NIE Bags the Blackboard Award for Teaching and Learning

The 2021 Blackboard Award for Teaching and Learning recognises significant and exemplary contributions to education by teams and institutions that utilise Blackboard’s education technology solutions. This year, the award went to the Learning Strategists team from the Centre for Innovation in Learning at NIE, who was recognised for developing the online course INL101: NIE Goes Online!

NIE Goes Online! is a self-enrolled online course designed to address teaching needs following the onset of COVID-19 in early 2020. It equips faculty with fundamental skills for designing, developing and facilitating a blended course or online lesson on NTULearn.

Prior to the inception of NIE Goes Online!, the number of NIE courses utilising NTULearn Blackboard had been on the rise, with 91.52% of all NIE courses in 2020 made available using this platform — an 8.86% increase from 2019. NIE Goes Online! aims to support these rising numbers and to achieve 100% technology-enabled learning through improved learner-centredness. Over 80 faculty have enrolled themselves in NIE Goes Online! since its launch in 2020.

With NIE Goes Online!, faculty can voluntarily enrol to enjoy the convenience of round-the-clock access to specific content and learning resources aimed at enhancing online teaching and learning effectiveness. A reflection of NIE’s “life-long, life-deep, life-wide and life-wise” learning philosophy, the course offers the following features:

1. Personalised Learning through Self-Assessment
   A Readiness Survey allows learners to gauge their technological skills and pedagogical knowledge related to designing and facilitating a blended course on NTULearn Blackboard. This enables learners to identify their learning needs to set personalised and achievable goals.
2. Just-In-Time Resources
   The course empowers faculty who have to shift their course delivery to an online mode within a short period. Its module resources can be swiftly downloaded and instantly used for the faculty’s purpose:
   • Module 1 - Creating Online Lessons and Assessment: How to design and develop a blended course using Microsoft Powerpoint and NTULearn Blackboard in four simple steps.
   • Module 2 - Facilitating Online Synchronous Sessions: How to acquire effective techniques for facilitating online synchronous learning sessions, e.g. ice-breakers, setting online classroom norms.
   • Module 3 - Facilitating Online Asynchronous Discussions: How to facilitate online asynchronous learning sessions, e.g. collating discussion forum posts, providing feedback.
3. Multi-modal Resources
   The contents of the modules are delivered through a mix of short recorded lectures, online videos, user guides with detailed texts and screenshots, and sample activities and templates to expedite application.
4. Statistics Tracking
   Course usage data can be retrieved from the BlackBoard User Activity Report, which allows the Learning Strategists team to analyse and adjust the module contents.

The contents of NIE Goes Online! have been significant and timely for our faculty, given that the readiness survey had indicated a lack of confidence in using Blackboard features (such as discussion boards) for courses and online lessons at the start of the Circuit Breaker. The award is an affirmation of NIE’s innovation and adaptability to new technologies to positively impact the educational experience.