Courseware

[JQ Johnson]

Greg Sennema writes:

> I am curious to now how academic libraries are dealing with
> institutional courseware such as Blackboard or WebCT.

The University of Oregon is one example of an institution where the library 
runs the university's blackboard server.  We concluded a year ago that the 
institution needed such a service and that nobody else was ready to do it, 
so we did a pilot project during 1999-2000.  Very successful.  The faculty 
who tried it almost universally like blackboard.  With very little 
marketing we grew to 45 courses/term and more than 3000 students using the 
system.  We will be marketing it as a standard library service during 
2000-2001.

The library provides training for faculty users through our Faculty 
Instructional Technology Training Center (FITT Center), a unit we also 
developed last year (at UO, Library includes Media Services.  The FITT 
Center is a joint project of Library public service and media services). 
We provide support for end users through the computer labs we manage in the 
libraries; although blackboard is easy to use, any system that requires 
student logins will generate huge numbers of "my password doesn't work" 
sorts of problems.

Greg observes that Blackboard offers a searchable resource area.  We're not 
finding that this is very important yet to our faculty users, so it doesn't 
provide any competition for existing library-licensed databases.  As Greg 
notes, it's primarily current newswire items useful for making a course 
more relevant, rather than literature useful for a term paper or reading in 
depth.

References: FITT Center http://libweb.uoregon.edu/fittc/
Blackboard: http://blackboard.uoregon.edu


JQ Johnson                      Office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator  mailto:jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon       phone: 1-541-346-1746; -3485 fax
Eugene, OR  97403-1299          http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/