Online summer sessions will feature fewer courses and require Blackboard-certified

By Zoe Strozewski | Published by May 5, 2020

Kean University’s administration is requiring all faculty to become Blackboard-certified to teach this summer or next fall in case the pandemic crisis continues — stricter guidelines that some say is already resulting in fewer course offerings in the summer sessions.

An April 30 email from Suzanne Bousquet, Ph.D. and vice president for academic affairs, informed faculty that while the university hasn’t decided yet whether fall classes will be moved online, all fall courses need to be ready to be taught on Blackboard. 

Neither the University Senate, which met on May 5, nor representatives of the Kean Federation of Teachers who were also in the Senate meeting, were consulted about this new plan. The Senate said it will send a letter to Dr. Bousquet asking for details. 

One big question is whether or not this means Kean courses — if online in the fall — will be live with virtual class meeting times as they are being conducted now, or will be asynchronous, which is how Kean Online has been structured traditionally. 

Asynchronous courses are packaged in advance of the semester with strictly standardized features such as discussion boards and assignments that can be used repeatedly. According to some in the May 5 Senate meeting, Blackboard also allows the administration to “pop into” courses to check on faculty as some professors said is done in many for-profit online colleges. 

“The School of Online Education will continue to provide faculty with examples, technical support, and training to achieve certification,” Bousquet said in her April email. “Only those so certified will be assigned teaching responsibility for Fall 2020 courses. We must be prepared to offer courses on a single platform – Blackboard – using a uniform pedagogy for course delivery.”

In order to transition regular courses to online, each course would need to be organized in units with specific learning outcomes and assessments, Bousquet said.

“Your course must conform with the approved course outline and learning outcomes,” Bousquet said. “You can improve each course further with your creative capabilities, your experience, and your knowledge of the subject matter.”

Members of the University Senate have been discussing the changes with summer sessions since their April 21 meeting and some of the concerns they had with the guidelines, such as connectivity problems in Blackboard, the possibility of unqualified adjuncts teaching upper-level classes and students not being able to graduate when they planned because of the lower course offerings.

Senate members on April 21 also expressed confusion over the process of getting Blackboard-certified and converting their courses to fit within the stricter guidelines.

Stephen Kubow, PhD., of the Division of Academic Affairs, attended the April 21 University Senate meeting to provide clarity on Kean’s decision. He said that because professors had been using a variety of video-conferencing platforms to teach a class during the spring semester, such as Zoom, Google Meet, and Blackboard Collaborate, the university decided to streamline all courses through Blackboard to give students more consistency.

“If we have one system that everyone’s using, it makes it easier for students to access,” Kubow said.

The online classes offered this summer fall into two categories, according to Kubow. The first category includes classes that were previously approved with the School of Online Learning and have “ON” in their course number. The second category includes ones that are newly being transitioned into fully online classes and would have “ION” in their course numbers, Kubow said.

Professors teaching in the summer are required to be Blackboard-certified so they’re familiar with the technology beforehand, Kubow said. He also said that standardizing one system could combat any potential accreditation issues for the university.

“The problem with using all these other systems is there is no permanent record that’s documented for the university,” Kubow said. “Should an accreditor ever come and want to make sure you have the appropriate amount of meeting times or that there was appropriate content, we have no way of doing that when you’re using some of these other systems.”

Because the two sessions will be fully online learning rather than remote learning, the university won’t be capable of offering all the classes it has in the past.

Jess Iacona, a senior Kean student, pushed back her graduation date from May to August 2020 so she could retake a physics lab course over the summer and give her GPA a boost before applying to graduate schools. When she went to register, she discovered that the course she needed was not going to be offered.

“I changed my degree date from May 2020 to August 2020 to accommodate this,” Iacona said. “Summer was my only opportunity to take this course and it is now not offered, so I have no way to strengthen my application which lowers my chances of getting accepted to the school of my dreams.”

There will be six four-day Blackboard certification sessions offered by the School of Online Learning from May to September, according to the School of Online Learning’s page, but getting certified in time to teach over the summer still may not be feasible for some professors. The first two certification sessions fall during the last two weeks of the spring semester when professors are conducting finals, and the next available certification course doesn’t begin until Summer Session 1 is already in progress.

Professor Christopher Lynch, Ph.D., an associate professor in the School of Communication, Media and Journalism, said he won’t be able to teach a summer course he’s taught for the past 25 years because he wants all his attention to be on his students during finals and not on the Kean certification course.

“The thing is, I want to give my spring semester students the time and focus they need rather than going into another training during what’s still the spring session,” Lynch said.

Lynch said he’s been using Blackboard in his spring classes and has learned a lot of new information about the system by attending national Blackboard meetings and training led by Vanessa Avila from Computer and Information Services. However, the school won’t allow him to teach until he completes the School of Online Learning’s training.

Apart from not being able to teach the first summer session, Lynch said he is also worried about how students will react to a fully online education rather than the remote learning practices they’ve experienced in the spring semester.

“I’m just concerned that students prefer face to face for the most part,” Lynch said. “I think they can tolerate remote learning because at least there’s interaction live with the professor and the classmates. I think if we make the jump to exclusively online learning, knowing the nature of some of our students, they’re going to miss that interaction and they’re gonna get lost along the way.”

Lynch said he sees the value of establishing a norm for online teaching at Kean, but also fears that too rigid a structure will diminish creativity.

“I can appreciate how we need to standardize for the students so that everybody is following the same direction,” Lynch said. “But at the same time, there needs to be flexibility within the standards.”

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