Blackboard Reports

UMBC's Check My Activity (CMA) feedback tool for students featured prominently in a keynote talk by John Fritz at the Blackboard World Developer's conference today.

The Internet and Higher Education has published an article about UMBC's Check My Activity (CMA) tool for students in its special issue on web mining in education. For more information, see the following:

Fritz, J., Classroom walls that talk: Using online course activity data of successful students to raise self-awareness of underperforming peers, Internet and Higher Education, Volume 14, Issue 2, March 2011, Pages 89-97.

The final 2010 issue of EDUCAUSE Quarterly includes a brief (5 minute) video demo of UMBC's "Check My Activity" (CMA) tool for students. The CMA demo was part of EQ's special focus on student retention, and includes new information comparing how students use Blackboard by final grade distribution in all 1,461 Spring 2010 Blackboard courses. Specifically, D & F students used it 47 percent less than students earning a C or better, which is similar to results from previous semesters based on much smaller samples. A similar analysis is being conducted on all Blackboard courses for Fall 2010.

In 2008, a national study of more than 30,000 seniors and freshmen at more than 100 colleges and universities (including UMBC) reported that students value the ability to check their grades far more than any other function in a course management system (CMS) like Blackboard. Yet, less than half of UMBC's Bb courses used the grade book this past fall and spring. We understand why: it takes a little time to master the Bb grade center, faculty may prefer to use Excel functions in an "offline" mode, and there may be a reluctance to put a grade on everything students do. But apart from keeping students from constantly pestering faculty, an active Bb grade book can be "leveraged" in some interesting ways.

Last month, UMBC began its first full semester with Presidium Learning as the provider of our new 24/7 Blackboard support service. As a result, 169 students and 83 faculty sought direct, start-of-semester help (266 total). In addition, the related Bb self-support portal recorded 755 visits, 167 knowledge base article accesses and a total of 1,766 page views. This does not include 195 Blackboard "Request Tracker" (RT) tickets resolved by DoIT staff directly. A more detailed summary of January's 24/7 Bb support is available here, and future monthly reports will be announced in this DoIT News blog each month during this one-year pilot that was announced last fall.