On today's post, Harry Day, Edward Browncross and Raja Toqeer make the case for saving Blackboard users a whole gang of time.
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How much time does your department waste on the VLE?
Could you save time if you streamlined things?
We asked ourselves exactly these questions which kick-started the Blackboard Streamlining Project.
But let’s just start with some eye-catching headline figures!
The Blackboard Streamlining project:
- Saves staff 51% of time in setting up new Blackboard pages from scratch.
- Saves staff 52% of time in the maintenance of Blackboard pages.
Statements like this can often be misleading ‘clickbait’ style headlines. So let’s explore these claims in a bit more detail to understand what the impact really was from the Blackboard Streamlining project.
First though, an overview of what the project was all about....
What is Blackboard (BB) Streamlining?
The University of Sheffield uses Blackboard (BB) as the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Staff across the institution have long grumbled about BB being cumbersome and time consuming to work with. The BB Streamlining project set out to identify the most common and most significant issues, before developing some fixes for them, and save people time!
This work was done inside MEE (Multidisciplinary Engineering Education) with our 15 academics, but with the potential for wider use across the institution if the project proved successful.
The first stage of the project was a staff consultation, then the project team examined the data and identified the following key components that could save staff time working with BB - which were appraised at a staff away day:
- A bespoke software tool that creates a standardised BB page at the click of a button - called the Construction Worker (developed in-house)
- Use of iFrames, a standard and easy method of embedding documents (such as teaching material) onto a BB page
- Use of Weblinks, a standard and easy method of live-linking documents (such as teaching material) onto a BB page
- Local Google-drive, a standard way of making google-drive appear as if regular folders on your computer (makes navigating and moving files around easier)
Detailed descriptions of these components can be found in this handy document- Blackboard Streamlining Guidance, but the question is, how much time can be saved by using them?
The Survey
15 academics in MEE were asked to complete a survey and 11 responded, 9 used the Blackboard Streamlining tools (the remaining 2 did not). The survey asked people to consider how much time it took them to do certain tasks in Blackboard, both before and after the BB Streamlining tools were introduced. This gave us qualitative data based on subjective judgement, and without a direct measurement of time.
With this in mind, the survey results could give an indication or user perception, an important factor when working with a VLE, and perhaps offer an ‘order of magnitude’ for the time savings gained by the department.
So lets now examining the initial claims of:
- “Saves staff 51% of time in setting up new Blackboard pages from scratch”
and
- “Saves staff 52% of time in the maintenance of Blackboard pages.”
The first question refers to how long it takes someone to create all the necessary folders, and upload all the teaching material to the VLE, for 1 new lab activity. This typically includes some standard text, a session plan (lab sheet), some additional files (i.e. spreadsheets) and risk assessments etc. The terms ‘Blackboard Page’ and ‘Blackboard Folder’ are used interchangeably for this meaning.
Here is the raw data:
All bands of higher lengths of time have reduced, and the “< 30mins” category has increased. This indicates a significant shift towards less time required to set up each new lab folder on BB.
To turn this into a more tangible number required some assumptions & simplification. Each band was converted to a single number of minutes; i.e. the “30 mins to 1 hour” band was converted to 45 mins. Then each band was multiplied by the number of people in it, before adding those all up to arrive at a total number of minutes. Dividing by the people provided the average minutes required for a person to create a new BB lab folder.
This went from 52 minutes, to 25 minutes after the introduction of the Blackboard Streamlining tools (a 51% saving).
Finally, if the time saving per BB folder is multiplied by the number of folders (~600) MEE will need to set up when we move to BB Ultra, then we reach an approximate potential time saving that could be seen by the department during the move - and that comes out at about 38 days!
Or another way of looking at it, giving each academic 2.5 days less work to do.
The second question refers to modifying, updating files, reuploading them to the VLE and making other changes when needed after the initial page is created at the start of the semester. This is what we call ‘maintenance’ tasks for a BB folder. Here’s the raw data:
In a similar fashion, bands of higher lengths of time have reduced while the “<10mins per week” band increased. We reached an initial weekly time cost of 29 mins (per person) to do the maintenance of BB folders. This was reduced to 14 mins with BB Streamlining tools (a 52% saving). This covers all the folders for each academic, so when multiplied by the 15 academics, and the 24 weeks of semester in a year, we reached a yearly time saving of about 13 days!
A couple of notes after all that:
- These time savings assume that all academic staff adopt the BB streamlining tools.
- We can’t know if the other 4 non-respondent (survey) academic staff either did or didn’t use the tools, so the figures are calculated based on respondee data only, and then projected onto the total number of academics in MEE.
- And yes, it’s rather rough and approximate in terms of the stats, but this approach seemed more pragmatic than standing over someone’s shoulder with a stopwatch and measuring how long they took to do BB jobs.
- Finally, people have been using BB in the same way for years and are familiar with how to do it, but the BB Streamlining tools are either partially or entirely new to them. This means that further time savings would be envisaged as people get used to using these tools.
What We’ve Learnt
It definitely worked!
Even with a low sample size and some rough calculations, we still have a convincing order of magnitude estimate showing a substantial amount of time saving for the department.
In addition to the benefits of saving staff time, the tools also improved the consistency and accessibility of the teaching materials presented to students on Blackboard.
The Future
There are other types of automated tools that can be developed, and MEE plans to work with Schools in the coming months to consider ways to bring wider benefits to the faculty/institution.
Perhaps Streamlining tools will become standard in our quest to reduce (unnecessary) workload on staff, while providing excellent quality of teaching material to students through our VLE.
If you have any comments, thoughts, ideas or questions - then please get in touch with Harry Day (h.day@sheffield.ac.uk), Edward Browncross (e.browncross@sheffield.ac.uk) or Raja Toqeer (r.toqeer@sheffield.ac.uk)