POV: Not Just for Online: Enhancing In-Person Teaching with Blackboard
A Learning Management System (LMS), like Blackboard, can provide faculty opportunities to deliver content and engage students in their courses beyond the traditional posting of grades and required readings. These platforms can be leveraged to create inclusive learning spaces, provide learning support and engagement opportunities for students in new and interactive ways, and take advantage of AI-assisted technologies to save faculty time. Blackboard is BU's most versatile educational technology tool, with many capabilities to enhance your teaching and students' learning.
Classroom Inclusion & Accessibility
The challenge for face-to-face courses to be inclusive, accessible, and supportive of all students can often be mitigated through the use of an LMS. Tools such as Blackboard Ally focuses on digital accessibility for students and provides instructor guidance and tips for lasting improvements to Blackboard content accessibility. Providing foundational content tailored to the course can also be an especially impactful way to close equity gaps in learning outcomes when this knowledge is required to succeed in the course.
Engaging Students
Blackboard can also complement and support classroom communication, content delivery, and collaboration. Through the use of four communication tools (discussion board, journal, blog, wiki), Blackboard offers opportunities for critical engagement with peers, self-reflection, creative writing, and experiential learning. The flexibility of these tools makes them easy to integrate as stand-alone options or in combination with each other.
Leveraging LMS Artificial Intelligence
In addition to course administration, an LMS offers time-saving tools for faculty that can be built into a course and carried over from term to term. The Blackboard AI Design Assistant (Blackboard Ultra only) aids instructors with creating and designing new courses and is intended to inspire instructors and make course creation more efficient. As a result, faculty can develop and customize course materials to best align with course learning goals, and students can access an entire course at all times.
Platform Support
The Educational Technology team works with faculty and academic staff to enhance the use of Blackboard.
- The Blackboard Buddy Program helps instructors maximize these capabilities. The “buddy system” approach pairs instructors with an educational technologist who will support them directly throughout the identified course.
- The Blackboard Instructor-led Training offers training classes throughout the year. The instructor may select a topic area from the link above to view detailed training descriptions, scheduled offerings, and prerequisites.
- BU TechWeb (Blackboard documentation and video tutorials) offers several services that directly support teaching and learning.
- Educational Technology Consultation offers one-on-one consultation and small group training. The EdTech team collaborates with BU leadership and educators and introduces ways to leverage available and emerging learning-centered technologies into a wide range of teaching and learning environments.
To request technical support and consultation, please email askedtech@bu.edu. For pedagogical assistance, please contact ctl@bu.edu.
About the Authors:
Chihsun Chiu helps faculty get the best results out of the Learning Management System (LMS), Blackboard Learn. Her specialization includes the LMS, but also instructional design, and all other technologies that touch the LMS. Chihsun holds a Ph.D. in Educational Technology with a Minor in Instructional Design from the University of Kansas, a Master of Arts degree in Digital Storytelling Media from Ball State University, and a B.A. in Radio, Television and Film from Shih Hsin University in Taipei, Taiwan. Chihsun’s doctoral dissertation elaborated on designing online instruction for students with learning disabilities and other struggling learners.
As Assistant Director for the Center for Teaching & Learning, Lisa Burgess supports faculty in the use and application of educational technology tools. She provides one on one assistance to faculty using educational technology, collaborates with Digital Learning and Innovation as well as Shipley Center projects with a focus on the use of technology to promote student learning and engagement. Lisa has 23 years of higher education experience, 17 of those as a professor of biological sciences. She holds an MS in Biotechnology from Johns Hopkins University and an MS in Forensic DNA and Serology from University of Florida.
