The Basics of Instructional Design in Blackboard

This document is designed to help develop an institutional common language regarding instructional design choices; it refers to blended courses and technology integration projects. If you work with an instructional designer to develop or update a blended course, he or she will provide the expertise about the best use of Blackboard tools as well as third-party tools such as VoiceThread or Panopto.  If you are working on a technology integration project, your training coordinator, the Distance Learning Coordinator (once you have participated in the Online Faculty Training) and the Academic Computing Department of IRM will support these same principles.

When designing online course components, the main priorities are to determine:

1. What constitutes ‘evidence’ of achieving a particular learning outcome;
2. What your students will create to demonstrate their learning growth
3. Which collaborative tool(s) they will use to share it with you or peers;
4. The appropriate pace and sequence of learning activities; and
5. How to improve course navigation within known constraints.

All design decisions flow from these priorities.  This document will focus on choosing the correct tool and improving navigation.

Navigation

Blackboard offers a large variety of choices when building a course.  You and an instructional designer will make choices that align with these overall goals for improving learners’ experience in Blackboard:

• Limiting as much as possible the number of clicks required to find content
• Helping learners to understand where they are and to not get lost
• Helping learners to understand the structure of your course
• Helping learners to understand your assignment expectations
• Reducing learners’ extraneous cognitive load.

Follow these guidelines to write instructions for graded activities and assignments on Blackboard:

1. If your instructions are very brief (1-2 short paragraphs):

• Use Blackboard’s text editor (VTBE) to put them in the description (the top level) of the Assignment form or other Bb learning object.
• Click for an example of top-level instructions, taken from the Online Faculty Training.
• Advantages:
  • Learners can find out what they need to do without any extra clicks or file downloads.
  • In general, limiting top-level information to about this length allows learners to see the structure of your entire week—like a table of contents.
• A note about journals and blogs: When a student clicks on Create Entry inside a Bb Journal or Blog, the instructions disappear.  You will either need to put your instructions in a PDF so they can have access to them while they are responding, or coach them to right-click on the title link to open the journal or blog in a new browser tab.

2. If your instructions are longer, but you do NOT expect students to submit a file:

• Create a PDF file containing your instructions and attach them to the assessment tool (e.g. Discussion, Wiki, Assignment, etc.).
• Do not attach or link to a Word doc if you are not expecting students to return it. This sends a mixed message!
• Possible scenarios:
  • You want students to write a short message in the comments section of a Bb Assignment form; or
  • The main work of the assignment is completed in a VoiceThread, and you only want students to reflect in the comments section of the assignment form, or to notify you that they are done; or
  • You want students to upload a screenshot documenting that they have completed a learning activity at an external site, and perhaps to reflect on that activity.
• PDFs are also useful for Journal or Blog assignments, as explained in #1 above.

3. If you expect students to create or alter a file and submit it (Word, Excel, Sketchpad, Finale Notepad, fillable PDF form, etc.):

• The Assignment form is the preferred Bb tool as it is the most efficient way for you to write feedback on the file submitted and return it to the student, if needed.
• Attach or link to the file from the Bb Assignment form—or instruct students to create a new file on their own.
• Advantages:
  • A file signals to learners that they should save it, do something with it and upload it for feedback and/or grading.
  • Learners are working with the software applications that are germane to your academic field.
  • You can provide graphic organizers such as tables to help learners organize their work.
• Exception: In some cases (for example in math or music) you may want to give students a file only to manipulate it but not to submit their changes.

Additional navigational reminders

Link to or list resources at the point where they will be used.

• Links to documents should be set to open in a new tab or window and should include the following information:
  • The title or description of the file that will be opening (do not just type ‘click here’)
  • Add information about the file format (DOC, PDF, XLS, etc.)
• For course documents, use the standardized header and footer used on this document. Your instructional designer can provide you with a template.
• For copyright reasons, embed media such as YouTube videos, SlideShare presentations or Flickr images using the corresponding Blackboard mashup tools. Do not upload your own videos onto Blackboard directly, you will run out of space. You may use Panopto or VoiceThread, which will allow you to embed your files on Blackboard.
• Use images judiciously to help learners remember where they are and to reinforce learning through multiple modalities. Avoid using animated images except if they are pedagogically meaningful, because they distract users.
• Use the ALT text tag to describe any image uploaded to Blackboard. ALT text provides alternate information for non-visual users—not the file title.  Keep it to fewer than 50 characters and describe just the image, not its purpose.  You can also include brief source information.  (A good rule-of-thumb is to imagine reading your text over the telephone. What words would you use when you got to the image?)
• The instructor / course developer is responsible for broken links to outside resources—for example, when another institution rebuilds its website. Check your links each time you teach the course, and correct them if needed.
• For those who are comfortable using HTML, you can move content from one item to another within a course, by copy/pasting code. Use extreme caution before copying code between courses!  Any links to documents uploaded to Blackboard are course-specific.  The link in the destination course may look fine to you, but from the student view it will be broken.
• To reduce extraneous cognitive load, procedural instructions should be written at about an eighth grade level. You want students to be challenged by the college-level texts of your discipline, not by your instructions!

For further information, the organization Web Accessibility in Mind (WebAIM) has more information and resources regarding design principles for online accessibility.

Which tool do I use?

In the online environment, it’s tempting to focus on using technology.  An important aim of instructional design is to shift the focus to:

1. what we want students to create to demonstrate their learning growth;
2. how they will share it with you and their peers; and
3. how we can facilitate this using the tools of the Blackboard learning management system and selected third-party tools such as “VoiceThread”.

Deciding what you want for your students is an important first step. A list with the basic purpose of each Bb tool follows:

• Blackboard Assignments—for any time that you want students to alter a document or file and give it back to you, to attach a file that they have created, or to write a short
• Blackboard Blogs—for student-student interactions, especially ones in which a flat rather than threaded or nesting structure works well. The Bb Blog tool makes it easy to see all responses by scrolling, is also accessible with few clicks, and makes giving grades and feedback much easier for the instructor.  A good blog or discussion starts with a good open-ended prompt.
• Blackboard Discussions—for student-student interactions that require a threaded or nesting structure. The Bb Discussion tool makes it easy to see the structure of an ongoing conversation—that is, who responded to whom.
• Blackboard Journals—for private student-teacher conversations including reflective writing and reinforcement of important concepts.
• Blackboard Wikis—for collaborative work. This may include each student making a contribution to or open editing of a shared product.
• Blackboard Tests—for auto-graded comprehension checks or step-by-step tutorials with student responses.
• VoiceThread—for online lecture-discussions; oral conversations; or presenting and responding to images. VoiceThread is currently available for blended courses and a few exceptional cases only.
• Panopto —for online lectures with the possibility to add instant quizzes. Panopto is ideal if you need to explain a concept in the form of a video lecture. Keep your videos short (maximum 5-6 minutes). It is better to upload more videos each one followed by a brief activity, rather than one 30-minutes long session. The attention span during long videos is highly reduced.

Please see the tables below for more details.  The first row in the table is exceptional in that it focuses on content delivery–specifically on using SlideShare to post copyrighted PowerPoint presentations in your course without violating publishers’ licenses.

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