Over the last couple of days I have been working on a report on the current online learning tools provided at the University of Southampton. They are numerous: we have a ‘Sussed’ portal, which acts as a home page with links out to all of the different services, online timetabling, a Blackboard Virtual Learning Environment, a link to the Office365 logon, and a student records system. We also have two different common mobile apps. The large number of services available could in itself be an inconvenience, but more on that later.
The purpose of the report is to discover what we have available for now, the features it provides, and the quality of the interface to the students. This will clearly show areas which are not being used to their full potential at the moment, as well as areas which are not currently suitable for the task. We can move from here to investigate why services are not being used to their full potential, and also to see what services are required and work out how to provide them.
Largely, the report is based on my experiences using the system, and as such I spent most of the time to produce the report looking through my own portal, testing different links and exploring features I didn’t know existed before. Each service (Blackboard, Timetabling, etc.) is looked at individually and the advantages and shortfalls are listed, described, and explained. There is no time or desire at present to discuss how the system could be changed or improved, as there is far more data gathering to do before this becomes relevant.
Blackboard
Blackboard, the VLE, has a number of features which I had not used previously as there had been no reason to use them. It is a more powerful tool than I thought – it is not just a file storing site, because there are blogs, wikis, forums (discussions) and even a full calendar feature. However, as I also discovered, these are not very well used.
To analyse the content types found and used on Blackboard, I counted up all of the files found in my directories and looked at the different file types present. As expected, nearly half were PDF files, and it would have been much more if I had not counted videos of recorded lectures as well. The biggest surprise was to find that only 6% of the file types on Blackboard are web technologies and not files. All of these are discussion boards and quizzes – there are no blogs or wikis used in any of my courses. The distribution is seen in the chart here.
The reason Virtual Learning Environments are used over simple file storage sites is because they provide so many more functions and ways for academic staff to interact with the students. But here we see that for 94% of the content on Blackboard, a file storage site may even be optimal, because it would allow users to keep their libraries in sync with the latest version of a file, access documents in the cloud, and share files with specific groups of students or links rather than the privacy being limited to course-wide folders.
Mobile Apps
There are two mobile apps associated with the university that are widely used amongst students at Southampton. Firstly, the MySouthampton app is used for viewing timetables, finding free computers, and library search functions like DelphiS. It is the method of choice for many students for viewing their timetables because the timetabling service online is much more complex to understand. The official Blackboard app, Blackboard Learn, is also used to access files on mobile devices. This comes in to its own when viewing lecture slides on mobile devices in lectures. Students can make notes directly onto the slides using specialised apps specifically for this purpose, or they can simply follow along if the lecturer moves too quickly or too slowly.
These mobile apps are widely used and have by far the best interface of any of the online tools provided. Both provide cut-down versions of the full online alternative and this allows the design to be simpler and easier to use. App design standards are also more focussed on usability where web technologies are not forced to be easy to use, so there are several reasons that the students prefer to use mobile apps over the online alternatives.
Review Points
The report summarises the above points and more into a list of areas on which more research will be focussed. These are areas where the current system is either ineffective or used inefficiently, or where improvements can be made which would improve the service provided by the tools.
- Student engagement in blogs and wikis – they are useful features that are currently unused.
- Content organisation in Blackboard folders – files are often difficult to find wthin the folder structures on Blacboard.
- Integration of content into one dedicated system – specifically the timetables, which are currently in their own system, and would be more easily viewed if they could be exported in a format that could be read by software such as Outlook and iCal.
- Second sign-ins – half of the links available through the Sussed portal require a second input of user credentials. Bringing these services under the first login would be beneficial.
- Mobile devices – can and should more features be added to mobile apps to improve content uptake among students.
Outcomes
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it: if we cannot find good reason to do away with the current system, regardless of the alternatives, then it should not be replaced. This report has established that while the current services are very capable of providing what is required from a Virtual Learning Environment, many of them are not provided efficiently or in a way that is user friendly and convenient. This means the focus of the review can be on improving user integration with the systems – which typically provide far more functionality than is actually required – than on improving the range of features that is available.
There will be further research into the VLE user groups to discover where it is possible to improve the user interaction and to identify how best to proceed with the recommendations.
Alex McCormick 