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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