Blackboard.9

This will be a challenge for all of us teaching Summer Courses.
While change is inevitable, and if we are not changing we may likely be dead to improvement, there is a bit of a hiccup, if you will, about moving to Blackboard 9 at our University.

Summer courses are usually fast, down and dirty, flights of content experience giving students the tree-top view of the subject. Usually these courses start and are over in about 30 days.

Adding to this speed of sound approach for delivering content, we are moving to a new Blackboard Version (V9). While I am excited about all the new bells and whistles in v9, my concern, from a business perspective is this: Students will not have access to v9 until the first day of their summer class.

I can just see the train wreck about to happen. Hope that I am terribly wrong about this, but the basis for my forecast comes from my own experience in giving some harmless new online request to my own students in the spring. My hope is that students will ask content questions of me about their course work, not Blackboard questions.

My plan is now, keep it simple for content delivery of my summer courses. To help out, I am including audio, even flip videos, to help ease some transitional pain so that the critical content that needs to sink in can be maintained.

Meanwhile, back on my own studies, I am heartily joining my own cohort of Marketing classmates for a round of discussions to prep for the Comprehensive exams that we will be 'sitting' for in August.