Bb World Europe 2009 - Day 2 (2/2)

The second morning session was entitled "Making the grade with Bbv8: Practical measure", which was somewhat misleading because I was expecting some practical issues and/or experiences about the use of the Grade Center. Basically the presentation was about how to instruct people on using the Grade Center, because this is the biggest change when migrating from Bb7 to Bb8. The university of Tennessee Knoxville seems to have some interesting tutorials on using the grade center. The main problem with this kind of tutorials is that nobody wants to read! For this reason the American University of Sharjah reduced the number of tutorial pages, but in such a way that instructors and students still can find the basics. Ron Ray listed the following recommendations when developing instructions for the grade center. Obviously, most of these are rather familiar and can also be applied for instruction on any other application. His list includes the following recommendations:
o Keep it basic, achieve a working grade center
o Hands-on training configuring an actual course, then use copy course function for settings)
o Lead faculty into the grade center incrementally
o Keep instruction materials simple and limited
o Provide instructions tailored only to the most commonly used options
o Provide other instructions only on a on-request basis
o Confirm that totals are calculated correctly
o Download Grade Center instances and confirm calculations in Excel
I found the two last recommendations a little bit odd, since you may expect that such an import function as the grade center will calculate correctly.

The next presentation I joined was given by Beatrice Lacomte from the University of Liege (B). There is not very much to write about, you should take a look for yourself at the eDemos portal (URL subject to change) they developed. In their vision on autonomy and self-directed learning the e-Learning team provided some online courses showcases as examples and good practises of e-Learning. The portal will be available outside ULG. The first release will be only in French but Beatrice promised there will be an English version too.

Besides attending sessions an important aspect of this kind of conferences is meeting with people. There was plenty of time for this during the (lunch) break and during the early evening client appreciation party. One more day to go here in Barcelona, strange idea that in 24 hours from now I expect to be landing in Amsterdam again.