April 6, 2004

GW Gets Onboard with Blackboard

New Course Management System Set to Replace Prometheus May 31

By Greg Licamele

The online course management system Blackboard is set to become the only option for faculty members and students to use beginning this summer, replacing Prometheus. A transition from Prometheus to Blackboard-supported courses has been underway since August, but will wrap up next month.

“The systems fundamentally offer the same features,” said William Koffenberger, director of the Center for Instructional Design and Development (CIDD). “Everything you can do in Prometheus you can do in Blackboard, with just a couple of exceptions.”

Unlike Prometheus, which is a decentralized system that allows anyone to access a course if given permission or passwords, Blackboard works in concert with the BANNER system. Only those students who register for a class will have access to the corresponding Blackboard course site if a professor elects to utilize the system. This makes Blackboard a much more controlled product, which, Koffenberger said, will help reduce costs to the University.

“Over six years of Prometheus use, we ended up with over 10,000 courses,” Koffenberger said. “Blackboard presents a very centralized management structure. The realities of escalating costs and trying to scale a system to support the really critical needs dictated that we try something different.”

GW continued its technical support for users of Prometheus, a product originally developed at the University, after it was sold to Blackboard two years ago.

Philip Wirtz, professor of psychology and of management science, uses Blackboard to its fullest extent through syllabi, virtual office hours, daily announcements, gradebook, course policies, transparencies and streaming audio files.

“Except for midterm and final examinations, which are in class, all weekly lab assignments are submitted by the students via Blackboard’s “Assignment” facility; my comments on each individual assignment are provided through Blackboard; and each student’s individual grades are recorded on Blackboard,” Wirtz said.

Some limitations to Blackboard do exist, but CIDD has managed to build extensions to meet faculty needs. For example, teaching assistants, co-instructors and guest lecturers, because of their lack of a connection to the BANNER system and specific classes, could not gain access to course Web sites. However, Koffenberger said solutions for this situation and others have been developed.

Though Wirtz uses Blackboard often, he does have concerns about the company’s “inattentiveness to bugs in its product,” independent of GW, that he feels could impact a smooth transition for faculty members.

“The adoption of Blackboard really requires a whole different mindset in approaching course management than did Prometheus,” Wirtz said. “This is not necessarily a bad thing — it may reflect a new generation of course management system design — but it does require a considerable amount of re-tooling on the part of the faculty member.”

Wirtz said CIDD and the Instructional Teaching Lab have provided tremendous support during the transition.

“We’re on the frontlines in terms of providing faculty support,” Koffenberger said. “Faculty should look to CIDD and our lab in Gelman Library for help.”
Individual and department training sessions are available. A Blackboard news Web site provides the latest updates, tutorials and other resources for faculty members at www.gwu.edu/~bbnews.

“This represents a change, and in many ways, a significant change, but I think with the resources that we bring and working with other units at the University, that collectively, we’ve put forth a very strong support infrastructure for this transition,” Koffenberger said. “There will obviously be some bumps in the road, but with the date rapidly approaching (May 31), we encourage people to contact us, review the Web site and learn as much about Blackboard as they can.”

Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu

Related Link

Blackboard News