So far I have designed all of my classes in Blackboard but I wonder if this is the best choice. There is a lot of great support and workshops for Blackboard (Karen Korstad Intro to Blackboard) and many, many options in blackboard. However I like the presentation the students get in MOODLE. In Pilar Hernandez's Building Community workshop we got a glimpse of how she modified her blackboard course to look more like MOODLE.
This semester I am going to try to make my blackboard courses be a bit more user friendly. The first thing I did was change what the students see first to a content area. Before I had this set to the default Announcements. I email/voicemail these announcements to all the students anyway so it didn’t make sense to have them see something they had already seen. In addition I'm including a lot of the emailed info in the (video and written syllabus). Now I will provide a link to announcements but not have it be the major focus of the class.
This will be a little more work as I am going to need to change the first view each week. I wish blackboard let you set up the first view to change in advance but I don’t believe you can. I could put the whole course in content area but there are a lot of drawbacks to that too.
The other thing I am going to continue doing and be more stringent about is to close down anything in blackboard the class won’t use. There are just too many options of available tools etc. Too confusing for the students.
Well we will see if this is enough to satisfy me or if I make the jump to MOODLE in the next online class I teach. Anyone have any other suggestions?
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