Enhancing students' engagement on using Blackboard as an online learning community tool in Clinical Biochemistry

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Background and aim of the study: Proper online students'/teacher communication and awareness of the use of Blackboard as an online learning community could result in the improvement of student academic achievement. So, the aim of the current project was directed to encourage students and faculty for using Blackboard as an online learning community tool. Moreover, it aimed to measures their perceptions. Subjects and Methods: The study was directed to the second year Medical students during teaching of Clinical Biochemistry. We started by pre-implementation survey, followed by orientation workshop, engaging students for Blackboard implementation then ended in post-implementation survey to evaluate how come students are engaged and satisfied. Results: The first questionnaire group indicated the students' perceptions of Blackboard use and usefulness as an online learning community tool. The second questionnaire group was related to the Interest & Enjoyment of using Backboard. While Blackboard Tools are presented in the third questionnaire questions group. The comparison regarding the total perception of the three groups of the questionnaire between pre-implementation versus post-implementation survey results showed significant improvement of students' perception in the post-implementation phase. By correlating grades in Clinical Biochemistry and total GPA to the questionnaire groups, total perceptions showed a non-significant correlation between all studied parameters in the pre-implementation phase while significant positive correlations were detected in the post-implementation phase. Conclusion: Based on the presented second-year medical students' perception and satisfaction, we could confirm that the Blackboard online platform is a very successful online line learning community tool. Blackboard together with face to face classroom-based learning methods helps students for better learning achievement. Moreover, the online learning community is considered a complementary tool to that of classroom-based learning as it facilitates students/students and students'/faculty communication and minimizes the time required for physical contacts.