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Sharing Knowledge at Blackboard World 2016

Sharing Knowledge at Blackboard World 2016

Technical solutions can be both elegant and groovy.

This is the message DUT took to the 2016 Blackboard World Conference held in Las Vegas, USA. Soren Aalto, Director of ITSS at DUT, and Pregalathan Reddy, Learning Management System Administrator at DUT, flew the DUT flag with a presentation entitled: An elegant (groovy) approach to SIS Integration with Learn 9.1, which looked at how automatic enrollment into ThinkLearnZone Blackboard classrooms had been achieved.

Blackboard World 2016 was attended by over 2,000 people from over 30 countries and included a developers’ conference as well as a leadership stream. Topics of the 200+ sessions included blended learning, competency-based education, gamification in education, mobile learning technology, increasing student persistence, and providing greater access to students with disabilities. Attendees included Blackboard users from teachers to higher education professionals, educational technologists, managers, IT directors and system administrators.

With Professor Nomthandazo Gwele, DUT DVC:Academic, in attendance, the duo discussed the various issues that had come up during the project to integrate DUT’s registration with the ThinkLearnZone (TLZ) learning management system. The project was a collaboration between the University’s Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT), the e-Learning Project and IT Support Services. Firstly, a way had to be found for systems with differing ways of recording and storing data to speak to each other. Following this, each evening, 51 departmental spreadsheets containing 110,000 subject registrations were processed and any anomalies in headcounts were collated. The successful completion of the project has significantly lightened lecturers’ load as they no longer have to liaise with the e-learning helpdesk to manually upload students into classrooms. The need to enroll students automatically was part of the scaling up of e-learning at DUT, where as of 2016, all taught modules now have a classroom on TLZ.

The presentation was positively received, with over 62% of those attending rating it as valuable and relevant for their current role and 41% rating the speaker’s style as “extremely effective”.

‘What I gained from the conference was two-fold: getting up to date with the road map and what lies ahead; and also gaining knowledge about the ‘real’ issues encountered when adopting new technology – the kind of information you only gain from talking to people,” said Reddy.

“It was fantastic to see the interest in our presentation and that at DUT we are mastering issues that have presented challenges to many. I was impressed by the infrastructure some universities have committed to e-learning. What has been learnt from this conference will influence our planning for the future,” added Prof Gwele.

– Ursula Vooght

Pictured: Soren Aalto, Director of ITSS at DUT, during the presentation.

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