score of 100.

It is also possible to display a widget on your My NUI Galway page, allowing you to see an overview of all My Grades from all your courses.

On the My NUI Galway page, which you see when you login to Blackboard, click on the Add Widget button. Scroll down the list of widgets to find the Report Card Widget and click the Add button.

You should see a confirmation that the widget has been added. Then click OK at the bottom right of the screen. You will now see a new box with a list of all your grades. The new widget can be dragged and dropped on the screen to reposition it.

 

 

How do you use Mobile Learn?

Two weeks ago I was at the Blackboard Mobile Users’ Group meeting in Durham. Notes from the meeting are available on our Learning Technologies Blog.

At the meeting, it was noted that while we can get analytics on the number of accesses using Mobile Learn (see previous blog posts), we don’t have any idea of how people are using the app. Are students using it just to get notifications or is there a deeper level of interaction?

So, last week we put a very quick survey up on our Blackboard login page, asking how you use Blackboard Mobile Learn. It was left up for just a week, and we had 848 responses, as shown in the picture.

It appears that many people do use the app for notifications, but they also use it to view content.

More interesting, a significant number of people use it to access their grades.

Just a small number of people use it to upload files, though the new integration with DropBox might encourage increased use.

And a very small number use the app to contribute to discussions boards, blogs or journals. This isn’t particularly surprising.

The results of the survey are not particularly scientific, but perhaps give a snapshot of how the Blackboard Mobile Learn app is currently being used at NUI Galway. As noted at the Users’ Group Meeting, having more detailed analytics would be very helpful for instructors and to help us plan a more strategic use of our Blackboard system.

 

Exporting the Grade Centre for Excel

Blackboard allows you to export the Grade Centre from your course, so that you can work on it offline (in Excel for example) and import again at a later date. The process is very easy, but there is one, quite serious, problem.

Many of our student IDs, which start with the year in which the student first registered, being with a 0 digit (zero). When the exported file from Blackboard is opened in Excel, Excel thinks that the student IDs are numbers, and removes any leading zeroes. So, the student number 08123456 (for example) becomes the number 8,123,456. This leads to problems when you try to reconcile the student IDs with other data, or when you try to import the file back to Blackboard.

The solution is to import the file into Excel (rather than just opening it), and to indicate that the Username and Student ID fields contain text, not numbers. This sounds more complicated than it actually is!

I have prepared a very quick screencast to demonstrate how to perform the export from Blackboard and import into excel. Please take a look.