Upgrades change look of VSpace

April 16, 2007 —

VSpace has undergone a number of aesthetic and functional changes recently, including the addition of the Blogger tool and an overhaul of some of the site's menus. These upgrades are a prelude to even more enhancements and adjustments that are in the works.

Online Teaching and Learning Coordinator Dan Tyger is responsible for monitoring the development and implementation of new features in VSpace. He and his staff have been working for some time on improving the usability of Blackboard's replacement, and he acknowledges students' frustration with having to use two learning systems.

"We know that the students are really annoyed. They're annoyed with having to go to BlackBoard with some stuff and VSpace for other stuff."

In the meantime, Tyger hopes students and instructors will look into some new features coming to VSpace. One such feature is the upcoming addition of a podcasting tool, which will allow VSpace instructors to record their own podcast and host it on VSpace, much like any other resource. Students would then be able to download the mp3 and play it with their own "podcatching" software.

Tyger hopes that instructors will take advantage of the new feature.

"Students won't get to benefit from them until people start making them, or linking to them," he said.

Another upcoming feature is the addition of a Blackboard conversion tool, which will allow instructors and advisors to save Blackboard courses as an archive, then import files, links and documents from Blackboard into their VSpace resources folder.

"This is really important to a lot of people here at SVSU," Tyger said. "What we're going to have this do, is when a teacher comes in here, they can actually browse, and go get a Blackboard archive."

The convenience upgrade comes at a time when more and more courses are switching to the open-source online learning environment. Tyger says that this semester marked a tipping point: more sections are now using VSpace than its proprietary counterpart.

"We've tipped the seesaw," Tyger said. "More academic courses are now in VSpace than are in Blackboard. I think the stats are something like 450 in VSpace and 420 in Blackboard."

The eventual transition to VSpace has been mandated by Academic Affairs. The College of Education and the College of Science, Engineering and Technology were the first to migrate from Blackboard, although the other programs will soon follow.

"I just met with the College of Business and Management last week, and I trained 12 of them. I have a whole bunch of them moving over to VSpace," Tyger said.

ITS plans to discontinue the use of Blackboard by the end of next Winter.

"May 2008, we pull the plug on Blackboard."