Item: Blackboard Learn by Anthology
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Blackboard

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

BlackBoard Learn is used as the education platform for teaching online nursing students. It is used to provide classes, tests, student presentations and online conferences

Pros and Cons

Pros

Allows an on-line classroom to be divided into breakout rooms when smaller work groups are needed
Allows in a fairly easy framework to navigate a forum that interacts via camera & audio in a synchronous on -line class
Allows classes to be recorded and effortless archiving of the class recordings

Cons

The recent upgraded version has affected the connectivity for the instructors & students with frequent bumps out of the session - breaking the teaching thread
Loading of presentations can have technology glitches that don't occur from student to student or instructor to instructor
Company support team is reluctant to help on-line support unless the facility/organization's support team have been utilized first, which often is not possible when problems occur after hours when evening classes are in session and organization's IT staff leave at 5 pm.
Grading center in BlackBoard was recently upgraded and this has increased the labor intensity of the instructor grading assignments within BlackBoard

Return on Investment

It does meet the objective of offering the college within the university one program/one platform to teach

I have taught at two other universities and using two other platforms, which I can not discuss currently. BlackBoard Learn has been the easiest to learn as Instructor. The ease of learning may be from the strength of the IT instructional support at my current university.

Likelihood to Recommend

BlackBoard is suitable for large classes combining group sections and making a large platform for presentation. It is a program that can give a group of instructors a way to share a class in a very fluid manner constructing sessions, sections and combining and separating groups as needed very quickly.

BlackBoard is no longer a stable enough environment (connectivity issues in the new version) for individual and instructor testing sessions on video. Some of the nursing courses being online require a visual clinical skills demonstration and this current version is not stable for this testing via camera sharing.

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Black Board Learn master for excellence in on -line teaching

Modules Used