Collaborate in Comfort – The Slippers and PJ's Approach for Online Students and Faculty
at Holmes Community College
Patricia S. Stewart
July 26, 2012
California State University, East Bay
Dr. Datta Kaur Khalsa
Holmes Community College is a rural two year community college located in central
Mississippi and we use Blackboard Learn 9.1.8 Enterprise for our learning management system
in conjunction with Blackboard Collaborate and Blackboard Instant Messenger. These two tools
have made a real difference in our ability to interact with faculty and students from a distance.
Holmes Community College has placed significant importance on the implementation of
Blackboard Collaborate -- not only for instructional uses, but also for college-wide, day-to-day
usage from the President’s Office to the Landscaping Department!
Our enterprise-wide implementation of Collaborate began with the Bb IM chat feature.
Students and employees fell in love with the instant communication and the auto enrollment into
courses and communities. Isolation is one of the dangers of online learning (Funk, 2005);
sometimes students in the online environment just need that extra nudge to feel connected
therefore instant messaging can be an effective online learning tool that can build community
and foster collaborative learning. Although many students may have used an instant messenger,
they probably have not used it for academic purposes. Bb IM can be used for one-on-one chats
between the student and the instructor in virtual office hours or for spur of the moment help
sessions. It can also be used for student to student interactions such as “in the hall” or “at the
water fountain” sessions and group chats for projects. This synchronous tool helps create a sense
of community because the student knows immediately when someone is online and if they might
a quick response to their questions. Bb IM humanized the online classroom environment with its
audio and video features because the student can now see and hear the instructor as they
collaborate. Another feature of Bb IM that our instructors use is the application sharing that
allows students to share their screens with the instructor, so the student can watch the instructor
correct a paper draft or a half worked math problem. This feature will also allow the Help Desk
to take control of the student’s computer to assist with technical problems.
“Imagine you are working on an Excel spreadsheet at night, you are confused,
stuck, the assignment is due tomorrow, and no friends around to ask. You check
your Bb IM and notice your instructor is online. You contact your instructor
through Bb IM chat and the instructor can take over your computer, see what
you have done wrong or they can show you their screen and show you what it
should look like. You are back on track with the assignment to get it
completed” recounted from Elizabeth Spooner, Instructor for Holmes.
What could be better than personalized one-on-one training at any hour of the day or night?
From chat, Holmes implemented the Web Conferencing features from both the IM and
Blackboard course launch pads. Bb Collaborate web conferencing is being used to host live
department meetings, live faculty meetings, live and recorded review study sessions and training
sessions, and to record our newly coined “gold nugget” moments. Those moments that make the
light bulb “click on” for the student are the same moments (topics) that subject-matter experts
know in advance which will give students and faculty the most trouble. This creates a more proactive approach to instruction and training. According to Pursel and Ramsay (2011) creating an
online community is difficult not only among students but also faculty especially when you have
a faculty population like ours that spreads not only across a nine county district, but also across
the country. We use “technology to teach the technology” as one way to get this accomplished.
An example of this would be an online faculty meeting held in a Blackboard Collaborate web
conferencing session. These can be recorded for review and for the instructors who did not
attend the live session. The faculty is shown a new technology in a “best practice” situation
giving examples of how to use the technology in their classroom. The instructors are trying the
new technology from the stand point of a student versus see it being demonstrated; the instructor
will be more prepared for the situations the students may encounter.
The technological environment of online learning is a major asset but it takes some
organizational skills to integrate the technology so students and faculty have an optimal learning
experience (Velez, 2009). Our trainers model the behavior in their training for the faculty to use
and build upon and take to their courses to re-create. At Holmes, trainers show how lectures
should be broken into smaller snippets. “If you try to watch a 50-minute block, your eyes glaze
over pretty quickly,” eLearning Instructional Design coordinator Jenny B. Jones says. “So, we
try to identify what will confuse students and concentrate our lecture capture only on those parts
of the lesson.” In general, she tells instructors to limit their lecture snippets to eight minutes, and
suggests that five minutes is even more ideal. That creates a series of “mini-lectures” that can
capture an essential component of a particular subject. Jones notes, “We call it the gold nugget:
the moment that makes the light bulb go on for the student. Maybe it takes just a couple minutes
of a lecture for a student to grasp a certain point, they can watch just the part that benefits them,
and that is what we want them to be able to review.” To help instructors get the hang of creating
lectures in this way, Jones uses lecture capture for teacher training—allowing them to discover
the power of effective video snippets.
This is one method of improving ourselves is to see first-hand what could be some pitfalls of
the students before they happen and be prepared for these situations. At the end of each training
or faculty meeting we have an electronic survey that asks pointed questions about what was
learned; was this session helpful; and comments for constructive criticism of how to improve our
online training. So what the training staff has done is 1) modeled behavior 2) taught a new
technology 3) improve the instructors’ awareness of the students role in an online course 4)
improve the instructors ability to support students 5) give instructors a voice about training.
The ultimate goal is to benefit the student and this is accomplished by improving our
instructors and our training programs by cultivating stronger relationships within our online
learning community.
References
Funk, J. (2005, August). At-risk online learners: reducing barriers to success. eLearn Magazine,
2005(8), Retrieved from http://elearnmag.acm.org/featured.cfm?aid=1082221
Jones, J. (2012, July 21). Interview by PS Stewart [Personal Interview].
Pursel, B., & Ramsay, C. (2011, November). Developing learning communities with faculty and
students. Online Classroom, 3.
Spooner, E. (2012, July 23). Interview by PS Stewart [Personal Interview].
Velez, A. (2009). The ties that bind: How faculty learning communities connect online adjuncts
to their virtual institutions. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 12(2),
Retrieved from http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/summer122/velez122.html