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A general FAQ about BlackBoard.com
05 October 2001
New Tools for Teaching Online
by Sheldon Greaves
One of the most exciting educational trends of the past decade has been the rise of online teaching as a viable method of instruction. This has been a long time coming. Early assessments of the ability to do teaching over the internet were, in retrospect, more than a little optimistic and did not sufficiently appreciate the problems involved with teaching through this new medium. I first tried my hand at online teaching back in 1993 when I taught two sections of a class on the Dead Sea Scrolls for AOL's Academic Services, and came away with mixed feelings about the whole business of online teaching.
Today things are better than they were; online teaching has learned to deal with the inevitable problems faced with a communications medium that has a much lower bandwidth than a live lecturer. Teachers have learned to allow more time for the slower pace of student/teacher communications. More information is now available online that lends itself well to course instruction.
Best of all, there are now a number of tool sets out there for people who want to share their expertise by teaching a course online. One of the best is produced by a company called BlackBoard.com.
Blackboard.com is a suite of tools one can used to create online courses that are adminstered over the web. After you set up your account on Blackboard.com, you have access to tools for handling online discussions and conferences, managing e-mail to and from students, places to keep syllabi, coursework and assignment tracking, even online test administration—and it is all free.
Blackboard.com is a free course Web site creation service designed to fill a broad range of online education needs. Built on Blackboard's industry-leading e-Education platform, the course creation service enables instructors to add an online component to their classes -- bringing learning materials, class discussions, and tests online -- or to teach an entire course on the Web. The service is very easy to use, with no HTML or programming knowledge needed.There's nothing to download or install. Course Web sites are hosted on Blackboard's servers, where they can be accessed via the Web at anytime. Blackboard.com also features an extensive course catalog, from which learners can access courses their instructor has set up or browse for distance learning courses created by other instructors.
If your chapter of SAS is looking for some new way to get people interested in science, of if you want to experience the fun of sharing your knowledge with others, teaching an online course is something you might consider. Now that there are excellent tools available for free, it's probably worth doing the experiment.
