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Jonathan Smith, Software Architect, Northwestern University

Bboogle Teams: Supporting Small Group Communications through Google Apps Integration with the Blackboard Learn Platform. Jonathan Smith, Software Architect, Northwestern University Patricia Goldweic , Sr. Software Engineer, Northwestern Universi ty. Project Members. Software Development

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Jonathan Smith, Software Architect, Northwestern University

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  1. Bboogle Teams: Supporting Small Group Communications through Google Apps Integration with the Blackboard Learn Platform Jonathan Smith, Software Architect, Northwestern University Patricia Goldweic, Sr. Software Engineer, Northwestern University

  2. Project Members • Software Development • Jonathan Smith (Software Architect) • Patricia Goldweic (Senior Software Engineer) • Blackboard Support • James Altman (Manager, Faculty Support Services) • Brian Nielsen (Project Manager, Faculty Initiatives)

  3. Overview • What is Bboogle? • What is Bboogle Teams? • Examples of Usage • Teams in the classroom • Demo • Teams concepts • Integration with Bb Learn and Synchronization with Bb groups • Teams tools • Architecture • Roadmap

  4. What is Bboogle? A Bb plugin that provides Google Apps Integration by providing: • Instructor tools to create links in Bb course sites to Google Documents, Sites and Calendars • Automatic adjustment of permissions in Google Apps so that instructors and students can collaborate • Integration with Google SSO so that no second logins are required for Bb users • (optional) Automated Google Apps user provisioning

  5. What is Bboogle Teams? • Bboogle Teams allows a class to be divided into smaller groups (teams) • Features: • Each team gets its own Google Documents Collection, Site and Calendar • Provides instructors and students easy access to each team’s content • Automatically adjusts content permissions based on team memberships • Supports division of larger communities such as a cohort of students in a specific program

  6. Examples of Usage • An engineering class where students work together on a team project • A history class where student teams work with Google Docs and Sites using primary sources • A journalism class where students collaborate on a research project with practicing journalists

  7. Teams in the classroom • Teams may be fluid (students may move from one group to another) • May be time-constrained (e.g. a team’s project is due at a specific date) or may have a start date in the future • Might be set up through a deliberate process, or just random assignment

  8. Teams Beyond a Classroom • A collaborative site for a research project so as to promote undergraduate involvement in research • Longer lasting interest groups collaboration around sub-disciplines and to support research areas. • A collaborative space for a cohort of students in a specific academic program.

  9. Teams Course Tool

  10. Sample Team Site

  11. Sample Team Site Template

  12. Bboogle Teams Concepts • A Bboogle Teams community may encompass a course or academic program, a cohort, etc. • A Bboogle Teams breakout partitions a community into a set of disjoint teams, which can be time-constrained. • A Bboogle Teams team corresponds to a particular group of people within a given breakout. • Each Bboogle Teams community and each individual team is associated to a Google Apps group.

  13. Integration with Bb Learn and Synchronization with Bb groups • One or more Bb courses can be mapped to a particular Bboogle Teams community • Within a Bb course, a group set can be mapped to a particular Bboogle Teams breakout • A given Bb group set can be (re) synchronized with its mapped breakout, thus updating the team assignments according to the Bb group assignments.

  14. Bboogle Teams Tools • A course tool provides instructors and students with easy access to their teams’ content. • A tool exposes the Blackboard groups integration. It allows instructors to: • Connect a Bb course to a Bboogle Teams community • Map a Bb group set to a Bboogle Teams breakout • Choose the Google Apps group names for each of the teams mapped to the Bb groups in the set • Choose a Google Site Template to be used for all teams in the breakout • (Re) Synchronize a given Bb group set with its mapped breakout

  15. Bboogle Teams Tools • A course control panel tool (under construction) provides an easy to use team assignments viewer/editor • Supports the creation/editing of teams, breakouts and communities • Allows the re-assignment of team members (movements between teams, etc.) • Allows the incorporation of external users to the community (identified by a Google email address)

  16. Bboogle Teams Architecture

  17. How Bboogle Teams Extends Bboogle’s Architecture • Bboogle uses the Gint (Google Integration web service) service to mediate all the Google-related requests • Teams adds an additional, higher-level service to Bboogle • The Teams service maintains its own database for storage and interacts with Google Services via the Gint service • Examples of Teams service requests by the building block: • Verifying that the current user belongs to a certain team • Ensuring that a course’s instructor owns the community mapped to the course • Synchronizing a Bb group set with its mapped breakout

  18. Bboogle Teams Architecture: the Teams web service • Uses the Java persistence framework to store relevant data structures: • Users • Communities • Breakouts • Teams • Team assignments • Is a RESTFUL web service which in turn uses the Gint web service

  19. Bboogle Teams Architecture: the expanded Gint service • Uses a relational database for storage coupled with the Java persistence framework. • Easy to hook up to different RDBMS systems • Can use embedded or external database, including Blackboard’s own • Keeps track of request executions in a new table, including logging information • Is able to schedule execution of requests (as it implements time-constrained breakouts)

  20. Bboogle Roadmap • Bboogle release that uses part of the expanded Gint service (relational db-based) created for Teams • Blackboard contributes to the open source project with a release that simplifies installation • Northwestern University continues piloting the Teams tools + integration with Bb groups • Bboogle Teams gets integrated into Bboogle building block • Later (possible) improvements: • Support for primary/secondary Google domains • Tool/user interface improvements • Support for multiple first class Google domains

  21. Bboogle Contacts • Bboogle is hosted at the Oscelot projects site http://projects.oscelot.org/gf/project/bboogle • The Subversion repository can be found at https://source.at.northwestern.edu/svn/os/bb-gint • You can contact us for more details at: • pgoldweic@northwestern.edu • b-nielsen@northwestern.edu

  22. Please provide feedback for this session by emailingDevConFeedback@blackboard.com. The title of this session is: Bboogle Teams: Supporting Small Group Communications through Google Apps Integration with the Bb Learn Platform

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