Courseware Sites
As an instructor in the Division of Rhetoric and Writing, I have used Blackboard to manage course materials and activities while teaching in a traditional classroom (i.e. not a computer-assisted one).
The discussion board in Blackboard has been the most frequently used communication feature. It allowed me to coordinate disussions outside of the classroom. The assigned readings represented common topics of discussion. Issues related to the research process, which took place exclusively outside of the classroom, were profitably addressed online, resulting in an FAQ of sorts.
I found Blackboard especially useful for assembling course materials and organizing them by learning unit. Because the system is password-protected, I was able to share with my students sample assignments for in-class analysis, the authors of which had permitted educational use without allowing public access.
The support for HTML and linking of content within Blackboard allowed me to create a detailed schedule of work with links to all the readings and the course documents to be used for each class session.
When I became interested in maintaining some of the course content publicly accessible, while allowing for password-protected communication among students, I used an external site to embed in the flow of the Blackboard one. The approach allowed me to integrate all content and tools in one place for my students' convenience.
