Campus Notice

Scholar to replace Blackboard

From: Susan Brooker-Gross, director for policy and communications, information technology management

Scholar will become Virginia Tech's online system for learning and collaboration, after three years of development and evaluation, with full implementation by Fall 2010, announced Provost Mark McNamee and Vice President for Information Technology Erv Blythe. Learning Technologies will discontinue Blackboard service at that time.

Support for the migration of courses from Blackboard to Scholar includes:

A do-it-yourself course copy tool and instructions to move most course content from Blackboard to Scholar;
Migration and reformatting of tests and quizzes, by reservation with OCS;
Personal assistance in course design for Scholar, by appointment with OCS;
Continuing FDI classes all summer on using Scholar;
Drop-in support at the InnovationSpace (1140 Torgersen Hall).

Those faculty whose Blackboard courses contain tests or quizzes are urged to get in the queue now to receive assistance. To get on the schedule for migration assistance or for more information, go to http://learn.vt.edu/transition.

Faculty who are ready to move to Scholar may begin using it anytime. They will join over 700 faculty already using Scholar this semester. Learning Technologies will continue to work with the faculty throughout this coming summer, the coming academic year, and summer 2010 to ensure that all courses are out of Blackboard and ready for Scholar by Fall 2010.

During this transitional period, Learning Technologies has convened a Scholar Advisory Board with representatives from all colleges and several administrative units to provide feedback and perspective regarding the move from Blackboard to Scholar as well as the overall functionality of Scholar. Faculty input will be a key component as this process moves forward.

Anne Moore, associate vice president, Learning Technologies, noted, "Moving to Scholar provides the academic community with a single environment to manage courses and to collaborate with colleagues on research, projects, and varied other university activities." Scholar is fully integrated with ePortfolio and facilitates the work of both faculty and students through a consistent toolset for instruction, research collaboration, projects, advising, assessment, and committee work. This semester over 1800 collaboration and course sites are in active use.

Scholar is the Virginia Tech label for the community source software Sakai. Sakai is a platform for innovation jointly developed through collaboration among several universities including Virginia Tech, along with Michigan, Indiana, Virginia, Cambridge, Stanford, the University of California-Berkeley, Rutgers, Yale, Georgia Tech, University of Cape Town, and others. By keeping development within the academic community, control of ongoing development and improvements remains within and serves the academic community.

Designed by higher education for higher education, Scholar offers tools in support of teaching and learning, research and collaboration, and assessment/accreditation. In addition to supporting announcements, assignments, discussion forums, chat tools, tests and quizzes, gradebook, and other traditional tools of a course management system, Scholar offers a rich array of mechanisms to engage students and colleagues including electronic portfolios and wikis, along with blogs, podcasts, polls, RSS feeds, a timeline tool, and an appointment tool for office hours. Additional tools are being developed by contributing institutions for sharing within the Sakai community.

Klaus Elgert, professor of Biological Sciences, remarked, “The launching of Scholar as the primary course management, collaboration, and learning system for the university community heralds a new era of e-scholarship. Even though my use of Scholar is limited, my introduction to Scholar, which included “house-calls” on the migration of my course website to Scholar and in the use of some of its features, such as Chat and Forum, and explanations of Scholar’s overall flexibility, driven by in-house design and maintenance, instill excitement in the potential of its other toolsets to enhance student learning and my teaching!”

Alan Abrahams, assistant professor in Business Information Technology, reported, "My student teams use Scholar to share their work with their team-mates. I find it much easier to set-up and grade assignments [and] navigate and configure my course in Scholar than in Blackboard. While my students were initially reticent about Scholar, they quickly got the hang of it."

Susan Clark, associate professor and director of the Didactic Program in Dietetics, recognized that "Scholar's capabilities to create wikis, post blog entries, online chatting between students and faculty, and much more multimedia capabilities including uploading video podcasts is more seemingly compatible with how students prefer to communicate."

Sara Kajder, assistant professor in the School of Education, said, "The use of the ePortfolio tools in Scholar has led me to continually rethink my pedagogy, and to open up the ways in which students can leverage the many literacies they bring into our classroom. When integrated throughout a course, Scholar can truly become transparent, requiring that students' focus on content and learning as opposed to web design or the work of collecting materials that demonstrate their work."

To get on the schedule for migration assistance or for more information, go to http://learn.vt.edu/transition.

For more information, contact Susan Brooker-Gross at 231-1715.

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