What's
New with e-Learning at CityU?
By
Eva Wong (EDO)
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As e-learning evolves into an integral part of our
academic learning environment, the Blackboard platform (Bb) is
now a mission critical system at CityU, enabling both staff and
students to maximize their productivity.
The e-learning project is the major focus of CityU's Information
Systems Strategic Plan 2005-2010 (ISSP) and it underpins the
strategic development of outcomes-based teaching and learning
(OBTL) at the University. Since its launch in the 2005-06 academic
year, there has been continuous and significant growth and demand
in usage. Over the years, we have maintained our effort to ensure
use of the platform to facilitate all forms of academic and related
activities. By deploying state-of-the-art functions and features,
we try to engage students in active, collaborative and self-directed
learning.
The e-learning platform has become the learning and communication
hub for 30,000 energetic and creative students and staff, and
provides integrations to essential administrative, messaging and
specialized learning facilities. Around 70% of courses offered
each semester have active sites on Bb; it is thus a mission critical
system where performance, stability and security are expected.
The performance tuning and capacity planning exercise done in
mid-2007 allowed us to map the demands and growth of the system
with its capacity. We planned and acted accordingly by upgrading
the entire system to sustain reliable performance.
The central aim of the e-learning project is immersion, one of
the four cornerstones of the ISSP. Our students are immersed in
an IT-rich platform which is part of their default learning environment,
giving them that extra edge on graduation to excel in today’s
place of work. To ensure that appropriate tools and features are
made available to staff and students for learning-centred activities,
the e-learning platform is enriched with self-developed and add-on
packages continuously. A major initiative of the University is
language enhancement. A couple of online voice tools, Wimba and
Tell Me More are deployed on our e-learning platform for both
in-class use and students’ self-regulated learning. The two major
Web 2.0 features, blogs and wikis are deployed as collaborative
learning tools, offering more flexibility and possibility for
student-centred learning activities.
Collected usage data from system logs and surveys on both staff
and students continue to show that the e-learning platform is
an essential system serving its students, staff and alumni, all
of whom have a 24 by 7 expectation on system availability. Furthermore,
the surveys of staff and students suggest that for the active
users at least, the system is perceived as having a significant
impact on student learning.
Leadership in e-learning
To continue ascertain CityU’s leadership in e-learning, particularly
in the Asia-Pacific region, we sent representatives to the various
Blackboard and e-learning conferences and forums to showcase our
successes and share our experience either as invited keynote speakers
or papers presenters. The largest of the Bb conferences is the
BbWorld held in the US each year. Despite keen competition, CityU’s
submission was selected for presentation at the BbWorld ’08 in
July 2008. This was the first time that an Asian university had
given a presentation at a BbWorld conference. Furthermore, CityU’s
success in deploying e-learning was showcased at the conference
with an 8’ by 4’ billboard and a case study published at http://www.blackboard.com/resources/highered/HongKongCS4.pdf
To maintain our education leadership in e-learning, the e-Learning
Forum first organized by CityU in 2006 will return to us in 2009.
We will co-organise this Forum with Taiwan’s Feng Chia University
and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. As the University
celebrates its silver jubilee in 2009, the 2009 e-Learning Forum
Asia will be one of the celebratory events for our 25th
anniversary. Details of the Forum are available at http://www.cityu.edu.hk/edo/elearning_forum/2009/.
System upgrade to enable latest features and functions
CityU firmly embraces the idea that IT is transforming education.
We have taken, and will continue to take, the necessary action
to make full use of IT to incessantly enhance our learning-centric
environment.
On the technical front, we have to ensure that our e-learning
platform continues to be a reliable utility for teaching and learning,
thus periodic upgrade and health check exercises will be part
and parcel of our proactive systems administration and management.
The Bb software is scheduled to be upgraded to version 8.0 at
the end of January 2009, during the Chinese New Year break when
usage is customarily low. The upgrade will enable the latest functions
and features, in particular, the long-awaited Grade Centre, to
be available to our users. It is also likely that we shall engage
a Bb consultant to run another health check for our system in
April 2009 to make certain that the upgrade to version 8.0 has
not inadvertently over-burden the system. The data collected and
analyses drawn will also help us to plan for September 2009 and
beyond.
New capabilities to enhance student learning
For the users, the enrichment of the platform will continue to
allow for more learning-centred activities as the University moves
forward into outcomes-based teaching and learning while preparing
for the transition to the 4-year degree structure.
In the last academic year, we piloted an institutional deployment
of the "blog" function added onto our Bb platform to
further engage students in improving their English writing skills
while learning their chosen subjects. Over 600 CityU students
in 10 credit-bearing courses of various disciplines were involved
in this pilot project whereby CityU students submitted their course
assignments into the blogs, and students in TESOL or Linguistics
programmes of our partnering universities in North America and
Australia served as online language coaches to provide feedback
via the blog on students' English writing based on a standardized
comment bank developed at CityU. Hence our new model deploys the
state-of-the-art Web 2.0 technology to engage students in collaborative
learning on a global network. With a stable and function-rich
e-learning platform, we envisage the innovations on its use to
help students improve their English and Chinese will continue
given the University’s emphasis on language enhancement.
In our endeavours to encourage students to engage in self-regulated
learning, an add-on system, Echo360, to record lectures and classes,
and then publish them via the e-learning platform will be piloted
in 2009. Useful packages, like Wimba and Tell Me More will continue
to be deployed with extended usage anticipated.
Engaging students in self-directed learning
With the focus of helping our students to become motivated and
self-regulated learners, the Student Computer Notebook Long Term
Loan Scheme (LLS), will be launched in January 2009. The rationale
of the scheme is to provide a truly personalized, educational
and productivity knowledge tool for each student to further immerse
them in a mobile, business environment, hence better preparing
them for their future workplace. In line with the launch of this
scheme, Backpack will move from pilot stage into deployment by
having it incorporated into the notebooks to be loaned out. This
will help each student to learn as an individual as they can still
work on their own Bb courses while offline through pre-downloaded
courses, organizing their studies and personalizing their materials
with their notes. This functionality will also allow students
to keep archive copies of their courses for later use and record
purposes.
With the LLS ensuring that the majority of our students can have
a laptop for work anytime, anywhere, the scope of student engagement,
particularly in large classes, can be enhanced. Proven effective
learning techniques such as the one-minute paper, personal response
system, even peer and self assessment can be deployed in class
using the laptops and the e-learning platform. The EDO has devised
some new Bb workshops to further explore this area of engaging
students in learning, please refer to the section at the end of
this article.
In order to show what students have learned, they have to be
able to apply the skills and knowledge to solve problems, and
then reflect on what they have done to truly internalize their
learning. In this regard, the ePortfolio is being recognized as
an important tool. Since an initial pilot in 2005, we saw a major
expansion of the ePortfolio project at CityU. When the project
on ePortfolios was first piloted, it was deployed as English Language
ePortfolios only with about 250 students who were enrolled in
ELC courses. The ePortfolios project has since been further promoted
at CityU across different disciplines for subjects beyond English
language learning. It aims to research and implement the learning
ePortfolios with the partnership with colleagues from a number
of Departments in the three major Faculties with over 500 students
involved. With our emphasis on using e-learning to help students
evidence and showcase their achieved learning outcomes, we plan
to expand our work on ePortfolios to incorporate not just the
learning portfolios, but move further onto careers portfolios.
We will continue to strengthen our seamless learning environment
with Web 2.0 and 3.0 functionality to facilitate social and personalized
learning for our students.
Online Guides and Further Assistance
We strongly believe in making use of Bb to help users learn e-learning,
as “doing” is an effective way to learn. To introduce these newly
released or piloting functions, Blackboard user guides with examples
are available online to help students and staff get started. The
respective URLs are: