[Web4lib] Personalizing library offerings in Blackboard (replies)

[Janet Hack]

Hi all, 
I said I'd summarize replies for the list, so here are the 5 replies I 
received.  Thanks to all of you.

Original post:
I am also interested in any new and innovative ways of providing library 
services through course management systems (Blackboard specifically, but 
innovations in other systems are also of interest).  I am particularly 
interested in any efforts to personalize the content for individual 
students based on the courses they are currently enrolled in.  Does 
anybody know if this is even possible?


Replies:
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The following link might be of interest, although (I think) it does not 
apply to Blackboard as much as it would a campus portal.

http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/oct06/Corrado_Moulaison.shtml

Mark

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As far as I know the only two ways to get course-specific library
content into Blackboard is to 1) create them on a Website, give the URL
to the faculty, and ask them to add the content, or 2) develop a
Blackboard module that faculty can import into their class, but the only
way you can see how students are using it is if you get added to the
course as a TA. Both methods require the faculty's cooperation, a
relationship that takes a lot of time and effort for the librarians to
develop.

I recently learned that it was possible to get major-specific library
content to appear when students login to Blackboard. To do this, you
would create not a Course but an Organization (in Blackboard parlance).
You can call your Organization something like "Computer Science Library
Tutorial". Then all of the students for that major (in this case,
computer science) would see this appear when they login to Blackboard. I
confirmed this with our campus's Blackboard coordinator and am planning
to create separate tutorials for the subjects I take care of but haven't
done so yet.

~Julie

Julie Shen, MLIS/MA
Reference & Instruction Librarian
Cal Poly Pomona University Library
(909) 869-4330 * jshen at csupomona.edu 
http://www.csupomona.edu/~jshen 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Talk to CSU Librarians! Join CSU-LIB! 
https://mailman.csupomona.edu/mailman/listinfo/csu-lib 

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I'm at-work on something to create customized content for courses. 
BlackBoard makes it really easy to "import" content into the course. So 
I've created "Research assistance" pages for BB that are specific to the 
subject of the course and can be imported by the prof into their BB 
course. So far I've done this by hand with html, but I'm at work now on 
using php to handle a form and dynamically create the necessary code.

We'll see how it goes.

Derik A. Badman
Digital Services Librarian
Reference Librarian for Education and Social Administration
Temple University Libraries
Paley Library 121
Philadelphia, PA
Phone: 215-204-5250
Email: dbadman at temple.edu <mailto:dbadman at temple.edu>
AIM: derikbad

"Some people cry out against the acceleration of time, others cry out 
against stagnation. They're both right." -Henri Lefebvre

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At UNCG, we have built a library web service that works with a locally
constructed Blackboard building block to pull relevant databases,
journals, and subject specialists and make them appear in relevant
Blackboard classess on-the-fly. So, when a student enters a Blackboard
class, the relevant library resources appear within that class context.

Tim Bucknall
Assistant Director - University Libraries, University of North
Carolina at
Greensboro
Founder and Convener - Carolina Consortium
336-256-1216
bucknall at uncg.edu


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My colleague Tito Sierra and I have designed a system that provides 
customized course content  for students at the course- and curriculum 
levels (ex. PS 308, PS respectively). It's internally called Course 
Views and it's still in development. We expect to launch our pilot in 
summer 2008. Through matching resources to both specific courses and 
curricula we will be able to have a course-centric set of library 
resources for every course on our campus (nearly 5,000). It is a system 
that can be hooked into an LMS. At NCSU we use Blackboard Vista as our 
learning management system, but it has an architecture that makes it 
difficult to integrate into the LMS in an automated way. The Course 
Views system, however, is designed so that it can leverage student 
enrollment data and LMS course section data in order to tie the content 
into the LMS environment. Our campus is probably going to migrate to 
Moodle and it should be much easier for us to integrate Course Views 
into it.

We recently presented at Educause on our project. You can check out our 
project page for more information as well as links to presentations:
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/dli/projects/courseviews/

We'd be happy to answer any questions you might have.

best wishes, Kim

-- 
Kim Duckett
Librarian for Digital Technologies and Learning
NC State University Libraries
919-513-3653

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-- 
Janet Hack
Reference/Web Services Librarian
Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Tel: 410-455-8130;  Fax: 410-455-1906
e-mail:  jhack at umbc.edu