One of my projects last year was upgrading our Blackboard Learn LMS. Because of the hardware limitations of our server, we were about 4 updates behind. Additionally, I wanted us to add features that would make it easier for teachers to blend their classes and for students to access Blackboard. We upgraded the system to include content collections, moved to managed hosting (so we don't maintain the server) and purchased mobile access for smartphones and tablets. Because we wanted teachers to take advantage of these new features, and to support teachers using blended learning, I developed the Blackboard Summer Academy (BBSA).
I designed a four-day course to be delivered to teachers over the summer. Each day would include 2 hours face-to-face, and 1 hour online. The course was delivered through the our upgraded Blackboard; teachers were enrolled as students in a BBSA course with all the content I developed. They also had a "practice" class where they were the teacher, as well as their own classes for the upcoming school year. When I opened signups, we were overwhelmed with the response; unfortunately, we were limited in the amount of money we could spend to pay teachers. We ended up running two workshops, each with 12 teachers.
The goals of our workshop were to familiarize teachers with existing and upgraded features of Blackboard; to encourage the use of Blackboard for more than just posting documents for students to download; to expose teachers to concepts of 21st-century skills (the 4 C's) and to the requirements of Common Core; and to create a cadre of teachers who are able to support their colleagues with Blackboard. The content I developed was a mix of hands-on, directly applicable Blackboard skills ("What button do I push?") with higher-level considerations of blended instruction. The class was delivered through a flipped model of blended learning; teachers were given all the content ahead of time to read or watch. Each class day started with a short 5-10 minute introduction, and then teachers had the rest of the time to work on their own, as I offered individual help and support. The culminating project was for teachers to develop a blended unit that they could deliver in one of their classes this year.
Teachers who enrolled came in with a wide variety of Blackboard expertise, from novice to expert. I felt like the flipped instruction allowed me to differentiate for each teacher, meeting them where they were in their experience. Teacher feedback at the end of the workshops bore that out, with 90% of participants agreeing that it "helped me to learn at my own pace." In the evaluation of the workshop, I asked teachers to (anonymously) write what was the best part, and what could have been improved. The responses indicated that teachers appreciated the opportunity to learn the software and prepare for their own classes at the same time, as well as the flexibility inherent in the flipped learning. (Interestingly, many teachers expressed to me their uncertainty and confusion about the flipped model at the very beginning of the workshop; by the end, they all seemed to appreciate it.) When I asked what could be improved about the workshop, most of the answers were some version of "more of the same": more people involved, more time, etc.
I'm going to be presenting about our BBSA at a Blackboard one-day conference next month. In reflecting on my take-away lessons, two stand out to me. (1) Teachers appreciated the differentiation provided by flipped learning, and (2) teachers found it valuable to work on an authentic task: developing their own class rather than some arbitrary made-up exercise. Not surprisingly, we know that those two factors are also characteristic of truly effective classes for students, as well.
I'm quite proud of how the Blackboard Summer Academy turned out. I think we achieved our goals in a way that modeled effective instruction for teachers. I'm hoping that we'll be able to run the workshop again next summer, hopefully for an even greater number of teachers.
