Blackboard Community
The CPS Blackboard Faculty Community offers a unique hands-on experience for faculty, both online and in person, to explore. The community has been designed from a user experience perspective. All of the resources provided will allow faculty to explore how a student would experience Blackboard and the wide range of tools and areas of engagement. With a focus on the user experience, the community will spotlight how faculty can maximize their usage of Blackboard to engage with their students.
All CPS faculty are added to the Blackboard Community as an additional way to support your professional development as a professor. Click the button below and scroll down until you see the "My Communities" box. Expand it if necessary and then click on the "CPS Faculty Community" link.
Featured Resources
- Community Engagement
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Building a faculty community is an essential goal of our team’s mission in supporting CPS. This community will serve as a resource for faculty from all across our college to come together to meet and collaborate with other CPS faculty.
One of the greatest strengths of our college is the incredible faculty that teach our students. Bringing together our faculty into this community will help bridge the gap between programs and faculty that have not previously collaborated.
A range of tools will be used to provide opportunities for engagement amongst the CPS faculty to see and hear from faculty across the college.
- Faculty Examples
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Sometimes all it takes is a little inspiration.
Between the incredible work done by faculty and the resources and skills of the CPS Design Team, there is a treasure trove of examples available to review.
Faculty will have the opportunity to explore some samples provided by faculty across CPS. These samples are provided to inspire faculty to explore other ideas to promote engagement and interactivity for their students.
- Blackboard Ally
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The Blackboard Ally tool will help identify potential issues within a course and provide clear guidance on how to improve the accessibility of course materials. Here are some things to remember when creating content for a course:
- Text-based documents need structure and organization to clearly deliver information. Use MS Office headings to demonstrate a clear structure and format for the text (i.e., Titles, Headers, Subtitles, etc).
- Planning to use an image? Ask yourself ‘Is the image informative or decorative?’ If decorative, consider not using it since all images will need to be described using alternative text.
- Alternative text, or Alt text, is a contextual explanation of the value of an image that does not exceed 150 characters. All images used in instruction, regardless of their intent or placement, require Alt text to be included.
- Ensuring a transcript or closed-captioning is available for any multimedia materials using audio or video.
- Student Preview Mode
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Ever wondered exactly what your students see when they’re in your Blackboard course? This tool will help you experience your course from the student’s perspective. Through a few clicks you’ll be able to view and engage in your course as a student.
The tool allows you to see how a student would post a discussion board, submit a written assignment, collaborate in a group project and much more. The capabilities of the student preview mode will help to showcase where students may encounter issues or questions.
Engaging with the course from the student’s perspective will help improve the user experience and help bring a greater sense of understanding of what and how student’s see and feel their Blackboard course.
- Quality Assurance Rubrics
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George Washington University promotes the highest standards for its course developments.
One quality assurance mechanism used within GW is the Quality Matters (QM) rubric. The QM rubric helped promote the highest quality assurance that courses being developed, particularly on the Blackboard LMS are adhering to the standards set forth by QM.
Outlined in the Blackboard community are a range of areas that faculty can directly address to ensure their course is following the QM rubric to the best of their abilities.