The Blackboard Content System and CourseWeb

The University is upgrading and extending its Blackboard course management system for the coming spring term, 2008. This article explains a key component of the upgrade—the addition of the Blackboard Content System to CourseWeb.

The last edition of the Teaching Times announced that the University was conducting a pilot implementation of several significant changes to CourseWeb, Pitt’s implementation of the Blackboard course management system. This article explains the newest addition, the Blackboard Content System; illustrates a subset of its capabilities; and provides some of the implementation details.

The CourseWeb upgrades are being pilot tested during this fall term (2081) and are scheduled to be fully deployed for the coming spring term (2084). Some faculty who are teaching in the coming spring term already have begun creating their course materials on the new platform. The upgrades occur in three areas:

1. Version 7.3 Upgrade: The Blackboard Learning System is being upgraded from version 6.3 to version 7.3. This upgrade provides several new features that were summarized in the September 2007 Teaching Times and documented in several BbmCasts .
2. Learning Objects: This building block has been added to the Blackboard Learning System on a trial basis, providing wiki, blog, podcast, and search capabilities within the structure of a Blackboard course section and/or instructor-created student group. These tools are documented in several BbmCasts.
3. Blackboard Content System: The content system is a sister product to the Blackboard Learning and Community Systems already implemented at Pitt. Its acquisition represents a significant extension of the capabilities currently available to faculty in support of instruction. The remainder of this article will explain the content system in more detail.

The Blackboard Content System

The content system provides every instructor with a permanent Web-accessible content area (called “My Content”) that is integrated with CourseWeb and searchable via metadata. The content can consist of any electronic document (Word, PowerPoint, PDFs, graphics, audio files, etc.) and is accessible to the instructor from anywhere via the Internet. After uploading their course materials to the content system, faculty can then build their CourseWeb sections by pointing to files in their “My Content” areas.

A Blackboard course is comprised of four components: (1) interactive tools (discussion boards, chats, quizzes, surveys, etc.), (2) course management tools (gradebook, assignments, groups, etc.), (3) textual material, and (4) uploaded documents (images, sounds, videos, PowerPoints, PDFs, etc.). The Blackboard Content System is concerned with the last two of these components, namely, the course materials.

As with any complex Web site, a Blackboard course is composed of a set of interrelated files stored in a hierarchical file structure. What was unique about Blackboard when the University acquired it nearly 10 years ago (then called CourseInfo) was its reliance on a database that defines the course and points to content resident in the course file system (see the “Learning System” side of the illustration below). The Blackboard Content System extends the file structure that a course can reference by allowing it to access files stored in a separate, persistent “content collection” residing on the same Blackboard server.

The advantage of this new capability is that faculty can access their course documents at any time from anywhere on the Internet. Unlike the documents within their courses (on the “Learning System” side), which are not available when the course is no longer active, the documents in the content system will remain as long as desired, within the constraints of the one gigabyte per instructor system quota.

Instructors can access their content system files via a new tab labeled “Content Collection” at the top of the Blackboard page. Once in the content collection, the left-hand navigation bar displays the instructor’s directory, identified by Pitt username (in the accompanying illustration the “laudato” subdirectory) under the top-level “users” directory. For faculty who co-teach, the system enables access to a colleague’s directory (see the directory named for the test user “instructor_laudato”) if it has been appropriately shared. Also, the icon of a hand holding a document shows that the documents in the illustrated directory have been shared with another instructor.

The content collection window contains commands for managing files on the system, including the ability to add items, add folders, copy files, etc. The “Add Item” option provides a familiar procedure for uploading single files into the content system. Another feature, the “Web Folder,” provides an easier way to upload multiple files or directories from the user’s local computer to the content system. The Web folder button launches a special application called “WebDAV,” an acronym for “Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning.” WebDAV enables its user to essentially “map a drive” to the content system and drag-and-drop (or cut-and-paste) files and directories to Blackboard. It is even possible to browse the content system from the Web folder and edit documents directly on the server. This capability enables shared documents to be modified without affecting the links to the shared documents.

The Blackboard Content System can facilitate access to shared instructional materials at the school, program, departmental, and course levels. It can enable faculty to share their course materials with their colleagues and to access materials shared with them. Finally, the content system includes the Blackboard ePortfolio system, which will be implemented at Pitt pending the creation and approval of school- or program-based implementation plans. Academic units interested in participating in a pilot implementation of the ePortfolio system should contact Diane J. Davis, director of CIDDE.

Implementation of the Content System

The content system is available for use by all faculty who plan to use CourseWeb in the coming spring term (2084). In order for a course to take advantage of the content system, it must be modified to point to documents that have been previously stored in the instructor’s content collection. The staff at the Faculty Instructional Development Lab (FIDL) have scheduled regular training sessions (see “Using the Blackboard Content System” at www.pitt.edu/~ciddeweb/cw/training_form.htm) and can share tools, procedures, and tips to facilitate the conversion process.

The timing of the implementation of the content system is critical, as it affords faculty the opportunity to “kill two birds with one stone.” Most faculty will need to manually re-create their courses anyway on the new Blackboard 7.3 platform. This requirement is based on an analysis by technical consultants from Blackboard who have indicated that the Blackboard conversion utilities did not always successfully migrate all of the database components from courses originally created in early versions of Blackboard (versions 2, 3, and 5.5) when the servers were updated, resulting in database corruption in our current 6.3 system.

For existing courses that were created recently, based on a new course shell originally built under version 6.3 (newly created since September 2005) it may be possible to import them into the new Blackboard 7.3 platform. The procedure for doing so will be for FIDL staff to import a course into the test 7.3 server, check it thoroughly, export it from 7.3, and import it into the new 7.3 production server. This will be done on request for any qualifying course, and will take from one to two weeks for each course.

Over this coming winter break (late December 2007) the new Blackboard 7.3 server will be renamed to “courseweb.pitt.edu” and be used for all spring term (2084) sections. The old Blackboard 6.3 server will continue in operation (under a different name) until May 1, 2007, in order to service courses that have students with incomplete grades, and will then be decommissioned and repurposed. Faculty who have students with incomplete grades after that point will need to back up their gradebooks and may need to make alternative arrangements for students to complete online course components such as quizzes and discussion board entries.

Training and Support

CIDDE has begun training faculty who are new to Blackboard in the use of the content system and the features of Blackboard 7.3. For faculty who are already using Blackboard, the FIDL offers a series of special seminars that will orient them to the content system (see www.pitt.edu/~ciddeweb/cw/training_form.htm). The seminar consists of a one-hour presentation followed by a one-hour, hands-on session. During this session, faculty will be able to upload their course materials into the content system and learn how to incorporate them into their Blackboard courses. CIDDE is also conducting seminars focusing on the new features of the Learning System version 7.3.

In addition to the face-to-face training sessions, all of the training resources will be available online at www.cidde.pitt.edu/cw/bbsupport.htm in the form of documents, archived Web casts, and narrated screen recordings.

I urge you to avail yourself of the many and varied training opportunities so you may make optimal use of these very powerful additions to the University’s instructional technology infrastructure.