Improving classes, one site at a time

New software enables profs to create highly interactive class Web sites for students. Penn professors are starting to throw away their chalk and erasers in favor of a new kind of blackboard. Using a commercial software product called "Blackboard" that the University is pushing faculty to use, professors can create sites that allow students to access class information and assignments, hold group discussions, take electronic exams and monitor their grades online. Blackboard was first unveiled last semester, when a small number of courses made use of it, primarily in the School of Arts and Sciences and the Engineering School. Classical Studies Professor Joseph Farrell, the faculty director of distributed learning for SAS, has spent the past two semesters working to get SAS faculty members interested in using Blackboard for teaching their courses. The program is designed to be user-friendly so that even professors unfamiliar with programming can design Web sites, he noted. Every SAS department has held a faculty-training meeting to make information about Blackboard more widely available, and Farrell said he hopes every department will have at least one or two courses utilizing the resource next semester. Blackboard Web sites are pre-formatted, allowing professors to add relevant course materials and use as many or as few features as they choose, as well as make a limited number of design changes, like changing color schemes. Students in courses using Blackboard must log in using a password to the course's Web site to use most of its features, allowing online class discussions and other private areas of the site to be protected from public view. In a Penn survey of students who used Blackboard in their courses last semester, 83 percent of respondents said the use of the program had enhanced their class in some way. Almost all of the nearly 400 students surveyed said they found the program to be user-friendly, while about two-thirds of those surveyed said they would like more of their professors to make use of the software. Farrell said the positive student reaction to Blackboard "was much more enthusiastic than we had even hoped for." At a training session for the Anthropology Department earlier this month, several professors in attendance said they planned to use Blackboard for their courses in the future. One of the features that most interested those in attendance was the software's ability to place course materials like readings and photos online, eliminating the need for course bulkpacks. These types of readings can be placed in the restricted areas of the Web sites accessible only by enrolled students, Farrell noted, avoiding problems like copyright violations. "Its a little less personal in some ways," said Engineering junior Ben Williams, who uses Blackboard to chat with classmates from a poetry class taught by English Professor Al Filreis. But he also noted that discussions via the Web site were "not as intimidating" as speaking in class. Farrell said he has found the program to be very useful in teaching one of his own poetry courses, "Horace," this semester. Students did not have to purchase any books or bulkpacks for the class because all of their assigned readings were on the Web, Farrell said. Students in his class take online quizzes based on the readings, he said, and can then keep track of their grades automatically using a personal information feature provided by Blackboard. "I can't imagine ever wanting to teach a course without [Blackboard] ever again," Farrell said.

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