• Introduction

• Users and notifications

• Blackboard and notifications

• Enhancing the notifications system

• Demo

• Technical overview

• Questions

Current role

Application engineer / software consultant

Managing the Blackboard environment

2nd line support

Background

Biochemistry

Usability design

Passion for technology and progress

Current role

Software architect

General building block development

Autoprovisioning based on SAP HR & SAP campus management

Background

Education: multimedia

Siemens Belgium: telecom & digital TV

Instant messaging & presence

2 Blackboard environments

Toledo (university and higher education)

eloV (secondary schools)

Blackboard Learn 9.0 sp2

Course Delivery

Community Engagement

Content Management

Self-hosted

Linux/Oracle

Toledo130.000 users

21.000 active courses and organizations

13 institutions

13 brandings

eloV60.000 users

9.000 active courses and organisations

128 schools

1 branding

A notification is a message that informs you of the

existence of an event

Many events can trigger a notification

Many different kinds of notifications (e-

mail, message, sms, pop-up, …)

Websites

Check manually

Email/Newsletter

RSS („05-‟06)

Personalized RSS

Facebook/Twitter/…

Stream of notifications (not all as important)

Emailed notifications for certain types of events

Conclusions

Increasing number of notifications

Users select the notifications they want / need

Email is not always as efficient (depends on use)

Not all users are the same

Let the user choose how he wants to be notified

Mail

!

Users

Default Blackboard

notification system

Announcements

Menu item

Modules

Notification dashboard

Email

Inside Blackboard

External

Dashboard Email

1% of our users use personalized notifications

99% of our users do not receive any email notifications *

2.500.000 pageviews per day system wide

425.000 pageviews per day for My Toledo (default) tab

8.000 pageviews per day for What’s new tab

240 pageviews per day for Notification dashboard

Students complain about email overuse

Survey: students want mobile access to notifications more than mobile access to the entire LMS

* Announcements emails not included

Usability issues:

• What‟s new in the what‟s new?

• No chronological information

• Limited information (title, source)

Performance issues:

• Heavy module/page

• Moved to separate page/module

• Deactivated the module

Problems with notifications for disabled users (row_status=2)

Only accessible inside Blackboard

Twitter

RSS

Mail

Bulletin board

Other

Other…

External webpage

Users

Default Blackboard

notification system

• Chronological notifications

• Extra information:

• Title

• Source

• Time

• Author

• Built with Blackboard API‟s

• Custom notifications (bulletin board, …)

Access to notifications:

• Lightweight module inside Blackboard

• RSS subscription to personal notifications

• Webpage (external)

Additionally for external access (outside the walled garden):

• Secure (https)

• Unique individual url (for rss and webpage)

• Privacy (supported by our educational policy)

External webpage with mobile CSS

Organise notifications

• Mark as read/unread

• Star important

• Dismiss

• Filter and sort

• By type, source, status, …

Twitter integration (Direct messages)

Discussion boards

“This opens up Blackboard”.

“Finally, I can see what is happening in a quick way”

“This makes Blackboard a lot more transparent”

“At last!”

Beta testing in different phases

Phase 1: internal

Phase 2: 50 users

Phase 3: ???

Phase 4: release

Finetuning

Interface

Grouping notifications

Blackboard Connect

Mass communications

Extra options to be notified

• Text/SMS

• E-mail

• text-to-speech (TTS)

Complementary to Toledo What‟s Recent

Extensibility

Security

Privacy

Confidentiality

Blackboard

NotificationsDiscussion

Boards

Bulletin

Boards

Other

Registery

Web Service (REST)

HTML(internal)

RSS XML JSONHTML(external)

External

Internal

Twitter Servers

Job

RegisteryConsumer registery

Twitter

Building

block

Internal

External

Notifications can only be retrieved from the outsidevia a

personal,

non-guessable,

non-spoofable,

non-interceptable &

revocable

URL

Application will generate the personal URL on request (when user is logged in)

Randomly generated parts

Digitally signed

URL is stored, only that URL is accepted

User can invalidate the URL by having the application generate a new URL

Please vote for us ;-)