The semester is over. Some thoughts...

• Turnitin.com definitely was the winner over Blackboard's built-in system in terms of being the most helpful plagiarism tool. I turned off the option that checks student papers against other student papers in Turnitin's database, so the program was NOT making a copy of student papers, so the privacy issue was solved. As a tool, Turnitin did a pretty good job of spotting when students used outside source material. It might not have caught all of the direct quotations in a student paper, but it did catch most. Often, it would catch "paraphrases" that were more like direct quotations, and the student could then use this material to re-write the paraphrase before submitting the final draft for grading.
  
• I made two film changes in my Masterpieces of the Cinema class. I removed Jules and Jim and Lost in La Mancha. I was sad to see Lost in La Mancha go because it was our one documentary of the semester, and it did a great job of demonstrating how collaborative film is as an art. However, it really is not on the level of a "Masterpiece" so I decided to remove it. I replaced these films with The Night of the Hunter and Bicycle Thieves. Both films proved very popular with students.
• We covered a lot of poems in the first online version of Introduction to Poetry, and for the first time, I made heavy use of podcasts to supplement the learning modules. We might have tried to cover too many poems, however, and I think the discussion posts suffered as a result. I'll be modifying the syllabus significantly and changing the way students do the postings in class. I might also experiment with CommentPress.