New learning system for students and staff at the Faculty of Arts
Blackboard is AU’s new digital meeting point, a subject forum for both teachers and students. The first people to use the system at the Faculty of Arts will be first-year Master’s students at two departments. This will be after the summer holiday, with the rest of the faculty following suit in 2015.
Blackboard is a new, shared learning system which will be replacing both AULA and FirstClass in 2014-2015. It will be implemented throughout Aarhus University, helping to ensure that students studying subjects in different degree programmes and main academic areas all have access to the same system. Blackboard was pilot tested at BSS in 2013, and is now ready for implementation in the other main academic areas.
Implementation in two phases
The Centre for Teaching Development and Digital Media is responsible for implementing the system at the Faculty of Arts. During the autumn the centre ran pilot projects for students of English and history, where the teachers have already started using the system to distribute teaching material as well as using the assignment submission and feedback options.
The first people to use the system after the summer holiday will be first-year Master’s students at the Department of Aesthetics and Communication and the Department of Culture and Society. But there are a few exceptions. Students and teachers of theology, archaeology as well as the international line of the international and global history programme, are waiting until the next phase. They will start to use Blackboard at the same time as the Department of Education in the spring of 2015.
Blackboard is expected to be fully implemented throughout AU by the end of 2015.
Marianne Ping Huang, the Vice-Dean for Education, is a member of the steering committee responsible for implementation at the Faculty of Arts. She says:
“The whole Blackboard project is part of the faculty’s strategy for Educational IT, which regards digital media and methods as central to the quality development of the faculty’s teaching and degree programmes. Blackboard gives our teachers a great chance to develop new, additional teaching and supervision methods which don’t necessarily take place in the classroom. The students will also get access to a shared system that provides a uniform and cohesive learning platform – no matter what subject and degree programme they’re studying.”
How does Blackboard work?
Unlike previous learning systems at Aarhus University, Blackboard is integrated with other administrative systems such as STADS and Syllabus. So teachers and students can expect their courses to be available on Blackboard the very first time they log in.
Blackboard is structured to ensure that teachers and students all have their own individual profile – an idea with which many people will already be familiar (on Facebook, for instance). This means that the system is based on you as a user – whether you’re a teacher or a student – so you will only be shown the courses that are relevant for you. You can also set up cross-subject groups – including groups for shared and cross-disciplinary areas of interest, projects and initiatives.
Before the system is implemented in the autumn semester, the teachers will be offered introductory courses and the option of organising their own courses in the new learning system. There will also be a website for both students and staff, containing information about courses and guidelines.
