11004

11004

General Session - Conference Presentation Only (no formal paper)

**Challenges of faculty development in the application of Blackboard 9.1 technology tools**
Yu-Chun Kuo, Arcadia University, Pennsylvania, USA, kuoy@arcadia.edu Buckley Jeanne, Arcadia University, Pennsylvania, USA, BuckleyJ@arcadia.edu

This paper discusses the challenges of assisting faculty in incorporating the newly-released Blackboard 9.1 into their teaching as well as the difficulties faculty encountered when using Blackboard 9.1 at Arcadia University. Arcadia University upgraded their learning management system to Blackboard 9.1 in the summer of 2010. Blackboard 9.1 is a new released version that provides a user-friendly interface as well as some new features associated with Web 2.0 technologies, such as wikis and blogs. The re-designed system also offers faculty interactive control over the look of the interface. Faculty are able to create content in an easier way with fewer clicks, compared to the previous version of Blackboard.

In the fall of 2010, Arcadia’s department of Library and Information Technology provided faculty individual face-to-face training, as well as weekly training workshops focusing on different features of Blackboard 9.1. These training sessions involved a general overview of Blackboard 9.1’s re-designed interface, its new features, the features that had been removed, course content creation, course management, assessment, and grade center. Online resources, printed instructions, and technology lab tutoring were also provided as supplements to the training.

This paper presents the issues regarding faculty using new Blackboard tools and the embedded instructional tools, which include faculty’s general perception of adopting Blackboard 9.1, the features most and least favored by the faculty, the confusion faculty had during the upgrading process, difficulties of involving faculty in using more new features, problems encountered when releasing Blackboard 9.1, and future plans to use Blackboard 9.1 more fully.

All Audiences Blackboard 9.1 Web 2.0 Faculty development