Blackboard Virtual Classroom: Office Hours

The Blackboard virtual classroom function is a very easy to use but functional tool that can be used not only as a simple chat room but also for lecture purposes. You can field student questions and provide answers, hence it can be a very efficient way of conducting office hours sessions if you cannot be in the same room as your students.

Potential Uses:

• Chats can be used for students to practice their dialogue skills in a language course. Students can be paired in small groups for these practice sessions.
• Chats can also be useful to increase the use of office hours by students by allowing them to participate from their rooms.
• If time or geographic constraints prevent a lecturer from being physically present at a class, then a virtual classroom can be invaluable.

Creating Chat Rooms:

Chat rooms can be created in two ways. Firstly, if you wish a chat room to be accessible by all members of a course, then it can be created in the Collaboration section of the Communication section of a BB course website. Secondly, if you would like the chat room to only be accessible to certain members of the class, then the chat rooms can be created in the Group Pages section of Blackboard. See our documentation on creating groups for further information on groups.

The significant differences between the two places chat rooms can be created are summarized in the following table:

Creating Chat Rooms in the Communication Section:

Clicking on the Communication link in the course menu will bring you to the Communication section of the BB course website. One of the options available is "Collaboration." Clicking on the link will bring you to the default collaboration section that is accessible by all members of a course:

As you will note, by default there are two chat rooms already created. The first, entitled "Lecture Hall" is a "Virtual Classroom" which has extra features such as a virtual whiteboard. The second chat room, entitled "Office Hours" is the one we will cover in this tutorial.

You can also create new chat rooms in order to hold specifically focused discussions. In order to do this, go to the Control Panel. Once there, in the Course Tools section, click on the link entitled "Collaboration." This will bring you to the same page as above, except now you will be able to add and delete new chat rooms. Click on the "Add new Collaboration Session" button at the top of the screen:

This will open a page where you can enter information for the new chat session, such as a title and, optionally, dates that it should be available:

when you are satisfied with your selections, click the submit button. Your new chat session will be added to the list of available sessions in the collaboration section:

Creating Chat Rooms in Group Pages

You may decide to have your students interact in smaller groups. For this reason, you may want to create group pages for your students where they will have their own separate collaboration space (groups can be accessed once created by clicking Communication in the navigation bar and then on Group Pages and then selecting the page for the specific group. Finally, click on collaboration.) In groups, students are able to create and manage their own chat rooms to discuss specific group related topics. This can be done by clicking on the "Add collaboration session" button as above and following the steps already described.

Using the Chat Rooms

1. To open the chat room go to the "Communication" section of the course website and then select "Collaboration." This will bring you to a page that lists the open chat sessions. Before using the chat room, make sure any pop-up blockers are disabled before you do this and that you have the latest version of the Java Virtual Machine installed on your computer (available from http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp)

2. After creating your chat it will look something like the following:

On the right, where it currently says "SHAUN GREGORY SMITHIES Joined the session, " is the window for the chat session where you will be able to view the chat as it happens. Below that in the box labeled "Compose" is where you can type your messages for the chat and post them by hitting Enter.

The main Toolbar:

The main toolbar at the top of the window gives you the following options:

View: This allows you to select how you want to view private messages. These are messages passed only between you and another user as opposed to between you and all users present in the chat. Choose "separate window" to have them show in a new window, or "Inline" to have them in the same chat window as the main chat.

Clear: This lets you clear either only your screen on every user's screen. This can be very useful if you want to start a new topic of conversation and hence want to clear the old topic from user's screens.

End: This will end the chat session.

All the way over to the right of the task bar are the controls for archiving of the session. It is possible to archive all of the chats and questions for future reference. From left to right the controls are: Start archiving, pause archiving, stop archiving, and finally, insert a book mark into the archive (which is useful if you want to highlight a section of the discussion for later reference.) Students can archive their chats only when they are participating in chats as members of a group page (see our documentation on creating groups.)

Participants:

The left hand side of the window lists all of the students who are logged on to the chat session. The picture above shows a session with only one user logged in.

By clicking the name of any user logged in, depending on your settings in the control section, you will be able to view their personal information, such as email address, and send a private message to them.