Gallaudet University – Chartered by Abraham Lincoln
7/11/2012 10:20am
Initially started with face-2-face training and noticed a decline in enrollment.
92% of their faculty use Blackboard
eCurriculum – a term to use for Blackboard Training
Fixed Dates 2 weeks long.
Watch recorded webinar
5 modules, use adaptive release.
Use collaborate when needed to demo and view instructor.
Now it is self-paced, and self enroll.
8:30am: Keynote starts out with a digital leaner/native talking about how she connects and interacts with the world.
Funny explanation of social media and Blackboard in potty language.
The Vision
The Fundamentals
New Services
Mobile Showcase
Vision –
Choice: Company supports multiple learning systems. with Multiple service offerings (consulting, student services, Managed Hosting, Online Program Mgmt, Developmental Education, Open Source Services)
Support you no matter what learning tech. you use on campus.
Innovation:
Need to Innovate accross Blackboard Learn, Angel, Moodle, Joule, Edline & Blackboard Engage.
Integrating open education standards into products.
ProjectXP – Tech that works across platforms, being part of 25,000 schools around the world.
8:45: learning object repository (xplor): search, create and manage content. Can be accessed from anyone of the different learning standards (LTI etc). [filtering and tagging is built in]
Create Content within Xplor: Pages, Files, Links, Assessments, Assignments, Discussions and External Tools (LTI) also Collections, Channels and Common Cartridge.
Access:
Access to content partnerships by faculty in an easy to use way.
The Fundamentals
Support, Openness, Transparency and Quality
Support performance: 7 day resolution 63% 1 Day Resolution 89%
Blackboard Openness: Oscelot, LTI, Common Cartridge, Bb Open Database, SCORM/TIN CAN, LIS, CAS, SHIBBOLETH, Blackboard education Open Source Services, Bb Building Blocks
All time highs in Support Issue Resolution, Change Mgmt, Usability, Quality, Recommend Bb.
Innovation – Excellence in User Experience, Educationally driven feature extension, Evolution of core technology & methods.
Products: Usability and removal of clicks was key in Bb Learn 9.1.8
Pedagogy First – Assessment Item Analysis – give faculty at a single glance a good sense of how students performed.
Enterprise course evaluation and surveys will be part of course delivery product at no additional charge!
Text & Text-to-Voice Notifications, Two-Way Messaging (from course to phone and phone to course)
One-way text delivery from course part of Course Delivery in Fall!
Collaborate – Improved Integration
Collaborate is Mobile in the Fall! Collaborate can be linked to gradebook and automatically give participation scores based on presence.
Social Learning
Edit your Profile Card, set privacy options, give academic interests. Blackboard Social will come this Fall! Blackboard Social can be shared outside just the school to the broad network of people that use Blackboard Social.
Program Management
How to go or grow online – big challenge for all institutions.
Blackboard can help with: Program Development, Faculty & Courses, Marketing, Student Lifecycle
Blackboard Mobile!
Mobile Showcase:
Usage Information:
Push Notifications – app pings you to interact. (new announcment, new content, new course, new grade, new test, test due, test overdue)
Roadmap
Mobile Learn Worldwide: If institution has not subsidized mobile learn, users can make a purchase mobile learn for $1.99 a year or $5.99 unlimited.
Institutional License, Mobile learn will be embedded within mobile central.
Innovation in Higher Education: Leadership and the Role of Technology
Keynote Subject Matter: Focusing on Freeman’s industry knowledge and leadership as well as the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s (UMBC) usage of analytics to enable data-driven decision making.
Michael Chasen doing the introductions.
175 Client Receptions
3,500 attendees – most well attended Bb conference ever!
Roadmap will be tomorrow at 8:20am!
real advantages of Blackboard – kids not willing to speak up in class will discuss issue on a discussion board.
Dr. Hrabowski’s student kept realizing more ways Blackboard is helping them as a student.
State of Higher Ed in 2012:
Themes:
Education increasingly being anytime anywhere
Focusing on access and portabilty
Growth and Current outcomes
Focus on Ethics
Increased Globalization
2005 250million students around the world were in Higher ed.
Tech will continue to change our insitutions
Online Education is Growing
social media
Cloud Computing
how we deliver instructions
Unlimited access to knowledge
Role of presidents and boards will be more important than ever in asking the questions and setting the tone.
Our responsibility to use our expertise to have an impact on the way leaders will think about what they can do in supporting the environment and faculty.
How do we go about changing the culture of education? Academic motivation.
How we can use technology to pull students to the work. (usdemocrazy.com)
I came I laughed I learned. Make it fun and interesting.
2/3 of americans don’t have a college degree. People 35-60 in america are second most educated people in the world. Under 35 is 11th.
35% of white people have degree – 20% of black 15% of Hispanic and 40% Asian – 2/3 of world population don’t have a degree
India is adding 1000 universities, effectively doubling the number of those with college degrees.
Fewer than 25% of first generation college students succeed. We need to change that to make all of us better.
America has a major problem with following behind – every percent increase in GDP adds about 1 million jobs. We need jobs, we need more educated trained people producing.
It’s not about race, it’s about the opportunity to get an education – Freeman Hrabowski
Science & engineering disproportionately create more jobs than other majors
k-12 needs more math and science support! They are about Methods and not about the math.
Think about access and success and what we can do as a campus to change the way we do business. It all begins with attitudes.
Innovation is the name of the game. What happens on my campus that would be defined as innovation.
“Look to the student to the left and to the right and our goal is that all three of you graduate.”
Use Blackboard and technology to empower the student to be more involved.
Small Groups, proactive mentoring examples of strategies to increase successful engagement and empowerment.
Online Learning and Hybrid approaches can lead to even more effective results than only face to face.
Importance of Course Design –
Focus on finding ways to engage the students. Constant monitoring and continual improvement is important, look past the anecdotes.
T-Bug: the Texas Blackboard Users’ Group
Room 294
3:10pm
Upcoming Webinars Collaborate sessions: (July, August)
http://t-bug.org/ – T-Bug Website
Subscribe to the T-Bug listserv from this site!
T-Bug Conference will be in Killeen Texas
on Thursday October 25 & Friday October 26th 2012
Collaborating for a Steller Future
Conference fee ($250) Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Planetarium, Party
Suggestions for T-Bug
– what other schools in Texas are doing on site
– a way for admins to exchange ideas
– Survey of group
Connections.blackboard.com – All of the T-bug webinars are hosted here. It is a community site for Blackboard user groups.
Elected Board of T-Bug
President, President Elect, Secretary, Treasurer, CIO. Half are elected for 1 year and half are elected for 2 years.
Members come from System admins, support, teaching and learning, management/administration 2 members at large.
BbWorld Blog: Engagement, Persistence and Retention: How is the University of Southern Mississippi using ConnectYard to Successfully Enhance these Key Factors
Room 277
Tuesday 7/10/2012
Overall Concept: How Student Engagement and Persistence has a positive effect on retention.
Students and faculty choose course by course what channels they want to be communicated through. (Facebook Twitter, Texting and e-mail)
Faculty doesn’t have to have a Facebook or twitter account to use ConnectYard for the students in their courses.
Hurdles:
– Marketing
– Faculty and Student buy-in
Social Media Policy (prohibits faculty from using it to teach classes through facebook, but they can use it to supplement.)
Faculty/Student Buy-in
Position ConnectYard
Encourage students to personalize notifications
Stress Use to Quantify Class Participation.
Current use of ConnectYard
Getting Everyone Involved
Communication within Courses
Student Notification
How it works: Messages, Discussions and Announcements come through Channels (Twitter, Facebook, Text & e-mail). Gradebook updates coming.
Planned uses:
Personalize Channels
One way & Two Way Communication
Bb Integration
Participation Points
Granular Administration
So the first session I’m attending is actually a pre conference workshop on Blackboard’s Content Management System. SHSU will be implementing this system going forward so we thought it wise to attend this particular session. The boot camp is about a 6 hour hands-on session.
Introductions, a fair amount of K-12 in attendance with the Higher ed folks.
There are two other participants from Texas besides SHSU in this session. Texas A&M is here as is Region 4 in Houston.
The File/Content manager resides in the course.
Repository – file storage and mgmt. for
– Share content
– Customize permissions
– Search Metadata
– Learning Object catalog
– Tracking
– Versioning
– Portfolios
– Work Flows
– Goals Alignment
We are getting not only a hands on look into how to manage and add content, but a peak into the System admin side of how content manager works.
Colleagues from other institutions can be given a pass to access course content and that pass can be a limited amount of time. This is a great tool for collaboration.
Being able to look at different versions of the same file is another bonus.
The content manager is closely tied to user roles within the system. All the way down to how much space a user in the system. I cannot wait to implement this product back at campus!
An ode to this week’s Blackboard World 2012 Conference in New Orleans:
‘Twas the flight before Blackboard World
We arrived at the gate.
Thinking about multi-booked sessions
for which we’ll be late.
Dinner with vendors, beignets at Du Monde,
the Client appreciation party, of which we are fond.
Pre conference workshops to jumpstart our brains
Learning best practices on which we will train.
My track is training, f2f and online,
So many sessions, so little time!
T-Bug, Best practice, pedagogy first
Networking with colleagues, you work up a thirst!
Vendor exhibits, giveaways galore,
Or maybe a door prize on which we will score!
We will listen, we will talk, we will soak up the knowledge
We will share our experiences with private sector, k-12, or college.
We hope to return come Friday this week,
Loaded with the knowledge we strove to seek.
So I say to you all, let’s learn without fear,
For if we want more, we wait ‘till next year!
So for most of my trips to the big Blackboard Conference I would “seat-of-the-pants” my session scheduling. Essentially this means I wait until I get the guide in my hands and go from there. When I started attending Blackboard Conference’s back in 2000-2001 (Washington DC was my first one) this really wasn’t that big of a deal. The number of presenters were low and the number of attendees was manageable for my “last-minute” scheduling routine. This year I decided to use the My Planner app on the Blackboard World Website and plan out my sessions in advance. Admittedly, I may still change my mind and pick different sessions when July 10th gets here, but this does help me get a head start. With hundreds of sessions to choose from the planner really helps me put it together. As the Assistant Director of Training & Development for SHSU Online, it is my responsibility to ensure our faculty feel comfortable in the new environment so you can see from my sessions, exactly that! I’ll try to include a little blurb on why I’m attending each session.
Jacob’s BbW12 sessions: (at least the ones he’s planning on attending today)
Preconference Workshop:
Content Management Boot Camp
Pre-Conference
Monday, 7/9/2012
9:00 AM – 4:30 PM
Engagement, Persistence and Retention: How is the University of Southern Mississippi using ConnectYard to Successfully Enhance these Key Factors
Tuesday, 7/10/2012
2:05 PM – 3:00 PM
New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – Room 277
T-BUG (Texas Blackboard User Group)
Tuesday, 7/10/2012
3:10 PM – 4:05 PM
New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – Room 294
Innovation in Higher Education: Leadership and the Role of Technology
Tuesday, 7/10/2012
4:15 PM – 5:30 PM
New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – New Orleans Theater
Best Practices for Developing an Effective Online Training Course for Faculty: Lessons Learned
Tuesday, 7/10/2012
5:30 PM – 7:30 PM
New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – Exhibit Hall (Hall J)
Blackboard Corporate Keynote
Wednesday, 7/11/2012
8:20 AM – 9:35 AM
New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – New Orleans Theater
100% Online Faculty Training
Wednesday, 7/11/2012
10:20 AM – 10:45 AM
New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – Room 260
Rock on, SLATE! An Up Close Look at How a Blackboard User Group has Impacted Teaching, Learning & the Support of Technology in the Midwest
Wednesday, 7/11/2012
10:55 AM – 11:50 AM
New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – Room 392
Foreign Languages in Blackboard Collaborate
Wednesday, 7/11/2012
12:00 PM – 12:25 PM
New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – Room 267
Creating Self-Sufficient Online Learners Through the Use of Online Orientations
Wednesday, 7/11/2012
2:55 PM – 3:50 PM
New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – Room 276
HuMBUG – Without the BAH! – How a Large Metropolitan Area Works Together to Improve the Blackboard Experience for their Students
Wednesday, 7/11/2012
3:50 PM – 4:20 PM
New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – Digital Content and Upgrade Center
Pedagogy First, Training and Course Design to Follow at Montclair State University
Wednesday, 7/11/2012
5:15 PM – 5:40 PM
New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – Room 392
iPad-emonium: A Panel’s Perspective on iPad Initiatives in Higher Education
Thursday, 7/12/2012
10:15 AM – 11:10 AM
New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – Room 281
Rethinking Education
Thursday, 7/12/2012
11:20 AM – 12:20 PM
New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – New Orleans Theater
Documentation Tips and Tools, Brought by the World’s Foremost Expert in the Field: YOU!
Thursday, 7/12/2012
1:45 PM – 2:40 PM
New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – Room 270
Beyond the Bells and Whistles – Exemplary Courses and Best Practices
Thursday, 7/12/2012
2:50 PM – 3:45 PM
New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – Room 273
Turning the Whale: Training for Transformation
Thursday, 7/12/2012
3:45 PM – 4:15 PM
New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – Digital Content and Upgrade Center
Client Appreciation Party!
Nuff Said!
Cutting down on last-minute scrambling with technological glitches by having your students practice the activity before the real assignment or assessment is due.
One of the worst feelings as an instructor occurs when you work tirelessly to put together an assignment or assessment in your course only to have the technology fail you. You spend countless hours organizing an activity with the learning objectives in mind, ensuring the activity is perfectly aligned to the curriculum, only to find that the students can’t even access it because the technology isn’t working. Talk about frustrating! While in some respects you will always be at the mercy of the technology gods, for example the old adage “It is not a matter of if technology will fail you, it is a matter of when.”, seems to come to mind. However, there is a very proactive way to greatly reduce the chance of a technological failure in your course………Practice!
Oftentimes assignments, assessments and activities that deal with third-party software or technology other than the Internet browser take place at stressful times during the semester or are associated with a stressful activity (test taking). At this point, you are taking the normal stress and anxiety levels associated with coursework and compounding them with the added fun of using a new or different technology. Why not introduce your students to the “new tech” at the beginning of the semester or make the activity less than 25% of the course grade. Below you will see some great examples of “practice activities” that you can use in your course. You don’t have to limit yourself to these activities as this best practice transcends just these examples.
The Syllabus Quiz (Killing 3 birds with one stone)
This activity touches in three important areas that will affect how the student goes through the rest of your course. By completing this exercise the student will:
NOTE: Be sure to make the Syllabus Quiz worth enough points so that the students will follow through on taking it.
The “Introduce Yourself” Presentation
One of the ways we can bridge the gap of interactivity in online and Hybrid courses is to allow students to record presentations and upload them to the course. This means that the student can present a project, assignment or some other activity while sharing video, audio and whatever is running on their desktop or laptop computer. We all know that many students undergo stress when they have to give an oral presentation. Take that stress and tie it to the added stress of “Can they hear me?”, “Is my webcam working?”, and “Can they see my PowerPoint?”. Give your students a fun activity at the outset without the added pressure of a major assignment deadline and the stress diminishes considerably.
Sample “Introduce Yourself” Presentation Guidelines
Note: Tools that can work for this assignment include: Adobe Presenter, Slide Bloom, Tegrity, Jing etc.. It will depend on if you want a view of the student along with the presentation.
Use this Concept in other Scenarios
This principle applies to many other activities you may do in your course. Having your students use a wiki to post their educational and professional goals and it will be easier for them when it comes to completing group projects, case studies and portfolios using wikis later. If you require your students to meet with you in real-time using a webinar tool, it is always a good idea to have a pre-meeting meeting to iron out any difficulty they might have in getting the web conferencing tool to work. A web meeting room is another tool where a Microphone headset is mandatory. You never want to get stuck in that feedback loop that comes from hearing yourself in someone else’s speakers during a web conference.
In conclusion, you can avoid the wailing and gnashing of teeth that takes place when students encounter a technical difficulty by practicing and ironing out the bugs. This best practice can save your life when it comes down to evaluation time.
Note: In most cases work with whatever support system you have to let them know when your students will be doing the dry run so they know to expect the phone calls and e-mails.
eLearning Frenzy 