Analyzing the Supercharged Notifications

of the Toledo What's Recent

Kenny Verbeke

Overview

• Introduction

• Background

• Current implementation

• Current use

• Future plans

• Conclusion

Who am I ?

Kenny Verbeke

• Current role:

– Application engineer / software consultant

– Managing the Blackboard environment

– 2nd line support

• Background

– Biochemistry

– Usability design

– Passion for technology and progress

Who do I work for ?

Who do I work for ?

How do we use Blackboard ?

• 2 Blackboard environments

– Toledo (university and higher education)

– eloV (secondary schools)

• Blackboard Learn 9.1 sp7 (since April 1st)

– Course Delivery

– Community Engagement

– Content Management

• Self-hosted

– Linux/Oracle

How do we use Blackboard ?

• Toledo

– 135.000 users

– 21.000 active courses and organizations

– 13 institutions

– 13 brandings

• eloV

– 49.000 users

– 9.000 active courses and organisations

– 115 schools

– 1 branding

Overview

• Introduction

• Background

• Current implementation

• Current use

• Future plans

• Conclusion

What’s New

Why replace What’s New?

• 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

Background

• Began as an idea from one of our developers

• He is also a student following some courses

• Wanted to know what was going on inside the

courses and communities he was enrolled in

• Lots of features were added after hours

Background

• First a prototype was made (begin 2011)

• Beta tested with 250+ people (mid 2011)

– Students, teachers and local admins

• Launched in September 2011

• New mobile version added April 1st (

• Survey conducted for future of What’s Recent

– 1800+ responses

Overview

• Introduction

• Background

• Current implementation

• Current use

• Future plans

• Conclusion

What is the Toledo What’s Recent ?

“A tool that displays personalized notifications in

reverse chronological order for events that

occur in the courses and organizations a person

is enrolled in. These notifications are accessible

from inside Blackboard, through RSS and

through a mobile page.”

Module

Notification

1. Title of the element2. Course or organization where it originated from3. Author of the notification4. Type of notification5. Time of the notification

Notification types

• Announcements

• Assignments

• Tests

• Surveys

• Items

• Course and communities made available

• My Grades

• Due

• Advalvas (Own tool)

Module

1. RSS2. Mobile version3. Setting (with link to notification settings)4. Help

Toledo What’s Recent

• Module inside Blackboard

• RSS

• Mobile version

RSS

• Mailclients• Google Reader• Windows 7 widget• Mobile RSS readers

Mobile version

Mobile version

Overview

• Introduction

• Background

• Current implementation and use

• Current use

• Future plans

• Conclusion

Current use

0

500000

1000000

1500000

2000000

2500000

3000000

3500000

4000000

Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar

Module loaded

Current use

0

100000

200000

300000

400000

500000

600000

700000

800000

Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar

Notifications clicked

Current use

0

20000

40000

60000

80000

100000

120000

140000

160000

Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar

RSS

Current use

0

5000

10000

15000

20000

25000

Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar

Mobile

Nice to know

• Used as navigation

– Users don’t always know where in a course

something is located because of What’s Recent

• Not (yet) actively promoted

• Performance tweaks were required

• Bugs in Blackboard surfaced (notifications)

– Adaptive release

– Overdue

– My Grades

Overview

• Introduction

• Background

• Current implementation and use

• Current use

• Future plans

• Conclusion

Future plans

• Lots of ideas

• Survey conducted to prioritize development

– Read/unread

– Delete/undelete notifications

– Sorting of notifications

• By source (course, organization)

• By type

• Ideas

– Starring ?

– Mobile app ?

– Filtering ?5% of responses: “Change nothing”

Future plans

• Open sourcing What’s Recent

– We are still working on it ;-)

• Blackboard is also working on similar

functionality

Overview

• Introduction

• Background

• Current implementation and use

• Current use

• Future plans

• Conclusion

Conclusion

• No performance issues

• Users quickly adopt the What’s Recent

• Makes Blackboard more transparent

• Easy access to notifications (RSS, Mobile)

• Some quirks are still present (BB notifications)

The end?

• Kenny Verbeke

• Kenny.verbeke@icts.kuleuven.be

• @Raverken

»Any questions?