At the usual risk of sounding (as usual) like a dufus, I'm wondering if faculty or instructional designers are getting much use out of the default HOME page that Blackboard introduced with version 9. I probably haven't spend enough time trying to make it work, but my impression is that we are better off just listing Announcements as the landing page for a course rather than the Home page which typically doesn't display much useful info.
For example, the calendar isn't linked to anything (due dates, for example) so unless faculty spend extra time adding dates there, that module is wasted space. The announcements are fine, but when you click on one you get the entire announcement page, not the announcement you want to read, so that's hardly a time-saver. "What's New" doesn't seem to display much of anything, and in my last attempt, the "To Do" module displayed nothing due today (I was logged in as a test student) even though I had just set two assignments to be due that very day. Moreoever, the way that instructors can't ever see what is being displayed in that module (even assuming that students can) seems like a terrible idea.
I'm sure that some or perhaps all of these things could be fixed by modifying settings so that we only display modules that accomplish something for us, but given the way the Home page is currently implemented, is it even worth the effort? Thanks in advance for your opinions--I don't want to tell faculty not to use it if the problem is just me.
Hi Roger - faculty at my institution have mixed feelings. Some use it and others have stuck with the Announcement page. Others yet have it in their course but do not have it as the landing page.
paige
Thanks for the response! Lots of faculty here use the Home Page (probably because it comes up as a default), but I've not yet seen it used in a way that was beneficial to anyone. I like the idea, but the current implementation seems to showcase Blackboard's shortcomings more than anything else.
Also, in my class, I removed the modules that weren't for students and added others to the page. Then I also created another module page (call faculty notification) and hid it from students and put the instructor modules on that one so students did see things that didn't work for them.