News and Activities

• Summer School Blackboard 9 Workshops
  In December the Faculty will be upgrading to the new Blackboard version 9. Training dates for academics teaching in Summer School this year are:
  
  November:
  Monday 23, Wednesday 25, Friday 27 - Morning sessions 10am-12pm
  Tuesday 24, Thursday 26 - Afternoon sessions 2pm-4pm
  
  December:
  Monday 14, Wednesday 16, Friday 18 - Morning sessions 10am-12pm
  Tuesday 15, Thursday 17 - Afternoon sessions 2pm-4pm
  
  Please RSVP to Faculty eLearning (eLearning@econ.usyd.edu.au) by close of business, Friday 20 November. Further training will be held for staff teaching in Semester 1, 2010 closer to that time.

Some of the benefits of the Blackboard upgrade are: 

• Better accessibility for students with disabilities.
• Improved functionality due to more intuitive functions, less clicks and a modern look-and-feel.
• Greater mobility with learning notification updates through facebook, iPod and iPhone.
• Better groupwork through improved group management and group space tools.
• Consistency University wide as WebCT is migrating to Blackboard 9, initially running both platforms from March 2010.
• Better visibility through improved notification dashboards for students and staff that allow performance/at risk monitoring and feedback, as well as student centric approaches to learning.
• More opportunity for collaboration with built-in blogs and journals, with wikis planned for applica­tion pack release in 2010.
• A longer transition time allowing a systematic training schedule of familiarity with the look and feel, followed by more focus on the new functionality, while allowing power-users the opportunity to innovate immediately. Blackboard will continue supporting the current version until 2010.
• Improved customization features will enable the Faculty to adopt within Blackboard new University branding requirements for online sites.
• Greater security enhanced SSL encryption capabilities.