The Blackboard Academic suite introduced at all three institutions in 2008 comprises the Learning Delivery System, Content management system and a Community System.  This next phase of activity was to engage with Blackboard Consultants to plan and prepare for the effective introduction of the Community System which has the potential to provide a complete Learning Portal or one stop shop, for learners.

The community system makes use of roles which can be assigned to all users directly from existing records systems. Using the attributes from these roles enables the community system to provide a highly personalised portal making it easy to target relevant information to the right groups of users at the right time.  As can be seen from this illustration the community system does not replace any existing systems but rather acts as a conduit between these systems and the end users.

[Click here to view a larger version of this diagram at gliffy.com]

Information can be taken by various means – database output, RSS feeds and input from support units and directed to users according to the roles allocated from student record systems.  Information from external sources can be imported by similar means.  In addition there are a whole range of tools (blogs, wikis, discussion boards and survey tools) which allow for two way interaction so that students have an equal opportunity to input information into the system.

Feb-Apr 2008  Saw the start of the consultation exercise to roll out the Blackboard Community System for each institution.  An initial information gathering event was held at each institution, with a representative sample of staff and students, followed by two weeks in-depth consultation, planning, training and prototyping at Swansea Metropolitan University in which the whole team worked with Blackboard consultants to deliver a prototype community system.

May 2009 Two full day consultation and planning events were held for Swansea University and Trinity University College using the model developed while working at Swansea Metropolitan. These were facilitated by Pepijn Kalis one of the Blackboard consultancy trainers and were attended by a good cross section of Teaching staff, support staff and student representatives.  The outcome of these participative events was to produce models of a community system for each institution which could be used to develop working prototypes early this Summer with a view to deploying these in time for the start of the academic year 2009/10