Hannah Whaley . com

I gave a presentation at the recent Blackboard World Conference (#bbworld09) in Washington DC on ‘Groupwork Assessment’. The powerpoint for this presentation is available on the Blackboard Connections site. The talk was videoed by the 360 people, and you can watch the video here. Thanks to everyone that turned up - and asked questions and spoke to me at the end. The feedback was all positive, and appeared to highlight the genuine requirement for a system of this kind to be more widely available within Blackboard. The rise in group teaching and assessment, and the issues students face with it, appear to be consistent across disciplines, year groups, institutions and continents.

The ability to work effectively in a team is seen as a crucial skill within many professions and industry sectors. There has been a rise in the use of assessed group work in many disciplines over recent years. There are numerous reasons for this increase, including larger class sizes (therefore making it efficient to have group submissions) and a greater emphasis on employability and transferable skills.

Despite this rapid progression, methods for assessing the individual contributions of team members have not advanced significantly causing a feeling of dissatisfaction amongst many students. Faculty are also concerned about the possibility of students gaining high marks because of their team’s effort, when the individual contribution was unsatisfactory.

An approach to collaboration has been developed that teaches about team work by focusing on assessment criteria and peer evaluation aspects of group working. As the amount of group work that students complete continues to increase, enhancing their learning in this area helps them achieve more from project work and benefit from collaborative learning approaches. By ensuring fairer grading for individual contributions to groups, students are less stressed by the challenges of team working and are better able to focus simultaneously on the project deliverable and team interactions.

It has been a busy few weeks, and I thought I would share a couple of recent challenges with you.

I recently spent two weeks in Germany, completing a 2000 mile driving holiday in our Lotus Elise. We spent some time at the Nurburgring - the longest, most challenging and unforgiving racetrack in the world. I chose to drive a lap - a genuinely nerve-wracking experience and not a decision I took lightly given the well documented dangers of the track. Also driving the 13 mile ring was a Lambo, Corvette ZR-1, Ferarri F430 Scuderia, Nissan GTR, and more GT3 RSs than you could shake a stick at - all doing some serious speeds on track. It was an amazing experience, a genuine feeling of accomplishment and I am incredibly glad I chose to tackle it.

This was not the only challenge of the last few weeks. Immediately before I left for Germany I had a job interview, and I have been delighted to accept the position of Assistant Director of the Library and Learning Centre at the University of Dundee, responsible for Research and Systems. I am looking forward to working more closely with the Library and Learning Centre staff to build on existing work and tackle the many challenges being presented within this area - not least the changes in the publishing sector, effective search, integrations, open access repositories and research management initiatives.

This week I am at BbWorld09 in Washington DC and have been presenting on both the challenges with Groupwork Assessment and with effective implementation of content systems for learning and teaching. Common themes from talking to colleagues here have centred on  moving elearning systems forward (the adoption of Bb9) and providing stable, integrated systems that meet our staff and student’s expectations for modern working. It never fails to impress me how much progress there is in the sector year on year, and yet how we feel constantly challenged by the needs and requirements of the university community. I understand how people can feel swamped by this, but it is important to realise just how quickly we can adapt, and how far we have already risen to meet the challenge of achieving 21st century education.

I hope that challenges of all kinds continue to present themselves to me in life, as the biggest challenges tend to bring the best opportunities with them.

Just last week Blackboard announced that they have bought Angel Learning. I thought it might be useful to pull together some of the information and opinion that I have observed online since this announcement.

First the info. Blackboard have been through the mill once before with a high profile acquisition, and while Angel is not as high profile as WebCT was in terms of client numbers it still represents a leading competitor at this time. Announcements came through thick and fast from Blackboard, and you can read them here:

• Michael Chasen’s twitter account, closely followed with retweets from other well known Bb twitterers, and complete with its own hashtag of #bbplusangel
• Blackboard blog posts
• Blackboard press release
• Dedicated section on Blackboard Website
• Michael Chasen on Fox Business News

Early reaction included lots of retweets, and news of a 10% drop in Bb’s shares (Nasdaq BBBB) - this was later accredited to lower guidance and a downgrade on the day. Subsequent twitter reaction seemed to show disappointment from Angel clients, and approval from Blackboard clients. The news that Ray Henderson (the No.2 at Angel Learning) was now to become head of Blackboard Learn seemed to help even out the opinion.

From what I have read, I have seen three main themes for community concern and opinion - collated here with example blog posts to reflect them:

1. Can you escape the gravitational pull of Blackboard? Many felt they had made repeated decisions against Blackboard, by buying WebCT and then Angel, yet seem to be pulled back to being Blackboard clients without actively making that decision.

• Angelic Learning Online

2. Have enough lessons been learnt? Many of the statements of optimism from this acqusition seemed to reflect similar statements given at the time of the WebCT merger.

• Three tests for the ‘new’ Blackboard 

3. Can Blackboard ever have a good guy reputation? Many feel that Blackboard’s reputation is going from bad to worse, following the WebCT merger, D2L lawsuits and now this latest acqusition of a main competitor.

•  A corpse for Blackboard’s corpulence
• Inside Higher Ed

It is important to remember that Blackboard are a business. Not a charity, not an educational establishment, not a government funded body. They are a company, and if they don’t do business right then they will cease to be a company, and the time and money invested in them by institutions will amount to nothing.  Somebody has to be a leader in a marketplace, and that fact alone does not make them evil or dangerous. A lack of innovation or  monopolising while stagnating would do. In the time I’ve worked on Bb systems they have continuously taken significant steps forward, and that is important to me. Interesting that the anger is always directed to Blackboard who appear committed to offering educational products rather than the companies that sold out their customers. Perhaps its just easier to aim at the ones that are still around.

Also, they are a really young company. A big company, but still young and still learning. We all work to promote learning in individuals so why are we so unforgiving of businesses that are learning? Maybe they have learnt nothing at all from the WebCT merger, but I don’t believe that could be the case. However, learning is not enough alone, and they must act on what they have learnt. I hope they do, as it could benefit many institutions. I’m possibly too optimistic, but I feel that a focus on the negatives helps no-one. There will be opportunities to come from bbplusangel - perhaps people should focus on providing a strong community voice to guide them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about academic profiles lately. Partly because writing a blog like this makes you consider your own public profile, but also because of the recent release of Google Profiles. The release of any Google tool should make us all stop to consider why they made it and what the potential impact could be. We’ve seen enough apps from them grow into meaningful entities in their own right to have a right to get excited when something new is released. So what is Google profiles all about and how does it relate to academics?

In short, Profiles is a place to collate all the information held about you on other Google apps so that you can control how you are presented to the outside world. It lets you link out to your blog, twitter, flicker and facebook pages and so becomes your central profile. Nifty features include things like allowing others to email you at your GMail account without giving out your email address, and automatically incorporating data that you enter into other Google services. And the killer hook? The more you populate your profile, the higher up the search ranks it goes. Wham. Google just put themselves at the center of everything you do online - all they need is single sign on to them all and they control the internet. Well, control it more.

Researchers and academics are starting to cotton on to the power of a good internet presence. Open access to publications gives earlier and more citations - citations matter in external assessment exercises. Even without open access publishing, a good web presence will ensure that people who go looking for your articles can find out easy information about your work, research, conference attendance and forthcoming publications. Despite these obvious benefits, it is not commonplace for Universities to provide their staff with the tools, space and training to create online profiles. It is left to the interested few to develop their own techniques and find the ways that work for them. There are hundreds of simple html attempts (of the nature of ‘Jim’s Research Page’) left unattended and not updated on uni servers around the country due to an initial wave of academic enthusiasm for the internet.

So Google Profiles could provide a good solution? It certainly allows people to quickly create and maintain professional profiles. The recognisability of them as Google ones brings benefits, not least the jump in search ranks. However…. it is forcing our academic staff down a very individualistic route - there is nothing that identifies them resolutely as belonging to a particular university. Staff and their work are major assets of any institution, and the ideal solution would be to provide functionality of this kind in house. Interestingly, I was informed recently that Google rankings actually weight University domains highly, meaning that an in-house solution would also achieve a very visible public profile.

The other option would be to see Google expand their system to facilitate Academic Profiles - specifically associating them and their work with an institution, linking to that institution’s repository and other work from the same research groups/schools.

So which is more likely: institutions understanding the intangible benefits of social networking presence and providing a solution, or Google moving to expand its Profiles service into academia, and linking with existing services like Google Scholar, Google Reader and Google Book Search? I’ll let you decide.