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My hope was to implement the Blackboard course management system in the Fall of 2004, but I did not for two (albeit lame) reasons. As September approached I perceived I would need a lot of time to learn how to “operate” Blackboard. The second concern was that I did not know where I was going to fit in the additional lecture or lab I perceived I needed to teach the students how to navigate through Blackboard. So I bailed out, pulled the plug, and put off implementation for one more semester.

Turn the clock ahead 5 months, and embarrassingly, what I found out in the few short weeks that I have been using Blackboard this semester is that it essentially took NO time to learn how to operate Blackboard, and it was remarkably easy to get the students engaged in its use. In retrospect, the two things I “feared” most about using Blackboard (my learning curve and my students’ learning curves) turned out to be nothing but myths!

Blackboard allows me to link all my digital content (PowerPoint lecture slides, handouts, homeworks, syllabus, lab handouts, outside reading URL’s, Institute policies, etc.) to one “website” using a process that is 10 times as “instructor friendly” as my previous practice of manually uploading my syllabus and content to the Institute’s server. Blackboard is also much more intuitive to use.

There is no doubt in my mind that as websites go, Blackboard is much less complex than most of the sites the students visit regularly for “recreational” web-surfing. In other words, it is easier for them to find their homework assignments (and all the tools to complete them) than to find tickets to a sold out concert or a bootleg MP3 file. It also became apparent in my first foray into “teaching” Blackboard that to do so merely consisted of telling the students what their user names and passwords were. So much for my 2 page lecture outline! By the time I was ready to explain where to find what, they had already explored the site, had the site navigation figured out and were engaged in their first online quiz.

This phenomenon repeated itself in each of my next two lab sections. It was amazing. With minimal effort I was communicating more effectively and efficiently with my students. Blackboard provides a common ground for communication that gives me user friendly tools to provide material with and at the same time reaches out to the students through a medium that they embrace. Now, if I can only get them to laugh at my disco jokes....