Interactive E-Learning: Here’s What Holds You Back

A New Chapter for Our Moodle-Based SaaS Product

We recently announced our strategic decision to exit the Moodle Certified Partner Program, and restated our fervent commitment to continue to provide clients with the most mature and stable Moodle-based Software as a Service (SaaS) product in the market and continue to support the Moodle project. With this change, we will accelerate investment and development of our SaaS Moodle-based product and continue driving innovation for the Moodle community.

Our decision to leave the Moodle Certified Partner Program does not affect in any way our unwavering support of open source and open standards. We have a very strong admiration for Moodle Pty and its contributions to education and the open-source community.

SaaS as a Differentiator

We are committed to providing our clients with the best possible Saas Moodle-based product on the market. Our Moodle-based SaaS product, introduced in 2008, is now available in Amazon Web Services (AWS) regions around the world. This supports our ability to better focus on further optimizing and expanding our market-leading SaaS operations and support.

Strong Growth

We are a major player in the open-source community with more than 1,000 clients using our Moodle-based product and 20 percent of them have joined in the last year with a growing pipeline. We are adding more than one new client per business day, largely driven by the market’s move to SaaS and our product being the most mature and stable in the market. Accelerating investment in this area will ensure we continue to provide our growing client base with the best possible tools to help solve their most pressing challenges in their organizations and institutions today and into the future.

Continued Investment

We are accelerating investment in important functionality, such as better support of IMS Global standards, enhanced in-product help and support features, continued focus on universal access and deeper integrations with critical third-party partners.

Improved Integration

We are also focused on providing clients with a deeply integrated EdTech platform. In addition to the hundreds of third-party certified plugins we support, we have delivered new tools to the open-source community including our accessibility checker Blackboard Ally and our plagiarism detector SafeAssign. We will continue to focus on bringing new capabilities, services and products to the Moodle community, enhancing the learning experience.

 What This Means for the Open-Source Community

Exiting the Moodle Certified Partner Program will not have any impact on our support of the open-source community and there will be no change in our ability to utilize updates and enhancements from the community. Additionally, there will be no change in the current user experience for clients and no drop-off in our pace of innovation and development. We will continue to contribute code and features back to the Moodle community—and work to move the community forward together.

We will introduce a new name and branding for our Moodle-based SaaS product soon. The new branding will align with the overall Blackboard brand. We hope you will like it.

These investments in innovation and development will ensure that our Moodle-based SaaS product is closely aligned with our overall mission to deliver innovative teaching and learning solutions that meet the evolving needs of institutions and organizations around the world and we look forward to the future.

Please visit the Blackboard Community to join the conversation and share feedback.

 

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A New Chapter for Our Moodle-Based SaaS Product  original post at Blackboard Blog

Using Technology to Promote School Safety

School and district leaders are focused on the most effective ways to ensure a safe and secure learning environment for students and staff. They want and need to be able to secure their school campus and quickly communicate with the broader education community to include parents.

As each day seemingly brings new challenges, educators have unfortunately been forced to consider this issue at depth. At the same time, legislators continue to debate the security issue and school leaders are left to wonder, “What can we do nowto improve the safety and security of our schools?”

The broader debate sometimes leaves out one powerful supporting tool—technology. Technology has proven time and again to help solve today’s challenges, and the safety and security of a school is no exception. Today’s best security practices call for school-wide electronic access control and integrated video surveillance systems that are designed specifically for the education community.

Electronic Access Control

At its simplest, this is made up of electronic locks, card readers, and a central control mechanism. The configuration of these components enables administrators with dynamic options to secure specific access points or doors. Whether it’s an exterior door, hallway door, or school lab, special consideration for securing these areas should be made. The technology to provide electronic access control to schools has become more versatile, sophisticated, and user-friendly. So much so, that it’s now possible to be alerted to intrusions, remotely lockdown a school, and provide momentary unlocking capabilities all from a mobile device.

Video Surveillance

These systems provide the technology that enables real-time awareness and intelligence of what’s occurring at a school. While many schools already have video surveillance systems in place, when integrated with access control systems, these systems exponentially increase their utility. In emergency situations, time is of the essence. When security officials are trying to corroborate information during emergencies, “Is there an intruder? Where is the intruder? Do we need to lock down the building and alert authorities?” being able to take action from a single, integrated system, is critical.

Communicating Effectively with the School Community

As school leaders need to effectively engage and communicate with their school community, this too becomes a critical component to school safety and security. Technology has enabled more effective methods of communication and now empowers school leaders to take immediate, proactive action to stay ahead of any situation by sending voice notifications, text messages, email alerts and social media updates.

The safety and security of a school is one of today’s unfortunate challenges and technology designed specifically to meet these challenges exists today. School leaders must consider implementing effective, new, and integrated technology to ensure a safe and secure learning environment.

To learn more about Blackboard’s security solutions designed for education, please visit Blackboard School Safety.

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Use PowerPoint to Create Custom Videos

Empowering success around the world

As we begin our last day of BbWorld 2018, I want to share some reflections on our global impact and the work we do with clients around the world.

Every year more clients from around the world are making the journey to BbWorld to be a part of our growing global community. This year we welcomed over 200 international delegates from around the globe, including Brazil, Colombia, Chile, U.K., Poland, UAE, Korea, China, and Australia.

What’s been really exciting for me is to see how they are connecting with others and sharing their best practices and unique experiences with our education community at large. Helping to foster that sense of community is part of what excites me about my job at Blackboard. And I’m so proud that we continue to make a huge impact in partnership with our clients around the world as the largest EdTech company.

For the second year, we hosted a summit for the educational leaders from Latin America, with workshops, a dedicated keynote and a roadmap highlights session, all delivered in Spanish and translated in Portuguese.

We also celebrated the signing of the first Center of Excellence in the Russia, Middle East and Africa (RMEA) region through a partnership with the Higher Colleges of Technology (HCT), a client of Blackboard for almost two decades and the largest higher education institution in the UAE, with a community of 23,000 students and 2,000 staff based on 16 modern, technology-enhanced campuses.

I’m also thrilled to hear from our clients at BbWorld about the differences they’re making in the lives of students through our integrated, flexible EdTech platform.  And as a result, we are continuing to experience growth in all regions, from South America to the Middle East.

For instance, we recently celebrated our long-term partnerships in Australia with Griffith University, Southern Cross University, James Cook University and Charles Darwin University. The universities all leverage Blackboard Learn to empower students and teachers, and decided to extend their partnerships for an additional five years.

Our clients look to us as a guidepost to help them meet the needs of their students, not only with cutting-edge LMSs, but also with a comprehensive portfolio of solutions and services that will enable institutions to solve the most pressing challenges they are facing, including improving student outcomes, providing an outstanding educational experience on and off campus, and enhancing content accessibility.

We heard a lot of inspiring stories from our clients at BbWorld in the past few days, and here there are others from around the world.

In the U.K., we partnered with the University of Derby, an institution renowned for technology and innovation, with over 17,000 students enrolled in over 300 programs of study. They have always been at the forefront of accessibility, and it’s no surprise that they decided to deploy Blackboard Ally alongside Blackboard Learn to boost content accessibility. The implementation was done in record time and within a month the solution was fully live across the entire university. Results have been positive. Their overall accessibility score jumped four per cent and Ally is helping create a cohesive accessibility strategy across the university.

In Mexico, Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey (Tec de Monterrey), a leading private multi-campus university that recently moved to Ultra, is making intensive use of Blackboard Collaborate to virtually connect students from multiple campuses. A group of teachers launched the “Professor Avatar Project,” complementing Collaborate with real-time holographic projections and Telepresence Robots to project the instructor’s hologram in the middle of the classroom.

In Colombia, the Government in partnership with Blackboard has been providing access to job training using Blackboard Learn and Collaborate to help tens of thousands of people across the country boost their employability. Following the peace agreement, part of that effort now includes providing training opportunities to former guerrilla fighters.

In the Middle East, the Arab National Bank, a leading financial institution in Saudi Arabia, recently began using Blackboard Learn to deliver on-demand training for employees located across the country. They received the Blackboard Excellence in Training & Development Award for their innovative work.

We’re also bringing the campus ID to Apple devices. Duke University, University of Alabama, University of Oklahoma, Johns Hopkins University, Santa Clara University and Temple University will be among the first to pilot our mobile student credential to securely access buildings on campus. We look forward to expanding to other institutions.

I am really excited about the impact we are having around the world and the incredible work our clients are doing every day together with our teams. I’m looking forward to sharing even more success stories with you in the future.

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Introducing Blackboard Data: Accelerating Impact Through Education Insight

At Blackboard, we realize that the LMS is simply not enough. As we look forward to the digital learning environment of tomorrow, we see a future in which educators and students are provided with flexible solutions, a connected experience and the data-driven insights needed to respond to their core challenges. What this means is that we can no longer think of analytics as a thing that we add on. Instead, we need to think of analytics as an integral and embedded part of the education experience itself.

What is Blackboard Data?

Blackboard data is a unified, cross-portfolio data and reporting platform. Starting in 2019, Blackboard Data will begin rolling out as a core feature across our entire portfolio. It will give clients a single point of access to data from all of their current Blackboard product and service investments. It will also provide institutions with an engaging array of useful reports, surfacing insights about and between activity. Blackboard Data will be available to all Blackboard clients under their existing licensing agreement and will also serve as the future home for new analytics products.  It will leverage the power of the Blackboard portfolio to give our clients access to the knowledge they need in order to take the right action at the right time.

The way we think about analytics is pretty simple. Analytics is meaningless on its own. But when paired with the right needs, the right questions, and a good sense of what you can do with the answer, it becomes a powerful accelerator for human action and decision-making.

We are building Blackboard Data in direct response to feedback from our customers.  Over the past year, we have launched multiple surveys and hosted numerous design workshops that have strongly informed our analytics strategy. In order to create an environment that is rich, open, intentional, and actionable, we are investing even more into understanding the needs and experiences of customers around the globe.  The Blackboard Data Collaborative Program will bring together domain exports from within the Blackboard community to clearly define challenges and develop data-driven solutions. Each cohort will produce a public whitepaper documenting its outcomes while also directly informing Blackboard Data development efforts. If you are interested in joining one of our cohorts, please sign up via the Blackboard Analytics Community Site here.

A Strong History of Surfacing Data

Since 2011, we have developed market-leading solutions to complement the human decision-making process. With Blackboard Analytics for Learn, we are helping institutions to optimize their instructional practices and increase educational quality.  With Blackboard Intelligence, we are helping colleges and universities to eliminate structural barriers to student success and increase institutional performance. With Blackboard Predict, we are helping campuses to identify at-risk students increase coordination as part of an holistic approach to student success. With Blackboard Data, we will leverage the power of the Blackboard portfolio, expanding access to information and accelerating opportunities for action.  With Blackboard Data, we are building a flexible framework for delivering new features and products that will allow institutions to be agile in response to complexity and rapid change.

Starting in 2019, Blackboard Data will automatically be available for current Blackboard Learn SaaS and Ultra and Blackboard Collaborate Ultraclients. Integrations for other products in the Blackboard portfolio are planned.

For the latest news and opportunities to get involved, sign up for our newsletter and join the community today!

 

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Boosting Student and Institutional Success with Attendance Tracking

Tracking attendance is an ages-old problem that institutions around the world continue to face. Educators agree that there is a strong and positive correlation between time spent in the classroom and student success. Therefore, it should be no surprise that institutions around the globe must prove “seat time” to demonstrate academic integrity.

The relevance of tracking attendance is also highlighted in many regulations. For example, in the U.S., universities must prove seat time to earn and maintain accreditation, among other requirements, and publically funded institutions must prove seat time to secure federal financial aid. In the U.K., universities face pressure from student loan lenders to monitor attendance and decrease drop-out rates, a key metric in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) introduced by the Government. In Australia, tracking attendance for full-fee paying English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) students is a big issue. Student visas can be cancelled if attendance levels are not maintained at 80% or higher and the student can be deported.

While institutions want to associate attendance data with student performance and retention efforts, today’s attendance-tracking solutions do not scale, are mostly manual and consume valuable instruction time. Moreover, with today’s methods, universities do not have real-time access to attendance data across the campus to inform student progression and retention initiatives.

To help solve these challenges, Blackboard is bringing to market Blackboard Attendance, a scalable and flexible solution for tracking attendance that will free instructors’ time, reduce the administrative burden and make attendance data readily available across the institution. Announced At BbWorld 2018, Blackboard Attendance is planned to work across all instructional modalities (face-to-face, online, and hybrid) and all class sizes, with attendance data readily available to enable student progression and retention initiatives to drive student success.

To learn more about Blackboard’s planned Attendance solution and how it will help address your attendance challenges, watch this conceptual illustration:

* Statements regarding our product development initiatives, including new products and future product upgrades, updates or enhancements represent our current intentions, but may be modified, delayed or abandoned without prior notices and there is no assurance that such offering, upgrades, updates or functionality will become available unless and until they have been made generally available to our customers.

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Boosting Student and Institutional Success with Attendance Tracking original post at Blackboard Blog

How to be Successfull in the E-Learning Industry

It’s Time to Take Another Look at Learn Ultra

It’s no secret that the development of our next generation user interface for Blackboard Learn, what we call the Ultra experience, took way longer than we (and you) anticipated. But today, with the expansion of the number of SaaS clients, and our increased development of Ultra features, we’re now seeing increased momentum of clients enabling the Ultra experience.

A Little History

At BbWorld 2016 we announced that Learn with the Ultra experience was “available now” for pilot and limited production use. And while we had a few clients begin moving to Ultra then, most didn’t feel it was feature rich and robust enough to meet their needs.

Since that time, we stepped up our development efforts to make it more applicable to a wider set of clients. We also reached a regular cadence of monthly releases and increased the velocity of feature development to close the gap with the Original experience (also known as Learn 9.1).

And, we haven’t just been adding functionality to Ultra, but we’ve been refactoring features and workflows so they are better than before. Here’s what that means.

We set out to build Learn Ultra to be the most modern and efficient LMS on the market.  We do this every day by making each feature and capability in Ultra responsive, modern, and accessible. One thing that makes this possible is the design approach for Ultra. By using a layered interface for navigation, we were able to simplify workflows, reclaim more of the user interface for the task at hand, and improve the overall accessibility of each screen. This is what makes it Ultra.

But that isn’t enough. We also set out to improve upon each use case we introduce to Ultra that is in Original today. We do this by looking for ways to improve on good ideas and make them better. For example, with SafeAssign, we took the use case of plagiarism prevention and not only applied it to Assignments, just like in Original, but we also introduced it to essay questions in Tests. We are planning to introduce this originality checking to other free-form text areas like Discussions.

Finally, we are making Ultra different—different from Original and also different from other products we see in the market. For example, we are using our large, anonymized data set, and our data science team, to find new ways to provide insights to instructors and students right in their workflows where it can help them the most. No one else is able to do this at the same scale as Blackboard. We will continue to innovate in this area and also with our integrations to provide you and your campus capabilities that can be found nowhere else.

The Path to Ultra

The first step towards getting to the Ultra experience is to move to a SaaS deployment of Learn. We’ve achieved great momentum with clients moving to SaaS. 386 clients are in production and we have a growing pipeline of additional migrationsplannedthrough the end of the year.Wenow have Learn SaaS deployed on Amazon Web Services in the United States, Frankfurt, Sydney, Singapore and most recently China. This makes Learn SaaS—as well as the Ultra experience—available to a more global audience. We’ve seen growing interest from Europe, APAC, and Latin America, so the trend is expanding well beyond North America.

With the expansion of the number of SaaS clients, and our increased development of Ultra features, we’re now seeing an increase in clients enabling the Ultra experience. As of today, we have 61 clients who have turned on the Ultra experience and another 35 currently running their own pilots or involved in our Ultra Partnership Program. The growth is picking up dramatically and our summer Ultra cohort, a program that helps clients learn about and plan for the Ultra experience, has representation from 193 additional clients. (This, on top of the 117 we had in the spring cohort.) As the momentum has picked up, we’re also receiving lots of positive feedback on the design and workflows that the Ultra experience provides. Check out the perspective of Stetson University who enabled the Ultra Base Navigation last year.

Today, we’re excited to announce that the Educator Preview platform, our Learn Ultra trial site, is now the new CourseSites.  CourseSite enables instructors to deliver live courses using our latest technology, for free, and currently serves thousands of instructors and tens of thousands of students. What does this all mean? Well it means our “try before you buy” site for Ultra now allows you to teach live courses to truly give it a run for the money. In addition, Blackboard Collaborate, Blackboard Ally and our mobile apps are also available through CourseSites – providing educators with access to our comprehensive digital learning environment. Check out the new CourseSites here.

So, the bottom line here is, if you haven’t looked at Learn with the Ultra experience for a while, it’s time to take a fresh look. You’ll find many of the features you need—like Attendance, SafeAssign, Discussion Analysis, Institution Page, Conditional Availability, Copy Content from other courses, Audio / Video Feedback, and Cloud Storage Integration to name a few— are now ready for you.

Keep in mind, enabling the Ultra experience is not an all or nothing proposition. Because of the way we’ve built Ultra, youcan enable the Ultra Base Navigation and keep the same Original Courses your educators know and love. That way your students and educators can benefit from a modern, intuitive, and responsive environment, without their courses changing as seen at Stetson University. Ultra provides the flexibility to change at a pace that works best for your institution.  And if you haven’t made the move to SaaS yet, have your early adopters run a class in CourseSites. It’s free and we think you’ll like what you see.

Check it out today.

The post It’s Time to Take Another Look at Learn Ultra appeared first on Blackboard Blog.

It’s Time to Take Another Look at Learn Ultra original post at Blackboard Blog

Blackboard Trend Report: 7/13/2018

Looking to learn more about what’s trending in education? Here’s a recap of some of this week’s top education news. Let us know what you think about this week’s news in the comments below.

Mixing and Matching Cal State Online Courses – Free
Inside Higher Ed
Many institutions allow residential students to dabble in online courses as they work through their schedule of face-to-face classes. The California State University System takes that offering one step further, presenting full-time students at all of the system’s 23 institutions with the option to enroll for free in one online course per semester at another Cal State institution.

How artificial intelligence is helping Pearson refocus assessment technology
EdScoop
…The company told EdScoop that it was refocusing its assessment technology from evaluating student input, or answers entered, to offering line-by-line feedback of a student’s entire solution process. The transition — which global head of product at Pearson, Tim Bozik, called a move from evaluating “what” a student’s answer is to “how” a student reached that answer — will involve implementing a new level of artificial intelligence into its product and service line.

A College Prices Its Online Programs 60% Less
Inside Higher Ed
Most institutions charge students the same or more for online programs than for face-to-face. Berklee has found success with a pricing model that favors online students.

How Do Institutions Select Student Success Technologies?
Encoura
…To help institutions make more informed decisions when choosing which student success technologies to implement, we established a partnership with LISTedTech, a firm that measures technology implementations at higher education institutions by mining external data sources. While the data cannot guarantee a 100% accuracy rate, it does allow us to answer questions such as: Which segments are popular? What products are institutions implementing the most? And, what are the technology trends in higher education?

Access Woes Persist for Students of Lesser Means
Inside Higher Ed
While institutions have focused on enrolling more high school graduates and seeing them through to commencement, new federal data suggest that students from lower socioeconomic classes still have trouble with access to higher education. According to a report released Thursday by the Center for American Progress, major gaps still exist in enrollment between students from wealthy, well-educated families and their more impoverished peers.

Nonprofit University Buys For-Profit College For Its Tech Platform
EdSurge
A company called UniversityNow—which attracted more than $40 million in venture backing and ran an experimental for-profit college—has been sold to the nonprofit National University system, which plans to use the company’s technology platform to deliver its online courses.

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Blackboard Trend Report: 7/13/2018 original post at Blackboard Blog

Combining Activity Data from Multiple Sources to Improve Student Success Predictions

In a study published today, researchers from Blackboard, University of Maryland Baltimore County, and VitalSource describe a joint project designed to test whether a predictive model of student achievement using IMS Caliper Analytics® (Caliper) events would benefit from combining data from multiple learning tools: Blackboard Learn and VitalSource. Their findings were incredibly promising:

1. Early activity in learning tools is a strong predictor of whether a student will pass a class
2. Patterns of activity differ significantly between courses
3. Learning activity data is a more powerful predictor of achievement than demographics and educational background
4. Combining data from multiple learning tools (like Blackboard Learn and VitalSource) improves the accuracy of predictions about student achievement
5. Students with high levels of activity in multiple learning tools can significantly increase their chances of successfully passing a class

Thanks to open learning analytics standards like IMS Caliper, vendors and institutions alike have the ability to more easily combine data from multiple sources in a way that can increase predictive accuracy and, hopefully, be used by institutions to positively impact course completion rates. Not only can combining data from multiple sources significantly increase the accuracy of predictive algorithms, but open standards can be leveraged to significantly reduce the cost of doing so. This joint research from Blackboard, VitalSource, and UMBC is a great proof of concept for the value of combining data through partnership. As adoption of the IMS Caliper standard increases, it is our hope that our work here might serve as a jumping off point for collaborative efforts by others in the future

Increasing the predictive accuracy of student achievement models is not valuable in and of itself. The value that an institution is able to derive from predictive analytics is, instead, a function of three factors:

1. The predictive accuracy of models that are deployed,
2. The cost of generating those predictive models, and
3. The effectiveness of the student support system that makes use of predictive analytics

We know from examples like Concordia University Wisconsin that it is possible for institutions with a mature advising model to increase student retention by as much as 10% using descriptive analytics alone. From our own research, and from the industry in general, we also find that the addition of predictive analytics to an already effective advising program and increase retention rates by an additional 1 – 3%.

Predictive analytics is an area where the perfect can be an enemy of the good.  Given the right conditions, we are able to create predictive models using LMS data alone that are more than 90% accurate, but fetishizing predictive accuracy can easily lead an institution to become distracted from investing time and energy into developing the high impact practices that are necessary to make a difference in student outcomes.

Realistically, any model that reliably predicts student achievement in a way that performs significantly better than chance will have a major impact when its results are used by the right people and institutional processes. Models maybe improved by considering data from sources outside of student information and learning management systems, but until recently the cost of integrating data from additional sources in order to achieve unknown, limited, or diminishing returns has been difficult for many institutions to justify

The widespread adoption of open learning analytics standards like IMS Caliper has the potential to change the accuracy-cost-practice equation.  By significantly decreasing the time and effort required to combine data from multiple sources into a single model, open standards decrease the cost of increased predictive accuracy and increase its relative value, particularly when used by mature advising and student success programs.

Download the full report here and read the press release here. For more information about how Blackboard can help you to use data and analytics to solve your core educational challenges, visit blackboard.com/analytics.

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Combining Activity Data from Multiple Sources to Improve Student Success Predictions original post at Blackboard Blog

Who to follow at #BbWorld18

Our team here at Blackboard is getting more and more social every year, and we will be tweeting like crazy for #BbWorld18.

We know you already follow @Blackboard and Bill Ballhaus (@BillBallhaus) for our biggest announcements, but the behind-the-scenes access is the best (and most fun) part of social media. Here are a handful of the top members of Team Blackboard on social that we recommend you follow to stay in the know about the latest trends in edtech and what we’re releasing at BbWorld.

Tim Tomlinson
Follow @timtomlinson

Tim is our Chief Product Officer and has been a leader in the LMS market for over a decade.  If he can’t answer your question, he’ll know how to find the person that can.  DevCon attendees won’t want to miss his opening keynote.  In addition to EdTech, expect to find healthy doses of Indiana Basketball and progressive political content in his feed throughout the year.

Scott Hurrey
Follow @shurrey

Scott’s favorite words are technical, geeky, and developer. Sound like you? Then you’re in for a treat. You’ll find Scott at DevCon and our roadmap sessions answering your questions about integrations, APIs, and upgrades.

 

Carey Smouse
Follow @CareySmouse

Carey is part of our Customer Success team, helping customers with adoption, change management, and faculty engagement. She loves to participate in Blackboard client programs, especially the Exemplary Course Program – and you’ll see this in her tweets! Carey is a busy mom to two boys and an adored Labradoodle, a coach’s wife, and loves to cook.

Marissa Dimino
Follow @diminom

Marissa is the face behind our Community Site. At BbWorld, you will find her at the Knowledge Bar, connecting and making sure customers get the help they need, and on Twitter you’ll also see her passion for photography and being a dog mom.

 

Allan Chirstie
Follow @ns_allanc

Allan is our VP of eLearning for the APAC region. He has been working in the educational technology area for over 30 years and his passion for its effective use in learning and teaching has not waned.

 

Vivek Ramgopal
Follow @tweetsbyvivek

Vivek is our go-to guy with insider info on all the BbWorld social events, swag, and FitBit challenges. This year he’ll be popping up around different spots in the convention hall as well as serving as the emcee for BbWorld Higher Ed LIVE. He also is the first to know about our new products and has access to behind the scenes info like none other.

 

Sheryn Anthes
Follow @SherynAnthes

Sheryn rejoined Blackboard this year, focused on managing various customer programs and helping to connect customers with each other to increase technology adoption. At BbWorld, you can find her at the Community Knowledge bar.

 

Timothy Hartfield
Follow @timothyharfield

Timothy is the Senior Product Marketing Manager of our Analytics team. He is passionate about #learninganalytics, big data, institutional success, and for fun—posting about his love for horses.

 

Steve Ostler
Follow @BbSteveo

As the Director of Product Marketing for Blackboard’s Community Engagement Solution, Steve geeks out when it comes to seeing how technology makes a difference in education. When he’s not presenting he’ll be tweeting insights from across BbWorld sessions. Follow @BbSteveo for ideas or just to chat – or to find out why everyone just calls him Steveo.

 

Lisa Clark
Follow @LisaC_BB

Lisa Clark has over 20 years in higher education currently serving as a Senior Client Manager for Global Strategic Accounts where she supports distance education initiatives for international universities. On Twitter, you’ll find her commenting on Blackboard programs such as the Exemplary Course Program, celebrating accomplishments of our amazing customers, and EdTech topics.

Ashley Hunsberger
Follow @aahunsberger

Ashley is a Quality Architect for Product Development. She’s fascinated by the hardest part of technology – humans! Follow her for insights into quality, testing, and her passion to improve experiences for underrepresented and marginalized people in tech.

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BbWorld18 Preview: Delivering an edtech platform to meet your institution’s needs

I’m excited to head to Orlando, Florida next week for our annual conference, BbWorld, which brings together nearly 2,000 educators, administrators and education thought leaders from around the world to share best practices, hear about the latest hot topics in education, and also learn about how our technology can help solve their many complex challenges. The conference is always an energizing and inspiring time for me as we hear about the direct impact we’re having on expanding access to education and driving student success in partnership with our clients.

This year, I’m especially looking forward to sharing updates to our business and how we’re delivering a broad set of capabilities that work seamlessly through our edtech platform. I’d like to preview some of what I’ll talk about next week.

SaaS update

While we’re already delivering most of our products to thousands of clients via SaaS, we’re now focused on bringing our SaaS expertise to Blackboard Learn. We’re seeing strong interest from many of our clients in moving to SaaS deployment for Learn and the momentum keeps growing. We are working in partnership with hundreds of institutions around the globe to explore whether moving to SaaS deployment makes sense for them today. While we have 383 clients who have made the transition already, the cohort of clients planning to move to SaaS this summer grew 70 percent from the cohort that moved in the spring. We couldn’t be more pleased with that direction!

Learn Ultra update

Once clients move to SaaS, the door is opened to Learn Ultra, our feature-rich next-generation learning management system. This past year Ultra came to life and we are thrilled by the response from our clients. Hundreds of clients ran pilots over the last year, and we’re hearing really positive feedback. We have 61 clients on Ultra and another 35 running active pilots. In addition, 117 clients participated in our last Ultra cohort, which are multiweek sessions with Blackboard where clients learn about and plan for the Ultra experience for Learn.

Working in partnership with our clients, we’ve added features and functionality that are most important to many institutions, including attendance, SMS notifications, cloud storage integration and more. And we’ve also increased the velocity with which we are adding features.  If you haven’t experienced Ultra in the last few months, the time is right to take a fresh look!  We think you’ll be impressed.

Edtech platform

The LMS is at the core of our business and remains a significant priority for us around the globe. And we’re proud that we are serving more clients in more countries around the world than anyone else in the market. But our portfolio of solutions is much broader than the LMS.   Our clients are dealing with a range of complex issues in this rapidly changing education market, and an LMS is not enough to solve those challenges.

Instead, our focus is on something much bigger – something no one else in the market can deliver.  We are focused on delivering an integrated, flexible edtech platform, architected through open standards to enable our clients to evolve their ecosystem as they choose.

Through our platform, we are able to provide our clients a unique connected experience, bringing together Learn, Blackboard Collaborate, the Blackboard app, data analytics, Blackboard Ally accessibility tracker, SafeAssign plagiarism detector, attendance tracker, financial payments, security solutions and more. And we’re seeing healthy growth of those products, as well as our services, in both the U.S. and other countries.

Proven Operating Model

We’ve made significant progress in executing our strategy over the past few years, and I’m proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish in a short period of time.  We’ve been able to execute on those plans and invest in our products because of our profitable operating model coupled with our ownership structure.  We have the capability and flexibility to focus investments on long-term, market-driving opportunities that meet the evolving needs of our clients, well beyond the LMS.  We benefit from the strong financial backing of our private equity investors and their belief in Blackboard’s strategy as illustrated by their investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in the company over the past 2 years.

In summary, the strength of Blackboard stems from our operating model, the breadth and depth of our portfolio, and the talent and passion of our team.

I look forward to sharing more details on our strategy as a company next week at BbWorld18! See you in Orlando!

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Come to Connect and Be Inspired at NSPRA 2018

Over the past year I’ve heard a lot of stories about inspiring students.  Students standing up against violence, students advocating for teachers, and students who have taken the reins of leadership to build stronger student relationships. But, students aren’t the only people giving me inspiration. It can be easy to forget that they are still just children and that they still look to adults as role models and examples to guide them as they develop their own identities. This past year, many of my friends in school PR have inspired me too. They have inspired me with stories of best practices. They have told stories of the amazing work your teachers and staff are engaged in.  They have stood up against bad actors.  They have been examples of the strong, smart, and compassionate people that we want our children to be.  You have led a world that inspires our students to be their best, and that prepares them to succeed.

As #NSPRA2018 draws closer I am getting more and more excited to see all of you. To hear first-hand all of the great work you’re doing.  I can’t wait to join you in sessions designed to help you and your peers grow and succeed.  This year’s conference will be a chance for everyone to meet with old friends, make new connections with amazing people, to let our hair down a bit, and to walk away with heads and hearts full of great ideas to carry us through the coming school year.

This year will be truly amazing. As I look over the schedule of sessions, I am in awe at the all-star cast.  Greg Turchetta, Lesley Bruinton, Carla Pereira, Joseph Ortiz, Brian Woodland, Trinette Marquis-Hobbs, Justin Elbert, and the list goes on and on.  This is a chance to learn from a collective hundreds of years of experience, from some of the leaders in school communication. Some of the sessions I’m most looking forward to are:

• Carla Pereira’s Speech Writing and Storytelling session. If anyone knows how to tell a story that motivates action, it’s Carla!
• Equity in Education panel. I can’t wait to hear each panelists take on making sure every student has a personalized, successful experience in school.
• Creating Conversation from Chaos panel. If there’s one thing todays students must deal with, it’s Chaos.  True leaders can help students navigate the chaos to find their own stable foundation.
• Student Perspectives panel. This presentation brings in students from Vestavia Hills High School who took student engagement into their own hands to create a student-based community in their own school.
• Carstarphen’s Engagement Power presentation. This year’s Communication Technology Award winner shares how she uses communication to build a district community.
• Lana Snodgras’ Sesame Street presentation. The always entertaining Lana Snodgras uses a fun model to demonstrate the importance of understanding demographics.
• Growth Mindset panel.Julie Thannum will lead a panel of experts through a discussion on leading and learning.

Check out the dozens of other sessions and panels that NSPRA superstars are presenting this year. It’s times like this I’m glad I have a team that can join all the other sessions and share notes. I’m also thankful that NSPRA goes to such great lengths to make session slides and recordings available too.

My job gives me an opportunity to attend many different types of conferences throughout the year, and I have to say that the PR community at NSPRA is the most tight-knit, closest networked, most supportive community of any group I’ve ever seen. And this year, maybe more than any other year, we need this group of strong, creative, caring, and reliable communicators to make sure our students have good examples to follow. I can’t wait to see you all there, and to be inspired and energized by you all.

Come find me at one of our events!

Blackboard Day: Sunday, July 15
12:00 – 4:00pm
Save your seat

Student Perspectives Session: Monday, July 16
1:00 – 2:00pm

Blackboard Party: Monday, July 16
7:30 – 10:30pm
RSVP

Storytelling Through Research Session: Tuesday, July 17
1:00 – 2:00pm

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Come to Connect and Be Inspired at NSPRA 2018 original post at Blackboard Blog

A Simple Way to Track Courses without an LMS

Blackboard Trend Report: 7/6/2018

Looking to learn more about what’s trending in education? Here’s a recap of some of this week’s top education news. Let us know what you think about this week’s news in the comments below.

The future of college education: Students for life, computer advisers and campuses everywhere
Washington Post
…One university thinking about those new models is the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2015, Georgia Tech formed a commission on the future of higher education, and its 48 members were asked to imagine what a public research institution might look like in 2040. (I joined the group as an adviser, along with Wayne Clough, president emeritus of Georgia Tech and former secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.)

How Faster + Cheaper Alternatives Will Replace Most of Higher Ed
Forbes
…Unresponsive, incoherent and expensive. That’s how Ryan Craig sees higher education. He’s a leading critic of the status quo and advocate for and investor in postsecondary innovation. The first third of Craig’s soon to be released book, A New U, convincingly outlines the problem starting with, “too much of a good thing.”

Reaching for the Cloud
Inside Higher Ed
Cloud-based IT services are becoming the norm in higher ed, but some colleges, particularly those with limited resources, may not be as far along on their “cloud journey” as one would think. Most institutions have moved to the cloud in “one form or another,” but there are relatively few institutions that have moved beyond adopting cloud-based software (known as software as a service, or SaaS) to cloud-based infrastructure and platforms (IaaS and PaaS, respectively).

Is the new education reform hiding in plain sight?
Hechinger Report
…Amid all the bellowing about charters, school choice and vouchers, a potentially more revolutionary reform movement is bubbling up. Philanthropists, state education officials, reform advocates — even charter school leaders — are examining personalized learning.

In Move Towards Nonprofit, Grand Canyon University Sells for $875M
EdSurge
… The move is the latest step in Grand Canyon University’s slow path towards reverting to a nonprofit institution. The Phoenix-based university was founded in 1949 as a nonprofit Christian college. But in 2004 Grand Canyon University found itself facing closure—with$20 million in debt—and with less than 1,000 students, and switched to become a for-profit institution.

Doubling Down on Wholly Online? Consider the Risks 
Eduventures
Within an overall higher education market in the midst of enrollment decline, online higher education is growing—with room to spare. Distance education programs in the U.S. now comprise of 14% of total student enrollment, and in 2016 76% of domestic, degree granting higher education institutions reported at least one distance education enrollment.

Leaders zero in on helping nontraditional students succeed 
Education Dive
Brandman University President Gary Brahm says the needs of nontraditional students are very different than those of traditional students. And though there is some consensus that nontraditional is the new traditional, many institution leaders are still struggling with how to adjust their business models to accommodate this wave of students on traditional campuses.

College Transparency Act Builds Momentum 
Inside Higher Ed
Senator John Cornyn last week quietly signed on to a bill that would overturn the ban on a federal postsecondary student-level data system. Advocates for the College Transparency Act say the Texas Republican’s support doesn’t just mean one more co-sponsor for the legislation. The decision by Cornyn, the second-ranking GOP senator, also suggests the kind of bipartisan support that could make stronger federal data inevitable.

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