A fresh new voice!

Northwest Mississippi Community College students LaFabian Conley of Senatobia and Emily Wilson of Independence watch a presentation for class downloaded from Northwest's iTunes University content on Conley's iPhone.  (Photo by Brittany Greer)

Northwest’s eLearning Gets a Major Upgrade

August 6, 2010

By Brittany Greer

For The Observer

Northwest Mississippi Community College’s eLearning Division has added several new features that will allow students to better interact with instructors and classmates, according to Phyllis Johnson, dean of eLearning.

These features include Blackboard 9.1, Pronto and iTunes University. The current eLearning tool—Blackboard—is getting an upgrade, according to Johnson.

Blackboard is a web-based course management system designed to allow students and faculty to participate in on-line classes. Blackboard enables instructors to provide

students with course materials, discussion boards, virtual chat, online quizzes, an

academic resource center and more.

“The new Blackboard 9.1 features YouTube integration for instructors, personal journals, wikis, blogs, video clips and audio clips,” said Johnson. “Instructors can use these features in any way that best works for their particular class. The features can either be made public or kept private.”

Johnson said a new feature to eLearning is Pronto, which is an instant messaging and video chat tool that allows students and instructors to spontaneously meet live on-line at any time to discuss their coursework. Pronto works with Blackboard to automatically populate students’ contact lists with their classmates’ names, thereby making it easy for students to collaborate live online.

“Pronto allows instructors the ability to instantly communicate with students by either sharing their screen and working through a problem, speaking with them through a microphone, or by using a white board that allows the instructor to do live demonstrations,” said Johnson.

“This program brings online classes in line with regular classes. Instructors now have the advantage of showing students how to do different things,” she said.

Information on how to correctly use Pronto will be available on the eLearning website this fall.

Another new campus-wide feature is iTunes University. The program, which launched in the spring, gives students access to lectures, presentations, readings, videos and podcasts produced by instructors. Students are able to download the material to their Mac or PC, iPhone, iPod or iPad, allowing the material to be viewed at any time in any place.

“iTunes University is a good study tool for students because they have access to lectures and other materials,” said Johnson. “We hope to continue to build the number of instructors that we have who are using iTunes University. This is a great interactive tool for students.”

To access Northwest’s iTunes University, visit: www.northwestms.edu/media/itunes.html.

“Our goal with eLearning is to reach all learning styles—visual, auditory and

kinesthetic—with our online classes, and this new technology incorporated in our on-line classes is helping us to achieve that,” said Johnson.

For more information about online classes through the college’s eLearning Division,

visit  www.northwestms.edu/elearning/elearninghome.html or call 662-562-3317.