Blackboard offers a variety of communication tools that allow learners and tutors to keep in regular contact with one another either synchronously (like live chat) or asynchronously (such as e-mail or discussion forums). Blackboard is good at facilitating activities like collaborative group work, where tutors set tasks for groups of learners to work on and monitor their progress online.
The Discussion forum tool can be used to support the discussion of a course theme and allow the learners to communicate with each other throughout the course. Documents, images, web links and files can be attached to messages. Discussion forums need moderation, but generally learners in HE are mostly sensible and forums tend to run with only a little input from moderators.
Some other useful communication tools that are available in Blackboard are highlighted below:
Announcement: Send a message to students to remind them of events/new material to your Blackboard module, etc.
e-mail: Send a message to all students/individual student/teaching assistants who are enrolled on a Blackboard course.
Chat: Live one-to-one discussion in a module.
Online Attendance: Talk live with who is currently online in Blackboard.
Blog: All staff and students can contribute to a group/course blog or to blog created by an individual.
Journal: A reflective, personal diary that allows students to keep their own notes.
Wiki: Wikis allow people to work collaboratively on tasks. Amend and develop content. Previous versions of documents are stored.
Campus Pack Podcast: Podcast your lectures using Blackboard Podcaster tool. If you plan to produce a series of podcasts, it is better to create a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed that will allow students to subscribe to your podcast and automatically download new editions of your podcast using an aggregator program such as i-Tunes.
Wikis, journals and blogs
Wikis enable groups of students to work together on the same task to create things like, a group presentation, a collaborative report or a group website. By using a Wiki, students can each change a documents format, add new content and the wiki keeps track of all the changes. The wiki can revert back to earlier versions, if needed. If you currently work with your own wikis, you can simply hyperlink to these from within Blackboard. Blackboard supports Blackboard Wiki and Campus Pack Wiki. There is slight difference between them, for example Campus Pack Wiki does not support assessment criteria, while it is easier for the tutors to roll over its structure in the next year activities. Teachers can compare the previous stored versions of documents by using the History option.
The Journal in Blackboard is only viewable by the learners themselves and not by others. It allows learners to make their own notes, complete their own diaries or action logs and is intended to be used for reflect-after-action.
The Blog tool allows learners to post information that is seen by everyone on the module or by a group of students. Blogging is becoming a popular way of communication and it can be used successfully for supplementing pre-written course content with up-to-the-minute information about the course such as, exam dates, urgent news, events, visiting lecturers etc. Blackboard blogs can be assigned to individual groups of learners and if required they can be assessed either by tutors or by learners themselves (peer-review).
Communication between learners and tutors by Maria Limniou is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Computers in Education and not only 