Update on the Blackboard Portal Project

Posted on: 18 June 2015
By: saundeg
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Filed under: Blackboard

All strands of the project have made good progress int he last few weeks.

14 student helpers have been employed and they are supporting drop-in sessions for staff across the 4 Faculties with a specific aim to help staff better manage their Blackboard sites. Already nearly 100 academic staff have booked on. If you are interested to attend a workshop then use the links below to book a slot.

Marylebone-based staff

Regent/LTS-based staff 

Harrow-based staff

Cavendish-based staff 

The information architecture for the new Blackboard is more or less agreed sufficiently to generate a ‘mock-up’ (see below – NOTE YOU CAN CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO MAKE IT LARGER). Later this month we will release a video tour of the ‘mocked-up’ Blackboard on our test server for people to comment on. Alongside this the design consultants Syndicut have been working to generate 4 or 5 possible ‘new looks’ for Blackboard based on the student responses to the earlier ‘mood board’ questionnaire. We hope these options will very soon be available for students to vote on.

Finally the pre-arrival Blackboard experience is developing. A major step forward has been completion of purely technical work which will allow us to provide students coming to us in September with a Blackboard experience which is fundamentally different (in terms of both look and content) to that which students actually starting their studies will see. Central tot he pre-arrival experience will be access to a wide range of induction type information about services.