The presentation given at the Blackboard Teaching and Learning Conference 2012 - Antwerp about the Toledo What's Recent

1. Analyzing the Supercharged Notifications
of the Toledo What's Recent
Kenny Verbeke

2. Overview
• Introduction
• Background
• Current implementation
• Current use
• Future plans
• Conclusion

3. Who am I ?
Kenny Verbeke
• Current role:
– Application engineer / software consultant
– Managing the Blackboard environment
– 2nd line support
• Background
– Biochemistry
– Usability design
– Passion for technology and progress

4. Who do I work for ?

5. Who do I work for ?

6. How do we use Blackboard ?
• 2 Blackboard environments
– Toledo (university and higher education)
– eloV (secondary schools)
• Blackboard Learn 9.1 sp7 (since April 1st)
– Course Delivery
– Community Engagement
– Content Management
• Self-hosted
– Linux/Oracle

7. How do we use Blackboard ?
• Toledo
– 135.000 users
– 21.000 active courses and organizations
– 13 institutions
– 13 brandings
• eloV
– 49.000 users
– 9.000 active courses and organisations
– 115 schools
– 1 branding

8. Overview
• Introduction
• Background
• Current implementation
• Current use
• Future plans
• Conclusion

9. What’s New

10. Why replace What’s New?
• Usability issues
– What’s new in the what’s new?
– No chronological information
– Limited information (title, source)
• Performance issues
– Heavy module/page
– Moved to separate page/module
– Deactivated the module
– Problems with notifications for disabled users
(row_status=2)
• Only accessible inside Blackboard

11. Background
• Began as an idea from one of our developers
• He is also a student following some courses
• Wanted to know what was going on inside the
courses and communities he was enrolled in
• Lots of features were added after hours

12. Background
• First a prototype was made (begin 2011)
• Beta tested with 250+ people (mid 2011)
– Students, teachers and local admins
• Launched in September 2011
• New mobile version added April 1st (
• Survey conducted for future of What’s Recent
– 1800+ responses

13. Overview
• Introduction
• Background
• Current implementation
• Current use
• Future plans
• Conclusion

14. What is the Toledo What’s Recent ?
“A tool that displays personalized notifications in
reverse chronological order for events that
occur in the courses and organizations a person
is enrolled in. These notifications are accessible
from inside Blackboard, through RSS and
through a mobile page.”

15. Module

16. Notification
1. Title of the element
2. Course or organization where it originated from
3. Author of the notification
4. Type of notification
5. Time of the notification

17. Notification types
• Announcements
• Assignments
• Tests
• Surveys
• Items
• Course and communities made available
• My Grades
• Due
• Advalvas (Own tool)

18. Module
1. RSS
2. Mobile version
3. Setting (with link to notification settings)
4. Help

19. Toledo What’s Recent
• Module inside Blackboard
• RSS
• Mobile version

20. RSS
• Mailclients
• Google Reader
• Windows 7 widget
• Mobile RSS readers

21. Mobile version

22. Mobile version

23. Overview
• Introduction
• Background
• Current implementation and use
• Current use
• Future plans
• Conclusion

24. Current use
Module loaded
4000000
3500000
3000000
2500000
2000000
1500000
1000000
500000
0
Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar

25. Current use
Notifications clicked
800000
700000
600000
500000
400000
300000
200000
100000
0
Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar

26. Current use
RSS
160000
140000
120000
100000
80000
60000
40000
20000
0
Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar

27. Current use
Mobile
25000
20000
15000
10000
5000
0
Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar

28. Nice to know
• Used as navigation
– Users don’t always know where in a course
something is located because of What’s Recent
• Not (yet) actively promoted
• Performance tweaks were required
• Bugs in Blackboard surfaced (notifications)
– Adaptive release
– Overdue
– My Grades

29. Overview
• Introduction
• Background
• Current implementation and use
• Current use
• Future plans
• Conclusion

30. Future plans
• Lots of ideas
• Survey conducted to prioritize development
– Read/unread
– Delete/undelete notifications
– Sorting of notifications
• By source (course, organization)
• By type
• Ideas
– Starring ?
– Mobile app ?
5% of responses: “Change nothing”
– Filtering ?

31. Future plans
• Open sourcing What’s Recent
– We are still working on it ;-)
• Blackboard is also working on similar
functionality

32. Overview
• Introduction
• Background
• Current implementation and use
• Current use
• Future plans
• Conclusion

33. Conclusion
• No performance issues
• Users quickly adopt the What’s Recent
• Makes Blackboard more transparent
• Easy access to notifications (RSS, Mobile)
• Some quirks are still present (BB notifications)

34. The end?
• Kenny Verbeke
• Kenny.verbeke@icts.kuleuven.be
• @Raverken
»Any questions?