I don't know if anyone else has encountered these two problems which arose
during our recent Blackboard content systen implementation engagement.
1) At the end of each year we archive all of the year's 'courses' and keep them
incase of appeals etc. The archive has to be a copy of the 'course' in exactly
the state it was at the end of the year, i.e. no documents, discussions etc can
have been modified, removed or added. When you archive courses which use the
content system you only archive the links to the documents in the content
system. Any changes made to the documents in the content system will render the
archive invalid (technically I don't suppose it's actually an archive)
2) Again during the summer we create new copies of all courses and prefix the
year to the course code. This allows all students who use Blackboard to refer
back to their previous courses and, as above, the content of the 'old' courses
will be exactly as it was when they took that course. With the content system it
isn't possible to do this as lecturers who update their documents from one year
to the next will also be changing the documents for all previous years, not just
for the current one. I know this is kind of the point of a CMS but I am
surprised there is no way around it.
We only bought the content system to support PDP but had thought that a happy
sideaffect would be that we could improve on what we provide in terms of
Blackboard for Learning and Teaching. It turns out that if we allow our users to
use the content system in a more general way we will be inconsistent in a
fundamental way with our policies and practices. We have taken the decision not
to allow any use of the content system other than to support PDP. This seems a
little wasteful though.
If anyone has any thoughts, workarounds etc. I would welcome them..
Neil
Neil Penry
Learning and Teaching Manager
Information Services
Cardiff University
PO Box 340
Cardiff
CF10 3BB
029 20875127 (X75127)
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