Project 3: Blackboard | Laurence Dumouchel

A Better Class Blackboard

The aim of this project is to improve the way the Learning Management System (Blackboard) is organized for one of my online university classes (ANTH 101: Biological Anthropology). This is a personal project I designed for my portfolio and I was not contracted by Blackboard.

My research question is:

What is the best way to organize course content in Blackboard?

Incentive

The students were offered extra credit in exchange for their participation.

Recruitment

I directly reached out to my current students via a Blackboard announcement.

Participants

Total: 18

Ages: 19 - 53 year old (median: 21)

Gender: 1 non-binary, 2 men, 15 women

College year:

Methodology

Participants were given one week to answer a survey, which includes both qualitative and quantitative questions.
I used Qualtrics to collect and analyze the results. I also used it to produce the graphs.

Qualitative questions

I inquired further about the participants' technical abilities.

I used a graphic slider as a fun way to have the participants evaluate their overall satisfaction with the product:

Feedback

"I would try to make Blackboard more uniform for every course, especially so that the structure of the tabs and sections are identical across courses (as of now, the format and features are somewhat different for each course I take)."

"The most useful tool on Blackboard, in my opinion, is the activity stream. I like this because it shows when and what assignments are due."

"In the past, I’ve accidentally posted the discussion and couldn’t delete it. I would add a delete button."

Heatmapping

Using heat mapping, I was able to determine that only about half of the students who participated (55.6%) could find the class syllabus...

... while nearly all of the participants found the gradebook.

User Validations

User flow should be streamlined so users do not get frustrated or confused
Some features such as the ability to delete a contribution should be added
A search bar could be added to find documents - such as the syllabus - that are important but used infrequently

Affinity Map

Recommendations and Reflection

It appears that most of the student participant's frustrations relate to Blackboard overall (not this specific course) and thus systemic changes are needed, either within a University or across all institutions that use Blackboard.
Further research is needed to verify if the concern of the student participants applies to classes of different topics or levels
Some participants reported previous and more positive experiences with other Learning Management Systems, such as Canvas. We could investigate some of the differences in pain points across different platforms.