Using Blackboard Learn to create an open online course

In this session we will discuss the way that we have used Blackboard Learn to create the University's first open, online course, entitled Study Skills for Academic Success. The course is designed to improve students’ academic skills and confidence, and was originally delivered as a 100% face-to-face course. In the session we will outline the way that we took this version of the course and transformed it first into a blended course, and then into an entirely online course. It was very important to us for the online course to be very interactive, participatory and reflective, and for it not simply to be a content repository or video library. Thus, the online course makes extensive use of e-tivities to structure the learning experiences/activities, and provide opportunities for discussion and reflection. We were keen not to lose the sociability of a face-to-face course, and so the online course also makes major use of the collaborative tools in Blackboard (particularly blogs and discussion boards), so that students still feel that they are part of a community of learning and can benefit from the peer-to-peer interactions which are such an important part of the learning process. For private reflection we used the Journals tool. Lastly, we were keen both to monitor learning and also to avoid overloading the students with e-tivities and tasks, so instead of presenting the course components en bloc to the students, the course is structured around eight specific sets of activities, each of which is adaptively released to students via the completion of tests. We have completed delivery of the blended version of the course, and have used feedback from this to create the new fully online version of the course. This version is currently being beta-tested (January 2014) and is due for first delivery to University of Northampton students in March 2014. From May 2014 onwards it will be offered on a rolling basis via the CourseSites MOOC catalog, and we will be contacting all students who make an application to the University of Northampton to encourage them to register and take part in the course.