33 Blackboard Collaborate with Yuyen Chang, and David Feldstein — 12.04.2015

In the Active Teaching Lab on December 4, 2015, David Feldstein and Yuyen Chang shared how they used Blackboard Collaborate to connect with their off-campus residents who didn’t have a classroom to meet in.

Key Takeaways

• Teacher presence in a class is an important consideration; perhaps Collaborate can help meet that need.
• Students can use mic to talk with each other in the breakout rooms. Six mics can be open at a time, so groups of six students are a good size for that reason. Up to six students are generally a good size based on pedagogy.
• Give students instructions about what to do in the breakout rooms – both pedagogy instructions and tech instructions.
• Assign another person besides the instructor, as a facilitator, to take care of the technical issues that might happen during the web conference. This is especially important for large courses.
• Have the students in the breakout groups designate a spokesperson, so that the instructor knows they can call on that person to report for the group.
• Do an orientation for the whole class before the first web conference so that students have already used the software before they need to use it for a class.
• Have a plan for if students have poor connection – how to redirect them to their breakout rooms.
• Recommend headsets for all students to minimize feedback.
• some features are not supported in the mobile app version of Collaborate
• University affiliation is required for the moderator of a Collaborate session (you can only launch a session via portal/Moodle/D2L, while there is no such requirement for the participants
• At this time, there is no clear information about the accessibility of Collaborate.
• As with other campus supported tools, an advantage of using Collaborate is that student privacy and information will be protected.
• There are more tips on the activity sheet!

If you’re interested in learning more to get up and running with Blackboard Collaborate, watch the videos below and try stepping through the worksheet we created for the session!

The Active Teaching Lab, a Faculty Engagement program, provides a safe space for structured explorations of cool teaching tools and techniques that your colleagues are using to engage students and teach more effectively. During the academic year, labs are held weekly and will be listed on the Active Teaching Lab page.

David and Yuyen’s Blackboard Collaborate Story