HRD 5336: Adult Learning Analysis

Assignment #3 Learning Analysis
“The Blackboard Experience”

Matthew B. Miller

HRD 5336: Adult Learning
Fall 2010
Dr. Andrea Ellinger

Introduction
For the past ten years, I have been involved in the development of Navarro College’s online program. When I arrived at Navarro College in the fall of 2000, we had approximately twelve online course sections, with just a little over 100 students. At the time, Navarro College had a total enrollment of approximately 3,800 students. Today, the online program alone has approximately 3,500 students during the fall and spring semesters out of a total college enrollment of just below 11,000. The growth has been phenomenal, and I am fortunate to have been
Blackboard provides faculty with an online platform for sharing course content with their students, and contains a number of features which allow students and faculty to engage in collaborative experiences through discussion boards, live chat, e-mail and an interactive grade book. Before Blackboard was introduced, faculty who wanted to develop an online course had to have knowledge about building a website, which translated into faculty knowing how to write HTML scripts and managing a domain. Needless to say, this proved to be a rather daunting task for most of Navarro College’s faculty (most of whom did not grow up with a computer in the home much less access to the Internet). In addition, administrators found it difficult to oversee course quality and providing technical support for students and faculty was difficult and
I decided that in addition to this approach, all the participants in the training workshop would be working in the same course environment to (in effect) “build” a course from scratch. I created an empty course shell and populated it with twenty generic instructor accounts as well as a few generic “students.” This would allow all of us to log into the same course simultaneously and I could project what we were doing onto a screen in the classroom. The learners would have ample opportunity to “play” and collaborate as I walked them through Blackboard’s many components and features. Recognizing that Navarro College’s faculty is made up mostly of the so-called Baby Boomer population, I intentionally wanted to make the training environment as relaxed as possible – steering away from the use of potentially intimidating technical terminology as much as possible. During our introductions, I would ask each of the participants to give their name, teaching discipline, campus location, and whether or not they were using Blackboard in their courses. I felt this last piece of information would assist in making the participants more at ease to know that others were new to this experience (since this training was being offered to online and traditional faculty alike,