2,200 members of the teaching staff at Arts, ST and Health have faced an extra challenge to their IT skills this autumn. Their assignment was to familiarize themselves with a new tool for sharing course materials and messages with the 6,800 students taking their courses.

The new tool – or more correctly Learning Management System (LMS) – is called Blackboard, just in case anyone was still in doubt. According to plan, 2015 is the year where the teaching tool will make all employees and students forget about previous LMS platforms such as FirstClass, AULA and Pegasus, and at the same time provide inspiration for new ways of teaching and learning.

A mixture of reservation and curiosity

One of the lecturers who has become familiar with Blackboard this semester is Associate Professor Steffen Krogh from the Department of Aesthetics and Communication.

In the beginning there were a number of problems, he says. The messages he sent to his students simply failed to arrive. But once that problem had been solved, Steffen Krogh was happy to adopt Blackboard, even though he would actually rather have continued to use FirstClass. 

"I think FirstClass was a very good tool that was easy to use to meet my didactic needs. But once we start using the new system, then I certainly think that it will work," he says.  

Steffen Krogh has noticed a certain reservation among some of his colleagues. Although he can understand this, he also thinks you shouldn’t write something off simply on the grounds that it’s new.

"When we went from Pegasus to FirstClass there were also people who were unhappy. But no one talks about Pegasus any longer," says the associate professor.

The project manager for the implementation of Blackboard at Arts, Special Consultant Birthe Aagesen, has experienced a great degree of curiosity among the teaching staff at the faculty.

"Of course people always need time to readjust, but people aren’t pulling their hair out. On the contrary, what we are finding is that support enquiries are often an expression of an extra interest from teachers who would like to utilise Blackboard even better, for example to blog," she says.

Far too many clicks

Associate professor in programming languages and software development Anders Møller from the Department of Computer Science is more critical. He thinks that the many possibilities offered by Blackboard are more confusing than beneficial and that both smaller and larger tasks are more time-consuming than teachers and students are used to.

"I would like to see a scaled-down version of Blackboard. The most important thing is that it has the simple functions necessary and that you don’t need to click several times in places where you previously only had to click once."

Anders Møller knows what he's talking about. He was the man who designed the LMS currently being used by the Department of Computer Science, called CourseAdmin, which will be replaced by Blackboard from the beginning of next semester.

The associate professor is positive about the idea of having a common LMS for AU as a whole, but he is not certain that the user interface and the required functionality in Blackboard are ready for the final stage of the roll-out in the new year, which will involve 30,000 new users in the remainder of AU.

"Blackboard is not intuitive," he says, and continues:

"But now they intend to just roll it out to everyone and then bombard us with courses, videos and other educational material. And if there is one thing that users really want to avoid, it’s having to spend time taking a course to learn a new system when the one they are already used to works as it should.”

AU must lead the way in the use of IT in the classroom

Blackboard is the basis for the vision of Educational IT which the senior management team adopted in 2011, a vision that basically involves allowing the latest technology to support and renew teaching.

According to Special Consultant Janne Saltoft Hansen, who is the person responsible for the implementation of Blackboard at Health, this would be impossible in practice with the old LMS systems.

"If we are to create added value through electronic teaching we must also learn how to use some new tools which actually provide better learning, not just a way of sharing documents," she says.

One person she will have to convince about Blackboard's excellence is Associate Professor Ulrik Dalgas from the Department of Public Health. He is generally happy with Blackboard’s user-friendliness, though he has so far only used it for the same basic tasks as AULA.     

"We try to integrate some of these e-learning aspects in our teaching, but I have not specifically used Blackboard for this. During a busy day with teaching and research you don’t want anything that is extremely bothersome because there simply isn't enough time to implement it properly. You need to have good support in place before you can really expand its utilisation," says Ulrik Dalgas.

Translated by Peter Lambourne