Interaction is a major component of online education at UA Little Rock, and there are many ways in which you can communicate with your instructor and fellow students in Blackboard.
- Blackboard Messages
- Blackboard Email
- Discussions and Blogs
- Video Conferencing Tools
Contacting Your Instructor
It’s important to understand your instructor’s preference for being contacted as you begin each course. Do they prefer to be emailed through the Blackboard messages tool or their UA Little Rock email address? Are there other ways they prefer to be contacted or specific instructions about how to interact with others in the course? This should be detailed in the syllabus for your course, so check there to make sure you’re using the correct method of contact.
Discussions, Blogs, and More
Interaction within your online course can take many forms, and you may encounter a number of communication tools within Blackboard to complete your course work:
- Discussions: commonly used to facilitate interaction between students, promote conversation about the topics covered in the course, and foster a sense of community in the online environment.
- Blogs: entries posted to individual or class blogs are not threaded like posts in a discussion forum, but students can still comment on each other’s work.
- Journals: like Blogs, entries are posted in, but Journals are often private between the student and instructor
- Wikis: collaborative articles are edited as a group effort among your classmates in the wiki tool.
Video Conferencing
There are a number of conferencing platforms that could be used as part of your course work, but the following are officially supported by UA Little Rock:
You can find more information about Blackboard Collaborate Ultra on blackboard.com, and you can reach out to UA Little Rock Blackboard Student Support if you need assistance.