BlitzMail dominates campus communication --and, as Director of Academic Computing Malcolm Brown pointed out, it is also the most popular form of online faculty-student communication. Recently, however, more classes have taken advantages of other chat clients to facilitate discussion through services such as Blackboard.
This term roughly 160 of approximately 400 classes are using Blackboard. Last spring only 120 classes utilized Blackboard and as recently as Fall 2002, only 75 courses used the website.
History professor Pamela Crossley uses a real-time chat client called "Fire" to communicate with her class. She favors the "Fire" program because it is simultaneously compatible with messenger services such as AIM and Microsoft Messenger, and also uses it to host online office hours.
Crossley said that she decided to use Fire because of its convenience.
"It is something that I can do in the evenings and during midweek," she said. "Students can get a hold of me easily this way, even if they can't make it to my actual office hours."
Professor Crossley explained that she began using her program before the advent of Blackboard. When Blackboard was finally introduced, Crossley saw no reason to switch over because she had her software customized to her liking.
Although online chat discussion is virtual, Crossley said that it has a concrete impact on her class.
Online discussion "has the advantage of generating a transcript," she said. "If something comes up relevant to the whole class, I can edit it and send its relevant parts out to everyone."
Crossley, however, indicated that she would not consider dropping in person discussion sections in favor of using a chatroom because students "need to see each other face to face in discussion."
History professor Allen Koop '65 also uses online discussion tools. He has used both Blackboard and other clients for class interaction. His History 36 and 53 classes are using an online forum as a free-form continuous discussion so that students can say anything they want at anytime about course material.
Although chat clients are clearly important tools in Professor Crossley and Koop's classes, Dartmouth is not exactly a mecca of virtual class discussion just yet.
Brown indicated that one of Blackboard's discussion features, Virtual Classroom -- a chat room similar to that of America Online -- has not been that popular of a Blackboard tool to date.
According to Brown, even though it is not as popular as Blitz, the Virtual Classroom offers better tools to facilitate discussion.
"It is more than just for sending text messages," he said. "I believe the virtual chat room allows for 'Interactive Whiteboard' -- where chat room participants can scribble things on a 'blackboard' for other users to see."
The only real drawback that Brown sees in the Virtual Classroom system is that "there is a lack of visual clues as to who is talking to who" which makes it difficult to facilitate an effective discussion.
"If you do a discussion session for 15 people and interactive chat may be not the best way to do it," he said.
Jeff Bohrer of Academic Computing said that Virtual Classroom is one of the least utilized Blackboard tools because Dartmouth's campus is of manageable size and lack of long distance commuters.
"One of the reasons that I don't think that it gets much use is because there are no true distance courses," he said. "Al l the courses are located in the same place -- all the students, faculty and resources are too. The need to use the Virtual Classroom to deliver a course is minimal as compared to larger institutions."
Elisabeth Sherman '06 is in a class that uses the discussion board on Blackboard.
She said that her professor indicated on the first day of class that there would be a board to post questions to the professor, teaching assistants and fellow classrooms.
"It is very simple to follow the topic, who is addressing who and who is speaking," she said. "The board is very helpful."
