I incorporate an on-line suite of tools/resources from the publishers of the textbooks I use (McGraw-Hill and Pearson) and these integrate pretty well with Blackboard, which is the LMS supported by the colleges where I teach. I have found that there are many more resources available in these publisher packages than the students have time to use and, unless I require them to use particular options and assign points for them, a majority of the students don’t take advantage of these options.
Frankly, I haven’t learned all of the intricacies yet for the existing packages that I’m already using and I don’t fully utilize what’s available there because I don’t want to overwhelm my students. Therefore, I don’t feel the urgency to learn some new systems and add just that much more on to my students’ workloads. What I would really like is a way to help the students master the material with less, not more, time commitment on their parts as well as my own. Unfortunately, it seems that introducing too many new types of tasks, in addition to the ones I use with the publisher suite and the Blackboard LMS, may be counter-productive.
I enjoy technology but I don’t want to add more technology to my classes just for technology’s sake. I’m trying to narrow down what I throw at my students so that they find it manageable and stay with the course and, ultimately, succeed. I want to make my classes interesting to the students (as interesting as accounting can be) and I’m open to new ideas but I’m not ready to throw out the baby with bathwater and any changes I make will be done slowly to see what is a real improvement and what isn’t.
