The Blackboard online education system has emerged as the tool by which Loyola’s professors can continue teaching during hurricane evacuation and incorporate media features in course instruction.

Brad Petitfils, support specialist for Loyola’s Instructional Technology, offers Blackboard tutorial workshops for faculty and staff to attend the week before classes start and during the first week that classes begin. So far this semester, Petitfils has held 18 workshops on a wide range of topics.

“I was really impressed with the number of faculty who showed up for different workshops. Some of them came back for everything we offered,” Petitfils said.

IT promotes the workshops heavily to new faculty who may not have had previous experience in using Blackboard. There are alternatives that other institutions use, like Web Course Tools and open source products, programs whose services are free of charge and consequently have no central support location.

Since Loyola pays for Blackboard, the host location at Blackboard’s corporate offices in Washington, D.C., offers support services. The university decided to move Blackboard to this hosted site after Hurricane Katrina so that students and faculty could still access it even if the on-campus systems were offline, Petitfils said.

The question pending since Hurricane Katrina concerns Blackboard’s ability to adequately organize courses during a brief or extended evacuation. In the past, professors who were already using Blackboard regularly for their classes were able to maintain momentum when there was an evacuation lasting a few days, Petitfils added.

Other professors who halted instruction until classes reconvened on campus had to add class days to the end of the semester to compensate for lost time.

Petitfils reminds faculty of this benefit in his Blackboard workshops. If Loyola’s WebMail system is down during an emergency or campus closure, Blackboard messages cannot reach faculty and students because it uses their Loyola e-mail accounts to communicate.

In this case, professors who use Blackboard for a specific class can use the “My Announcements” section of Blackboard to communicate and provide an alternate e-mail address for further communication. This is just until Loyola recovers its main information systems as part of Information Technology’s recovery plan, according to Bret Jacobs, director of IT.

But depending on Blackboard during a long-term evacuation is a more difficult venture, Petitfils said. The problem is getting the faculty to offer strictly online classes.

“If we were in a long-term evacuation, we would have a group of faculty who would be willing to continue online and another group of faculty who wouldn’t. That issue is for the administration to decide,” he said.

This semester, Loyola has made efforts to revamp Blackboard to update it to common modern technology. Loyola has hired Justin Mauck, Learning Technologies developer, who deals with media features for Blackboard, especially video and audio.

These multimedia features are new this semester, and the faculty and students who use them have received them well. “We have a streaming server that we can put lectures on. If a faculty member wishes, we can video tape his or her lecture and stream it,” Petitfils said.

In addition to viewing their professors giving lectures, students have access to documentaries and movies through Blackboard, such as the “Star Wars” films that English professor Mary McCay posts for her “Harrison Ford: American Hero” course, and videos English professor Robert Bell posts for his “20th Century American Literature” course, two classes that are exclusively online. Student workers at the library helped in programming these classes and told Petitfils these features would be helpful to them in their other classes.

Chemistry professor Kurt Birdwhistell uses Blackboard mainly for posting documents for students to retrieve or review, laboratory procedures and PowerPoint presentations for in-class lectures. He doubts other professors in his department use Blackboard extensively, if at all.

Birdwhistell is uncertain of Blackboard’s viability throughout an evacuation.

“I think it would be difficult for sure. First it means that the student would have to have a laptop or desktop wherever that person is and ready access to Blackboard, which especially in the event of an evacuation may or may not be true,” he said.

“I think in reality, people are thinking of a week-long evacuation at this point. Labs are especially a problem. A week running a lab on Blackboard doing some sort of dry lab might work but beyond that, you’d have to do something else, but I’m not sure what. I’m pretty sure we’re not prepared to do the labs on Blackboard.”

Sally Tunmer can be reached at [email protected].