How much do your lecturers utilise Blackboard?

Croppy Bhoy

To what extent do you lecturers use the Blackboard facilities? Don't mention any lecturers or courses by name (Boards seem to get a bit touchy about that sort of thing!).

Of the 7-8 lecturers I have, roughly none of them seem to use Blackboard as effectively as they could.

Absolutely none of them use the grade module which would be handy for tracking our personal progress

None use the Learning Outcomes which would be helpful for setting personal goals

None use External Links to distribute resources

Virtually none use Staff Information to give us a quick and easy means of contacting them.

A few use Course Information which is handy to check the assessment methods and stuff.

Half of those who let us submit via Blackboard also make us hand in hard-copies, all but negating the usefulness of Bb/TurnItIn

Some bother to post Announcements

Most of them do post up lecture slides, although personally I've never found them to be of any use. What's the point in a sparse slideshow with a few key words on each slide, when I could just Google search and find actual information?

All in all, it appears to be a criminally underused tool - one I'm sure the university pays a handsome amount for. Are the lecturers not instructed to use it? I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them avoided putting too much on there to 'encourage' students to show up to all their lectures... a noble but slightly unfair tactic.

Raging_Ninja

The reason I was told to use both TurnItIn as well as handing in hardcopies is so we could get feedback. The softcopy acts as a receipt, and if the student loses their hardcopy, the lecturer can just print off the softcopy and give them that.

LAVADUDE

I find some use blackboard too much as if they put too much material into a lecture, they just rush through their notes with little explanation or none at all and tell us to get the notes on blackboard later.

and the reasons they use hard and soft copies:

The reason a lot of lectures like to ask for a hard and soft copy is that, the soft copy is used to check for plagiarism and as a back up in case your project goes missing, it also prevents the excuse "I handed it up and you lost it"

A hard copy is easier to mark as they go along and they're able to track their progress when they see a massive pile of papers to correct get smaller.
It is also easier to flick between pages if the lecturer has to go back to a previous section. It is also easier for a lecturer to go through a hard copy if a student comes into the off office and asks the lecturer to point out where they went wrong.

TheCosmicFrog

Definitely not as much as I'd like. A lot of lecturers used to keep their lecture notes on their own personal websites, but since migrating to Blackboard are just doing the same thing. Only one of them used the Grade Center (she was a Blackboard evangelist - also made podcasts, posted useful materials, etc.). It's a shame.

Then there's those lecturers who refuse to make their lecture notes available at all. While it's totally up to them what they do with their notes, I still have an opinion on it. Most of them seem to think that by putting up their notes online they'll reduce their attendances and make students less likely to realize the benefit of physical lectures. The sad fact is, for most of these lectures there's feck-all students who turn up anyway. I always attend my lectures. The reason being that if I miss a lecture I'm never bothered catching up using the Blackboard notes. The notes are useful simply for revision and study, not for catching up on what you missed from sleeping in. That's a misconception that lecturers have and it ruins it for the rest of us.

It's not so bad when the lecturer prints physical notes and hands them out in class. This mainly affects the "Here's the notes, write it down before I change slide" lecturers.

KittyeeTrix

One of our lecturers put notes up on BB and removed them 3 days later.
It didn't affect me as I attend all the lectures with a copy of the notes to fill in the extra info but I'd say about half of the class who haven't turned up are screwed as now they don't even know what was covered at all!!!:eek:

Hard on the students who have attended the lectures but who haven't necessarily saved or printed the notes.....
I suppose the lecturer has their reasoning for it.
They might allow access to them for the students that were in the lectures

TheCosmicFrog

One thing that aggravates me is how you only have access to your module materials for one year "and a bit". I'm in second-year and back around October all my first-year modules were removed from Blackboard. I'd downloaded copies of most of my lecture notes, but not all of them.

Croppy Bhoy

The hard-copy/soft-copy thing is well and grand but why can't they just print off our TurnItIn submissions if they don't like reading them on a computer? Besides I thought everyone was falling over themselves to modernise and computerise everything these days.

I know that sounds spoilt/self-important/lazy but at the end of the day I'm paying, they're being paid.

RolandIRL

Most of my lecturers put up fully fledged notes on Blackboard. some of them put up good notes, but during class, they look at them, and write on the board/projector themselves, fleshing them out a bit. i'm able to study grand with the ones they've put up. one lecturer last semester was really good at using it, he put up youtube vids that demonstrated the concepts he explained in class.

only ever used BB for notes and maybe finding out the lecturer's emails. never used TurnItIn at all, since most of my homework is maths, which would take ages to do out on a computer.

brendansmith

In my course Lecurer-Blackboard interaction is minimal.
Im afraid to say that I think the common blackboard has had its day.
I remember as a child jumping out for bed every morning as I couldnt wait to get into school to witness my teachers different methods of blackboard utilisation. She would tantilize our senses with different coloured chalk and where shading of large areas was involved she would turn the chalk lengthways and blow our minds.
It is sad to see the common blackboard being thrown out in this way.
Good night brave soldier. You have served us well.

brianthebard

brendansmith wrote: »

In my course Lecurer-Blackboard interaction is minimal.
Im afraid to say that I think the common blackboard has had its day.
I remember as a child jumping out for bed every morning as I couldnt wait to get into school to witness my teachers different methods of blackboard utilisation. She would tantilize our senses with different coloured chalk and where shading of large areas was involved she would turn the chalk lengthways and blow our minds.
It is sad to see the common blackboard being thrown out in this way.
Good night brave soldier. You have served us well.

:rolleyes: ná bí trolling. mod.

Croppy Bhoy

brianthebard wrote: »

:rolleyes: ná bí trolling. mod.

Quite right. Slightly humorous posts have no place here.

brianthebard

Mod work shouldn't be any of your concern Croppy Bhoy. Mod.

Croppy Bhoy

Yawn. Back on topic.

I've 2 modules this year that aren't even listed on Blackboard. That is pretty ridiculous, no?

TheCosmicFrog

brianthebard wrote: »

Croppy Bhoy.

So it's not just me :rolleyes:

QueenOfLeon

Material for my course is usually quite good on blackboard, lecture notes etc, but we do a lot of exams on blackboard and it is a disaster. We've had a series of complete f*ck ups during our exams on blackboard which are usually worth 25%. 2 particular exams which had corrective marking and partial credit gave us the completely wrong results at the end, telling some people they'd gotten as low as 0/150. The lecturers didn't even realise they'd set the marking scheme wrong until they got complaints from the whole class.

After that, they said we wouldn't get results straight after our BB exams but seems they can't find that setting either as we always do. The lecturers seem to be able to do the bare minimum but when it comes to doing something a bit more difficult like setting marking schemes they're completely clueless. If they're going to use BB to set exams they may as well get some sort of training to get it right.

Croppy Bhoy

For the second time this year our lecturer (IT of all subjects) has decided the best way to tell us our assignment results is to pin them to her door in the college. Admittedly the first time I was just annoyed because I'm lazy, but our exams are finished. Loads of people won't even be in Galway.

Surely in order to stick them on her door she would have had to have printed off a Word/Excel document? Why not just upload it to Blackboard for god's sake?

Raging_Ninja

Croppy Bhoy wrote: »

For the second time this year our lecturer (IT of all subjects) has decided the best way to tell us our assignment results is to pin them to her door in the college. Admittedly the first time I was just annoyed because I'm lazy, but our exams are finished. Loads of people won't even be in Galway.

Surely in order to stick them on her door she would have had to have printed off a Word/Excel document? Why not just upload it to Blackboard for god's sake?

Email her and ask if she can put the results up on blackboard?