Blackboard System Research Articles

Differences of E-Learning Systems With the Focus on Moodle and Blackboard Systems

With the development of new technologies and their implementation in all areas of life, especially education, it is important to understand and accept all the new educational/technological concepts and their benefits. Through the concept of virtual learning environment, educational institutions can improve the quality of the learning process, reduce costs, but also improve communication between students and lecturers. The main objective of this paper is to present characteristics of two most used e-learning systems (Moodle and Blackboard) and provide results of the literature review on the differences of these two systems. Based on the results of literature review, a comparison between Moodle and Blackboard based on ISO 25010 framework is made. Through this secondary research, it was concluded that Moodle is the best solution for introducing a learning management system, but there are numerous opportunities for improving the education system at all levels.

The Effect of Using Blackboard in the light of Daniel’s Model on Teaching Mathematica Program and Developing Science Processes, Reasoning Ability, and Academic Achievement

The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of using blended virtual classrooms in Blackboard in the light of Daniel’s model on teaching Mathematica program and developing the science processes, reasoning ability and academic achievement. The participants comprised 50 female students at Mathematics department, University of Tabuk. The researcher designed the two assessment tools, namely science processes test and reasoning ability test. Then the researcher taught the instructional content by using virtual classrooms blended learning in Blackboard in the light of Daniel’s model, in accordance with the teacher’s manual guide. Then, the researcher applied post-testing on the experimental group. The study results showed the effect of using blended virtual classrooms in Blackboard system in the light of the Daniel’s model in teaching Mathematica. The results also showed statistically significant correlation among science process, reasoning ability among study participants.

The Impact of Distance Education on Learning Outcome in Computer Skills Course in Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University: An Experimental Study

The present study aimed to explore the impact of distance education on the learning outcome of students in computer skills course in Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University in Al-Sulail, Saudi Arabia. In this study, the learning outcome is represented in the students’ academic achievement. The researcher adopted an experimental approach. He selected a sample consisting from 80 male students from 4 sections of a computer skills course. Those students were divided equally into control and experimental groups. The members of the control group were taught through adopting a face-to-face instructional approach. They attended 4 face-to-face lectures. The members of the experimental group were taught online through using the Blackboard system. The researcher used a pre-test and a post-test for assessing students’ academic achievement. SPSS program was used. It was found that both groups share similar levels of computer literacy. It was found that distance education has a significant positive impact on students’ academic achievement in the computer skills course. The researcher recommends adding online instructional activities to the curricula used in Saudi universities.

درجة رضا طالبات الدراسات العليا عن نظام بلاكبورد واستخدامه في تدريسهن الطارئ عن بعد في ضوء نموذج نجاح نظام المعلومات لديلون ومكلين

درجة رضا طالبات الدراسات العليا عن نظام بلاكبورد واستخدامه في تدريسهن الطارئ عن بعد في ضوء نموذج نجاح نظام المعلومات لديلون ومكلين

A Technical and Conceptual Framework for Serious Role-Playing Games in the Area of Social Skill Training

Virtual role-playing games can provide an authentic experience of situated learning and allow for trying out different problem-solving and communication strategies without consequences in the real world. This is of particular interest and benefit for the training of social skills. This article presents a conceptual and technical framework for serious role-playing games for the training of specific social skills in virtual 2D learning environments involving chatbots in dialog-centric settings. It summarizes different use cases and evaluation results from prior studies. From the design perspective, several distinctive conceptual features characterize our framework: (1) chat-like interaction with an AI-controlled chatbot, (2) separate phases of immersion and reflection to facilitate a change of perspective that is considered conducive for learning, (3) the learning process is emphasized by means of adaptive feedback based on individual analyses. We propose a system architecture that is based on three components: (1) AI-controlled chatbots that adapt to the player’s behavior, (2) a multi-agent blackboard system as the backbone in order to keep components independent and optimize performance due to parallel processing, and (3) intelligent support for an automated evaluation of the player’s performance and feedback generation. The training scenarios presented and discussed in this article include workplace-oriented conflict management, patient-centered medical interviews, and customer complaint management. First evaluation studies indicate that the scenarios may be well-suited for real training situations. Due to its flexible architecture, our framework and approach can easily be tailored to different settings and use cases and thus serve as a basis for future research focusing on the adaptation to other contexts and systems. On the basis of these developments, we elaborate important design dimensions, reflect and discuss general issues and major challenges, summarize and contrast different approaches and strategies, as well as identify opportunities for serious role-playing games in the area of social skills training.

Faculty members' readiness implementing e-learning in higher education Saudi Universities: A cross-sectional study

Background/ Objectives: This article reports on an e-learning readiness study that was carried out to determine the institutional, individual, and communication factors of the two major stakeholder groups (teachers and institutions) in the higher education universities in Saudi Arabia. Methods: A sample of 139 faculty members working in ten higher education universities in Saudi Arabia was surveyed in this cross-sectional study. A pre-validated survey questionnaire of e-learning was adopted to collect data from the participants\' between April and May 2019. Findings: The pre-validated survey tool of Teachers\' Readiness for Online Learning Measure (TROLM) of an 18 item scale has been explored in four factors: Communication self-efficacy, institutional support, self-directed learning, and learning-transfer self-efficacy. The findings of this study are instrumental in implementing successful e-learning resources (strategies) in Higher Education Institutions and will also benefit e-learning initiatives in similar institutions in other regions of Saudi Arabia and beyond. The Study demonstrated the supportive e-learning strategies Blackboard system that facilitated faculty members\' readiness to teach university students during the sudden transition from traditional methods to the e-learning platforms. Keywords: Faculty members\' readiness; higher education institutions; e-learning strategies; e-learning resources; information technology; institutional support

A Study on the Usability of Moodle and Blackboard – Saudi Students Perspectives

<p class="0abstract">Nowadays, e-learning management systems are used in many universities around the world. In Saudi Arabia, universities use several systems such as Moodle and Blackboard. However, only little empirical research has been conducted on Saudi students’ preference for such systems. This study compared the usability of Moodle and Blackboard systems among Saudi university students. Specifically, three comparison metrics have been considered: user interface, download and upload service and materials organization. The results showed that the students preferred Moodle and believed that it is more usable than Blackboard in all studied metrics.</p>

Effectiveness of Blackboard and Edmodo in Self-Regulated Learning and Educational Satisfaction

Due to the increasing use of Internet-based Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and Social Learning Networks (SLNs), educators tend to employ these technologies in improving student learning skills and educational quality. This study investigates the impact of Blackboard LMS and Edmodo SLN on self- regulated learning and educational satisfaction among the Founding Year students at Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University (PNU). The quasi-experimental approach applied to (148) students enrolled in the Founding Year, Faculty of Education, PNU. The participants were randomly distributed to two experimental groups: The first group compromised (61) students and the second one included (87) students. For achieving the study objectives, Blackboard and Edmodo based learning environments were designed. The educational material was transformed into a digital educational content and uploaded on the Blackboard system. Furthermore, scales for self-regulated learning and educational satisfaction were prepared. The self-regulated learning scale composed of (9) items illustrating the contributions of e-learning systems for developing the students’ self-regulated learning skills. The educational satisfaction scale comprised (8) items illustrating the satisfaction of the students with e-learning systems. After applying the two scales to the participants, a t-test was utilized to analyze data and calculate the significance of differences between the mean scores of the pre and posttests. Results showed a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the pre-and post-tests of self- regulated learning scale for Blackboard, favoring the post-test. There is a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the pre-and post-tests of educational satisfaction scale for Blackboard, favoring the post-test. There is a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the pre-and post-tests of self-regulated learning scale for Edmodo, favoring the post-test. There is a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the pre-and post-tests of educational satisfaction scale for Edmodo, favoring the post-test. There is no statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the experimental group (taught using Blackboard) and the second experimental group (taught using Edmodo) in the post-test of the scale of self-regulation skills. There is no statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the experimental group (taught using Blackboard) and the second experimental group (taught using Edmodo) in the post-test of the scale of educational satisfaction. The study recommended holding training courses for students and faculty members on using Blackboard LMS and Edmodo SLN.

Effects of e-Assessment Tools in academic achievement and motivation towards learning among pre service kindergarten teachers in Turaif

The objective of the current research is to measure the impact of e-Assessment Tools used in the Blackboard system in academic achievement and motivation towards learning among pre service kindergarten female teachers in Turaif. To achieve this objective, the researcher used the descriptive approach which is suitable for measuring this objective, where an electronic questionnaire was designed using Google forms for easy access to the largest number of pre service kindergarten female teachers in Turaif to answer the questionnaire questions. The questionnaire consisted of three axes, namely the use of the Blackboard system in promotion of academic achievement. The axis of obstacles to the use of the Blackboard system, and the third axis deal with motivation of students towards learning using the Blackboard system. The sample of the research consisted of (407) pre service kindergarten female teachers, Turaif, of different study levels and scientific and literary disciplines, where the study results showed the effectiveness of the Blackboard system in the academic achievement and motivation towards learning among students.

AN INTELLIGENT FRAMEWORK FOR DYNAMIC TEST PLAN OF CLIENT/SERVER APPLICATIONS

To assist a solution to the problem of the test environment spanning multiple platforms, this paper proposes a decision support framework with the blackboard model to integrate all complementary features into a single automated test environment for multi-platform client/server applications. Before testing client/server applications, the input into this framework are testing tools with different approaches and client sites which are going to run the test. The planning agent will make a decision dynamically and produce a testing plan to allocate testing tasks to these testing tools to client sites. Two complementary features for testing client/server applications are illustrated in this paper to demonstrate how the framework works. The concept of mobile agents is applied to launch the test driver to different client sites, execute the tests and bring back the test results from client sites as well as the trace file from the server site for inspecting the interaction behavior among clients. Based on the multicast framework, the same test data can be broadcasted to multiple clients sites to run the tests simultaneously and the test results can be returned from client sites for examining the problem of repeated executions.

Design science research in construction management: multi-disciplinary collaboration on the SightPlan system

As a tribute to Ray Levitt’s early computer science contributions, this paper presents the research methodology he and I in close collaboration with Barbara Hayes-Roth followed to develop the SightPlan system. This research methodology falls under the umbrella of what is known as “design science.” Design science concerns itself with designing and making artefacts to fulfil a purpose, and then testing and validating that they indeed are fit-for-purpose. Design science does not belong in the category of physical science or of fundamental science; instead, it falls in the category of the sciences of the artificial. This paper describes the methodological steps pursued in design science and in parallel illustrates how these steps were instantiated and what artefacts were produced in the course of developing the SightPlan system, a blackboard expert system that lays out temporary facilities on construction sites. The aims of this paper are to recognise Ray’s work as an advisor and researcher, reflect on and promote the use of design science in construction management and economics and thereby participate in the ongoing discussion on research methods in this journal, and illustrate to scholars in this field that research is an opportunistic endeavour.

Predicting Personality Traits by Student Learning Behaviors on Blackboard Systems

Personality has been demonstrated as influential factors in technology-enhanced learning. The collection of personality is always a challenge. Human efforts are usually required in the user surveys which is the most common and popular way to collect the personality traits. Predicting personality traits, as a result, becomes one of the research directions. Some researchers consider these personality traits as labels in the classifications, while some others consider them as numeric variables in the regressions. In this paper, we made our attempt to predict the students’ personality traits from their learning behaviors on the Blackboard system. More specifically, we tried both the classification and regression models, and evaluate them based on the same standards. Our initial experimental results discover the insights about these predictive models.

Mone: Mutation Oriented Norm Evolution

A norm regulates the run-time behavior of the agent with the action and condition to trigger the action. Because of the incomplete understanding of the world, the result of the action may be different for the same agent with the `same' context, or unintended different context. To study this phenomenon, the classical norm definition is extended from the condition-action pair to cover the expectation, in order to verify the result of the action. The Norm evolution can be defined as a gradual process which makes a norm more complete and effective. In the terminology of evolution, a norm is called mutated if the result contradicts to the expectation, i.e. at least one of the expected conditions is invalid. At run-time, norms are executed in series. A mutation brings new knowledge to the following states and might affect the later execution of the norms. Such knowledge provides will help the norm designer to complete the definitions. A mutation based norm evolution (Mone) method is proposed in this paper to detect the mutations, to propagate the evidence and to crossover the norms for completeness. The method is formalized in the Description Logic, and implemented with the algorithms for mutation detection and norm crossover. The case study illustrates the Description Logic $\mathcal {ALCI}$ of the method and shows the potential to evolve the norms autonomously in the Blackboard system, GBBopen.

Evaluating and Measuring the Impact of E-learning System adopted in Saudi Electronic University

This research aims to investigate and quantify the impact that the Blackboard system has as an e-learning system, with the specific context of its use in Saudi Electronic University (SEU) using the IS Impact Measurement model. This study will help to provide rich insights and increased understanding on how the creation of effective and successful adoption of such Learning Management System (LMS) can be achieved. Thus, this research will help to improve the quality of existing learning environment in Saudi Electronic University (SEU) and other similar context. The significance of this research is that it addresses gaps in current knowledge for a special need of SEU to measure and evaluate its use of LMS after about eight years of implementation in order to increase knowledge on how to best apply such LMS on a blended learning environment.

Perceptions or Actions? Grounding How Agents Interact Within a Software Architecture for Cognitive Robotics

One of the aims of cognitive robotics is to endow robots with the ability to plan solutions for complex goals and then to enact those plans. Additionally, robots should react properly upon encountering unexpected changes in their environment that are not part of their planned course of actions. This requires a close coupling between deliberative and reactive control flows. From the perspective of robotics, this coupling generally entails a tightly integrated perceptuomotor system, which is then loosely connected to some specific form of deliberative system such as a planner. From the high-level perspective of automated planning, the emphasis is on a highly functional system that, taken to its extreme, calls perceptual and motor modules as services when required. This paper proposes to join the perceptual and acting perspectives via a unique representation where the responses of all software modules in the architecture are generalized using the same set of tokens. The proposed representation integrates symbolic and metric information. The proposed approach has been successfully tested in CLARC, a robot that performs Comprehensive Geriatric Assessments of elderly patients. The robot was favourably appraised in a survey conducted to assess its behaviour. For instance, using a 5-point Likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), patients reported an average of 4.86 when asked if they felt confident during the interaction with the robot. This paper proposes a mechanism for bringing the perceptual and acting perspectives closer within a distributed robotics architecture. The idea is built on top of the blackboard model and scene graphs. The modules in our proposal communicate using a short-term memory, writing the perceptual information they need to share with other agents and accessing the information they need for determining the next goals to address.

Communication-Optimal Distributed Dynamic Graph Clustering

We consider the problem of clustering graph nodes over large-scale dynamic graphs, such as citation networks, images and web networks, when graph updates such as node/edge insertions/deletions are observed distributively. We propose communication-efficient algorithms for two well-established communication models namely the message passing and the blackboard models. Given a graph with n nodes that is observed at s remote sites over time [1,t], the two proposed algorithms have communication costs Õ(ns) and Õ(n + s) (Õ hides a polylogarithmic factor), almost matching their lower bounds, Ω(ns) and Ω(n + s), respectively, in the message passing and the blackboard models. More importantly, we prove that at each time point in [1,t] our algorithms generate clustering quality nearly as good as that of centralizing all updates up to that time and then applying a standard centralized clustering algorithm. We conducted extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-life datasets which confirmed the communication efficiency of our approach over baseline algorithms while achieving comparable clustering results.

Assessing the Relative Importance of an E-learning system’s Usability Design Characteristics Based on Students' Preferences

<p style="text-align:justify">This study considers the interaction between an e-learning system, the Blackboard system, and the students who use it in Saudi Arabia. While previous work exists, there is limited consideration of the assessment of the preferences of e-learning system usability variables based on students’ perspectives, especially in developing countries such as Saudi Arabia. This paper attempts to fill the gap by investigating the relative importance of the design criteria developed for e-learning system usability evaluation from the students’ perspective in Saudi tertiary education. Based on reviewed literature, a set of usability principles was developed that have had an influence in the students’ learning process and use of the e-learning system. The list includes system navigation, system learnability, visual design, information quality, instructional assessment and system interactivity. An exploratory study was carried out to identify the most important usability design characteristics from a student’s perspective and then evaluate the overall usability of the current e-learning system, based on this subset. A quantitative approach was adopted to weigh usability design characteristics, based on 181 learners’ perceptions. The sample consists of undergraduates who are users of a web-based e-learning system in a university in Saudi Arabia. The research instrument was tested for construct validity and reliability. The analysed results have shown that information quality is the most important dimension followed by the navigation of the e-learning system. The study has also revealed that the system learnability and visual design came third and fourth in order of importance of e-learning system usability assessment. Finally, the least important design categories that influenced the e-learning system usability assessment were instructional assessment and system interactivity. The empirical results of this study may help to provide insights for designers and evaluators leading to a more effective approach to improve the usability and uptake of the e-learning system.</p>

Effectiveness of flipped classrooms using the Blackboard System in developing art work skills and attitudes of Faculty of Education female students at Jouf University toward the use of practical skills

Abstract: T he present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of flipped classrooms using the Blackboard System in developing art work skills and attitudes of Faculty of Education female students at Jouf University toward the use of practical skills. The participants of the study included 80 female students from Faculty of Education at Jouf University. The researchers prepared an observation checklist and an attitude scale. They also prepared some tasks, activities, sites for videos and data for students to do at home. They taught the experimental group through flipped classroom via Blackboard System, while the control group taught through the traditional method for a whole semester. The findings revealed that using the Blackboard System proved to be effective in developing art work skills and attitudes of Faculty of Education female students at Jouf University toward the use of practical skills.

An Implementation of the UTAUT Model for Understanding Students' Perceptions of Learning Management Systems

The rapid growth of e-learning around the globe is inspiring various academic institutions to adopt it. Uptake is motivated by convincing benefits such as flexibility, accessibility and the management of course delivery. In fact, academic institutions place great emphasis on e-learning and are investing significantly in information technology infrastructures. However, in spite of this effort and investment, it seems that instructors and students do not always fully benefit from the learning technology and more often learning management systems (LMSs) remain underutilized. Thus, this study adopts the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to study how people accept and use the Blackboard system. The data were analysed using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) techniques to test the hypothesized research model. The empirical results found that technical support is fundamental in determining the acceptance and use of e-learning systems. The findings of the study may help to provide insights into a better approach to promote e-learning acceptance.

The mobile blackboard system in higher education: Discovering benefits and challenges facing students

The mobile blackboard system in higher education: Discovering benefits and challenges facing students