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Our first online meeting

The group held its first meeting online using Blackboard Collaborate on Friday 14^th March.

There was some interest from the students, after a tour of Blackboard Collaborate, to be able to use it themselves with other students and we should explore this further – perhaps Blackboard Collaborate could be used to hold certain student led events?

We spoke about some work that the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has been doing across the UK with groups of students from across the sector to try to build a picture of what students are likely to want from the digital environment at universities in 2020. A summary of the JISC findings to date is available here.

The group had also helped test out a crowd sourcing tool called Waggl and all felt that this kind of online tools could be very useful in gaining wider student input into any proposal for change that the university was looking at.

We briefly discussed the work to re-design the front end of the Blackboard system (login page and signed in page) – this work is ongoing and the web designer should have some mock-ups which we can look at soon.

Changing the look of Blackboard

One thing the student group has already given feedback on is around the composition of the landing page in Blackboard (the page you see after you sign in which list the courses (modules) you can access).

Previous feedback has indicated that this page is just too busy and crowded, containing information that is not accessed very often by students at all.

A web designer is currently mocking up some simpler looking designs for the landing page, based in part on feedback this group has already given over what is most important to them on the current landing page.

Check back later on this blog for further news on this re-design work.

Welcome

Welcome to the blog for the University's Blackboard student user group.

We hope to use this space to conduct some lively discussion on how to improve the student experience of Blackboard and other IT systems and services at the University.