Nebraska eLearning Pilot Project

During the grant period, a series of quarterly discussion boards were established to gather input from the participants. Dr. Jim King served as the discussion board coordinator and Collette DeFrey, director of Blackboard support for Westside Community Schools, assigned experienced Blackboard users to provide feedback during the quarterly discussions.

Quarterly meeting discussion topics:

October, 2003 Discussion Board

• What behavioral and attitudinal changes are you expecting from your students as you and they use the course management systems (Blackboard and WebCT)?
• What behavioral and attitudinal changes would you like to see?
• How will you measure the changes you are seeing (are you measuring them? How?

December, 2003 Discussion Board

• Are communication patterns with students/parents/ colleagues changing with these course management systems? How do you know?
• Provide some short examples of those changes.
• How have you used this tool to involve others in your classroom activities? What types students seem to respond well to this medium? What types respond regularly?

March, 2004 Discussion Board

• "What types of instructional strategies are you putting in place? Have they been successful? Might anyone be willing to share a strategy that did NOT work?"
• What activities have you created using this tool that get students to interact more with course content?
• What challenges have you faced when trying to use CMS?

April, 2004 Discussion Board

• If the opportunity to use Bb or WebCT "went away", has this project made any difference?  What difference has it made?  What can you do with this tool that you cannot do in the face to face classroom?
• What changes have happened since you started using this tool that gets students to do the things you wanted, or reaches your objectives? 
• What things didn't happen that you thought might happened? What big objectives didn't get met?