Now that we have established the plan and structure, alongside preliminary theories that we want to include in the course, it is time to incorporate all the elements.
To start, I would like to highlight that we have already created an orientation course on the BlackBoard, but there are a few limitations that we had to address and overcome. Firstly, the BlackBoard is limited to in scope of materials that can be included and activities that can be run in it.
As it can be seen in the picture above, there are only videos and reading material, and in terms of the activity, there are only quizzes. This strongly limits the amount of activities that can be done, but links could also be attached to mitigate this. However, since we wanted to contain the Orientation course within the BlackBoard, external links were not included.
One aspect that is beneficial in the BlackBoard, is the "lock" system. As seen in the screenshot above, the lessons are locked until the previous lesson is viewed. This ensures that students do not jump around in the material, and watch them in the order it was intended to be viewed in. On the other hand, this also inhibits the learning at some points, since some students felt limited in their freedom and considering that the orientation was not mandatory to progress, a lot of the students did not fully pass the orientation.
Our hope was, that with using Edmodo, a platform that is more familiar to the students, they would be more inclined to go through the material as it was more "fun".
We also decided that we do not want all the materials from the previously developed Orientation, and relied on "what is most important". We stayed on the following:
- Introduction
- About the Course
- Student Assessment
- Academic Integrity
- Mitigating Circumstances
- Academic Counselling
- Enrolment and Module Registration
- Learning Resource Center
- Student Support Services
These are the main lessons we wanted students to cover, since these are the basics of their study at WIUT. Once students understand these concepts, they will be most familiar with how the university functions and what students have available in terms of additional services.
My thoughts on the BlackBoard, is that it is a tool that has its purpose, but is quite limited in its use. I wanted to make the orientation more accessible (Pirani and Sasikumar, 2014), hence why we, me and my partner, were discussing what we can do to make such.
By the next post, I will start covering how we incorporated the existing material and develop them further to make them more engaging and relate it with the relevant literature.
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Pirani, Z. and Sasikumar, M. (2014). Accessibility Issues in Learning Management Systems for Learning Disabled: A Survey. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 253–264. Available from https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01778-5_26 [Accessed 10 April 2022].
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