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I attended a “Blackboard Day” yesterday. Product developers and other Bb people from the US (George Calvert, Melissa Anderson, Chris Etesse and Zach Johnson) and Australia (David Wilson & Janette Ring, an academic) spoke about latest Bb developments – App Pack 3, Bb 7, Backpack and Caliper.

Because of stricter US laws on promising goods without delivering, they were hesitant to give too many specifics or timelines.

Anyway, this is what I gleaned:

App Pack 3/Release 7

• Adaptive release: Content can be released to specific students based on (eg) score in a quiz
• Review status: Students need to verify/claim that they have read something
• Advanced course menu: A Windows Explorer-like main menu
• What’s new module: RSS-based, shows new content, announcements, etc. (This did not live up to the promise too well when I saw it briefly later…)
• Enhanced performance evaluation: (for the control freaks) enhanced monitoring of student activity plus other improvements to assessment options, SCORM compliance, and Content System integration.
• Better language support

Backpack

Backpack allows the user to download whatever (but not discussions) from Bb and view it later, offline.

Caliper

Caliper is an interesting concept which is designed to better integrate the institution’s new initiatives, accreditation, course evaluation, student outcome tracking and the like.

My bit

I gave a few constructive suggestions to the Bb team, including:

• Integrating all of Bb via RSS, so in my aggregator (or email), I can see all recent activity in discussions, digital dropbox, e-portfolio, virtual classroom etc, so I don’t have to login all the time and go looking all over the place for activity. Also, such a system would make Search much better than it currently is (what search?). Also, RSS support would enable students to blog elsewhere and have their posts appear in Bb.
• e-Portfolio needs a lot of work to make it more intuitive and user-friendly, especially the uploading of photos or Word documents and sharing. Also, the default templates are not attractive or intuitive.

There are other things I hope to see improved in the near future. I’ll leave them for another post.

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