Catalyst Awards Blog Series: Back in Black, or the story of how we launched Blackboard Learn Ultra – after just launching Moodle a year before

The Catalyst Awards program recognizes innovation and excellence in our global community of practice. In this blog series, a selection of 2022 award-winning institutions from across the globe share their success stories and best practices. 

This post was guest authored by Elisabeth Sandow, head of learning management systems at Galileo Global Education Germany GmbH. 

Galileo Global Education & Macromedia GmbH is a 2022 Catalyst Award winner in the Leading Change category. 

It was a completely normal Sunday evening, two days before we launched Blackboard® Learn for almost 5,000 students, about 1,000 instructors, and 400 people in administration. We had a working REST API, we had the courses, and people were enrolled. And my heart was racing, because WHAT IF THE STUDENTS DID NOT GO INTO THE ONLINE SESSIONS IN BLACKBOARD LEARN?!???

Thank you, brain.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Macromedia School of Applied Sciences was a school completely focused on onsite studies. We had eight campuses in eight cities throughout Germany and a Moodle instance that nobody ever used. Remember, back in the day not everybody had a Zoom account or even knew what that was. We had Microsoft Teams, but that was it.

Then again, we had one advantage: in October 2019, Macromedia launched several study programs that were completely online, the Macromedia Online. The program was shut down in May 2020, but the knowledge was there. So, within the span of four months we launched a new Moodle instance with Teams as the extended learning environment, though we already knew that this was not enough.

Not only that, but we had also made everybody use Moodle and Teams – and then came along singing the praises of a completely different solution. Yeah, everybody believed that was a great idea.

The system was working, and all the decision makers were not too happy to put resources into a project that they thought they had just finished. But with the Galileo Global Education Group having our backs, we were able to convince them. It was obvious that having just one system for storing content, having online sessions, and a lot of options to make online learning more interactive was the better solution. They gave us almost 11 months to implement Blackboard Learn Ultra.

Good thing we did nothing else because of the pandemic, which was also the reason we were doing the project in the first place. It gave us time to do what the award we won is called: “Leading Change”.

So, what was important to make the project – the MOVE2BB – successful? How did we tackle the change?

1. Have the best team possible

I am talking about “us,” but who is us? At first it was me and half the workforce of Monika Felder, plus my student employee Leon Herrmann with 10 hours a week. By the start of the MOVE2BB in April 2021 Tara Assadi joined the team, which added another 20 hours to our overflowing workforce. And right in the thick of it we threw in Phil Müller when he came to work full time for the team in January 2022. And somehow these wonderful people created the best team an inexperienced leader like me could hope for. We became the Guardians of the LMS (now in stores with fun desk jobs and laptops!). Each new member was welcomed, not just because we were desperately overworked, but also because we all felt like a part of something bigger, and that our team was about to change the way students learned and teachers taught at Macromedia.

2. Know your system

You are probably the only one in your organization who knows every nook and cranny, every feature, and all the buttons. And if you don’t, you will find a solution. My advice is to learn everything there is to learn about what Blackboard Learn can and cannot do. Study the Help website on a lazy Sunday afternoon and think about how to use it when you buy some bread. Because you never know what will be asked of a learning management system.

Nobody cares that you can put a pretty picture here or integrate a LTI that nobody ever uses. What they want to know is if you can serve their processes and make those processes happen. Of course, they never know all their needs, so it is also your task to anticipate them. At this point all our knowledge about Blackboard Learn and the university paid off.

3. Know the processes and the people living them

To know your stakeholders is a no brainer for every project manager. Still, a university has its own ecosystem. People within that ecosystem live with the ebb and flow of semesters and examination periods. Since we knew all the stakeholders from basically doing the same project before, we were lucky. They are the ones who actually know how a university works. And we knew our system well from the project before that. These were the main reasons we were able to move on so quickly.

When administrative staff was awkwardly trying to explain their processes, we would know what questions to ask. When people asked us if Blackboard Learn was stable, we could confidently say: yes, it is, we did this before.

4. Know the didactics

You are not just tech. You are actually less IT than your IT peers would like. Between IT and the university there is a gray area, in which we found ourselves. There I had to translate and interpret the highly academic didactics into a design for Blackboard Learn Ultra. So, you break down 80 pages of intensive research and strong coherent arguments to “Okay, so there are centralized and de-centralized courses”. But it was the long (and late) conversations with the actual academics that really let us understand how to transform these theoretical concepts into a working learning platform.

I would always explain the study and teaching experience of our Blackboard Learn instance as the embodiment of the didactical concept called “mPower”. Using this concept, the university determined that all courses have one person responsible, have one central online lecture if it is taught at more than one campus, and have decentralized courses for additional content at each campus or in each session.

The fact that we worked from the academic ideas and not our own made all the difference for the people accepting the MOVE2BB transition. It wasn’t about a great technical or even didactical idea that we had, but about making the didactics a reality. What would a “holistic learning environment” look like? To understand this was the key to actively working together with the stakeholders, and to making Blackboard Learn into their Blackboard Learn. As soon as they found their ideas realized there, they liked it. (I’m confident the love will grow with each passing semester.)

5. Tell everybody everything – rinse and repeat

Change is no fun when you are not the one in the driver’s seat.

Back then, our instructors barely had a grip on how to teach online, how to use the tools, how to get their students’ attention, and were trying to understand why nobody turned on their camera. We didn’t have the heart to tell them that all their students were texting and doing God knows what. But we told them everything else we knew.

The people we tried to reach - the instructors - are no techies. Their job is to teach. To switch from offline to online and then switch again to a whole new set up was not their idea or their job.

And how would they know Blackboard Learn without anybody teaching them?

That was rhetorical. They wouldn’t.

So we trained them. With a training series, from Introduction to Blackboard Learn to Course Building Advanced to daily office hours to answer all their questions. Even before that we started a Q&A series where they could ask the question they all had: Why, just why, did we have to move to yet another system?

The training used up half our time and resources. We used 20 different methods to train the teachers, students, and administrative staff. We had live training sessions, recordings, a dedicated Team within Microsoft Teams for all the instructions, individual meetings, and held hands for nationwide online lectures. We were there to help. That was probably the most important argument for this project and the acceptance we ultimately experienced.

6. Make it fun, be kind, and explain

I learned that I could be a very patient person in these days (or just very tired). We explained it all, again and again, until we were so tired and exhausted that we would become silly in the trainings. We put pictures of funny cats and alpacas in the test courses. We forgot how to make square brackets. We asked each other the most obvious questions (Pray tell, just how would one upload a file here?) and had all our test users modeled after the Avengers, with their comic book pictures and everything. Tony Stark aka Iron Man is a very good instructor, let me tell you.

Furthermore, we answered each and every question. The fifty-third instructor asks how to start Collaborate? Nobody read the instructions? People do not know what a browser is? You will answer them nicely and helpfully. You will send them the instructions again. And the next day, in the office hours at 8 a.m., you will do it all again.

Ask anybody in the team at 3 a.m. after a great party what the first steps are to make a course in BBLU appealing and they will explain it. (Please do not actually call us, we are busy!)

7. Party like you don’t have to do support tomorrow!

We launched on a Tuesday and didn’t party until Friday. By then we realized that it maybe had actually worked. So we had a little online party, a meeting called “Supervised Drinking.”

Every team member got a parcel for that, which included the first Iron Man movie, a funny hat, streamers and sparklers, chocolate, peanuts, and a drink. It was the time of cool packages sent out to people and until this point no team member except me had ever seen any other member in person. To party online was not even strange anymore. Still, we did it all, including an absolutely epic toast by me while firing up those sparklers.

We needed that. A moment where one realizes that the job is done, and the project has found its end.

8. Get feedback

Sure, we talk to instructors, the administration, and students. When they have a problem.

But what do people think of Blackboard Learn Ultra in general? And what do they expect from us? More instructions? More office hours? Well, we asked them. How the transition was working for them. What problems they were facing.

The results from this evaluation were no surprise and so very important at the same time. It gave us an insight into what was still a challenge for users and what they wanted more of. Taking into account the experience we have had since then, what they want is mostly for us to be there for all their questions. They want to be supported all the way.

For more information on the program, visit Catalyst Awards. Learn more about our 2022 Catalyst Award winners and their stories.