Supporting the Seven Principles with Blackboard Learn
By Dr Chris P. Jobling
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb4XDzjPS_4]I attended a Blackboard Innovative Teaching Series webinar on Monday which discussed how Blackboard Learn can be used to support Chickering and Gamson’s Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education [1]. This was a very nice presentation from Ronald Scott Wennerdahl and Crystal Sheu of the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And there are some good ideas that I will need to think about in relation to my own teaching coming up next semester. The video has just been published on YouTube.
Reference
[1] Chickering, Arthur W. and Gamson, Zelda F, “Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education” American Association of Higher Education Bulletin vol.39 no.7 pp.3-7 1987. URL: http://www.aahea.org/aahea/articles/sevenprinciples1987.htm
Comments:
Alan Levine - Oct 1, 2014
The end result of design by software engineers? Maybe when Google is done re-imagining email, they can re-fabricate discussion forums. I get dizzy whenever discussion forums are mentioned. In a time when they were the only way to communicate to a large group online, it was like magic. Now it often ends up like a sprawling mess of fallen spaghetti. Features are functionality are important, and can help some, but I dont think is the complete answer. What is? If I knew, I’d be making it….
Alan, I noticed that connected courses (#ccourses) is using discourse … does that work better?
There is a lot to like about discourse, Chris, or perhaps less to dislike. It’s clean, elegant, and has a lot of the features you found shortened on (and then some). I still deal with a real pit in my stomach aversion for forums, and its not the features/technologies. They were super vital when they were really the only mode to have a community conversation, but now the locations for where people put their attention is in many places. Forums take focused attention, frequent tending/attention and often (to me) just feel like idea sprawl; it becomes an unwieldy pile. But I would recommend it highly if you are looking for something that was not designed with a 1980s BBS mind set.