FrontPage | OAA Blackboard Fellow Announcement

In applying to become a Blackboard Fellow, my reasons are quite simple.  The transition to Blackboard Learn offers opportunities for IPFW that go beyond simply how this campus implements instructional technology, and as a Blackboard Fellow, I have the experience, interest, and technological savvy to provide leadership in the transition from Blackboard Vista to Blackboard Learn.  While my dedication to instructional technology began long before the call for applications for Blackboard Fellows went out, including my service as an OAA Fellow, my membership with the Instructional Technology Co-Ordination Committee, and my leadership in facilitating department- and school-wide transitions to the first IPFW web template, more recently I have learned that this dedication has its limits.  Any commitments to instructional technology have to compete against other, equally important service expectations that have accumulated well beyond the more defined and well-structured expectations the campus has for teaching and research.  Thus, seeing real resources placed behind this position encouraged a belief that the transition to Blackboard Learn was important enough to warrant a set of structured resources, and that with these resources, my leadership could achieve some degree of effectiveness.

As a Blackboard Fellow and along with the other named Blackboard Fellow; ITS, and the Office of Academic Affairs, including CELT and FACET, I hope to help promote a collaborative, dynamic, and learning-driven culture of technological innovation.  As a Blackboard Fellow, I hope to accomplish this first by promoting solutions that work to support learning rather than enlist learning in the service of technology and that work to foster continuous, learning-centered and faculty-centered innovation using a broad range of collaborative tools available through Blackboard Learn. I then hope to promote tailored training in support of the transition in ways that better match ever-expanding, on-the-ground contexts in which both faculty and students actually are using Blackboard Learn across a range of screens and platforms.  The challenge for both finding solutions and tailoring trainings is to avoid replicating and perpetuating a one-size-fits-all set of assumptions concerning how faculty and students are using this technology, regardless of whether these assumptions might apply or not.  We do not teach first, and then derive our assumptions about teaching after we have taught.  Rather, the assumptions we hold about teaching, regardless of where this teaching takes place, can determine the kinds of teaching that occurs in these specific contexts.  The more flexible and self-aware these assumptions can become, the more adept our solutions and our training will become in producing the kinds of teaching we want to take place at IPFW.

Although the transition to Blackboard Learn ultimately will prove both the right decision and an important one in IPFW's history, the transition has not occurred without certain missteps.  One of the biggest: IPFW largely delegated this transition as a problem solved through ITS training.  As a member of the Blackboard Pilot group, I see the challenge to IPFW extending far beyond just a training issue.  The success or failure resulting from the calculated risk in moving the campus to Blackboard Learn largely rests on how well this campus facilitates major shifts in thinking about what learning and technology means for a university like IPFW.  At a recent panel on the transition to Blackboard Learn, I likened this shift to the difference between using a one-room schoolhouse; and having a multi-use, multi-purpose, and multi-room high school.  Blackboard Vista's major limitation was that its paradigmatic assumptions about learning could imagine one or two very limited scenarios in which the teacher remained at the center of the learning process.  Blackboard Learn's central paradigm imagines a broader set of decentered learning scenarios, many of which involve student-to-student collaboration.  Training alone cannot change the way in which faculty think about how best to use instructional technology amid a proliferating set of learning contexts and assumptions, especially when this thinking has for the past ten years depended upon Vista's extremely thin and limiting paradigm for instructional technology.

As I proposed in the drafting of the original position description, support for the transition to Blackboard Learn must occur along a variety of tracks and in a variety of contexts.  In this environment, a straight how-to training model faculty still has a place, but not to the exclusion or subordination of other kinds of models for how to facilitate the transition.  In this spirit, I had proposed a faculty-to-faculty support model that could address a variety of different teaching styles and contexts in a variety of different kinds of settings.  Using an approximate schedule of nine to twelve hours per week, I suggested that this faculty-to-faculty support take place in one-on-one settings, in small groups, and in preparing a set of extensible "best practices" templates that faculty could use for upcoming classes.  Faculty support could take place without ever meeting face-to-face; through a series of scheduled meetings; through just-in-time assistance; or in some combination of these modes.  IPFW thus could help support faculty without ever requiring anyone to attend a training session, simply by making a series of "best practices" templates developed in coordination with FACET and CELT available.  For some faculty, that alone would be sufficient.

For others, I propose a collaborative, problem-solving model for addressing issues as they develop throughout the semester.  This model would include at least two different scenarios.  Under the first scenario, the Blackboard Fellow would meet one-on-one with faculty, in real-time and just-in-time, to address specific challenges and possible solutions given what the faculty member is attempting to accomplish in the course.  This could occur five minutes before class, or it could occur five weeks in advance of when the faculty needs to know how to do something.  Under the second scenario, the Blackboard Fellow would hold regularly scheduled meetings with small groups of faculty to share common experiences with challenges encountered, and how faculty could or did find ways to solve those problems or work around them.  Training will not go away under either of these scenarios, but the mode in which training occurs needs to change.  Rather than prepare training materials that anticipate what faculty need based on a set of assumptions that may or may not be accurate, training in these scenarios would take on a much more flexible and improvised dimension.

If this model is to work effectively, the Blackboard Fellows will need be available in a variety of different modes.  I would propose having a combination of regularly scheduled meetings, walk-in office hours, and a mechanism for online scheduling of appointments each week.  I also would propose equipping each Blackboard Fellow with an iPad so that the Fellow can help acquaint other faculty with the potential of designing courses for use on mobile devices.  Finally, in addition to scheduling meetings in Fellows' or other faculty's current offices, I also would propose that OAA provide an office with a computer so that these meetings could take place away from the typical distractions of a faculty member's office.

Ultimately, should the Blackboard Fellows do their job effectively, their role eventually will become obsolete as faculty become more accustomed to new models of instructional technology emphasizing collaboration and access.  The transition affords a welcome opportunity to move away from older instructional models envisioning knowledge as both a privatized and scarce commodity.  To that end, I would propose that Blackboard Fellows become facilitators of faculty communities where IPFW faculty can freely share innovations with one another.  Blackboard Learn has created new opportunities to do this.  Ideally, faculty could simply log in to another colleague's course to see how he or she "did that."  Once IPFW faculty become engaged in a real dialogue about what constitutes effective online learning, the need for a Fellow or some other administrative position may yield to a stronger learning culture in which all faculty readily embrace new opportunities to innovate, regardless of the learning platform.  That in turn may help our students become less dependent upon faculty as dispensers of discrete quantities of knowledge.  If we continue to use Blackboard Learn to uncritically and unwittingly build unnecessarily constricted spaces of virtual one-room schoolhouses, our students will have every reason to expect an obsolete 19th century education, as opposed to the 21st century education that will get them jobs, and the one that they deserve.