Blackboard COLLABORATE is Here!!

Shenandoah University now has a new tool, Blackboard Collaborate. Collaborate is basically an interactive online classroom environment, allowing for both real-time pedagogical activities, and for the recording of such sessions for playback. You may have heard of Elluminate and/or Wimba Classroom. Blackboard has combined the best capabilities of both these industry leaders to create Collaborate.

A group of staff and faculty, have recently been trained in order that they may help train other users. Training sessions will appear on our training schedule very soon for students and faculty, and we hope you will attend whenever possible. Please be understanding about our limited number of training sessions at this time. If you and two other students would like a training session or your student organization would like to use this product, please email bbsupport@su.edu with the subject line STUDENT COLLABORATE TRAINING REQUEST.  

While Collaborate can be used as a stand-alone application, the Blackboard Collaborate building block will be the focus of our training and information. Also, while Collaborate may be useful for staff within organizations, our initial priority will be to focus on the academic application for Bb courses and student organizations/groups.

For those of you who are anxious to learn more about Collaborate at SU, you can visit the Bb support site (www.su.edu/bb) and under the Related Technologies link find all the information or directly by clicking here. Note that not all faculty will be using this tool.  

We are requesting that before any student organization or group uses the tool they attend a student leader training session with an IC Blackboard Staff member to learn all of the session naming rules and moderator tools.

If you have questions or issues, please send an email to our BbSupport@su.edu address. Additionally, we ask that you please not file any support tickets with Bb or Collaborate, but instead, let the Bb Support team manage those requests. We have a set number of support requests per year, according to our license, and not only do we not want to exceed that number, but we don’t want to waste support ticket opportunities with duplicate requests. We appreciate your help with this.

SO….take a test drive! Kick the tires! Enjoy this new exciting tool. If you have any creative ways students could use this tool in addition to groups, organizations, and courses please email bbsupport@su.edu with your ideas.