Digital Content Resources to Help You Get Ready for the Fall Semester

With the publisher building blocks which you’ve no doubt heard a lot about this past summer, faculty have the opportunity to integrate digital content from Higher Ed’s leading publishers into their courses. Faculty can pick and choose rich digital content from a wide variety of publisher sources, including Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill, Pearson and Wiley, all seamlessly integrated into the Blackboard Learn platform.

If you’ve already installed these building blocks, you may be wondering how you help your faculty get started. We’ve consolidated a number of publisher resources on linking accounts, pairing courses, adding content and more – all within Blackboard Learn.

Today’s digital natives – those who have had access to computers, cell phones, email, and other forms of technology since birth – expect their professors to integrate media into the curriculum to augment learning in the classroom.

Kaltura, a market-leading open source online video platform and a Blackboard Premier Partner, helps universities deliver on this expectation by allowing faculty to easily create, edit and upload videos with a click of a button. Once the videos are uploaded to the platform, students can view the videos from any device in any location.

In 2010, Professor Sharon Feaster began offering Connect Anatomy & Physiology to her students as an extra study tool. Professor Feaster was hesitant to require McGraw-Hill Connect and have her students go to two course websites – Blackboard Learn and Connect – so she made it optional for students.

As soon as the Blackboard integration became available, she immediately jumped on board and started requiring her students to use McGraw-Hill Connect.  As a result, she experienced significant improvements in course and exam pass rates, demonstrating the effectiveness of Connect and LearnSmart on student learning.  In addition, she saw a 29% reduction in course withdrawals, which she assumes is a result of fewer students feeling compelled to withdraw because they were succeeding in the course.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read this case study to find out why Professor Feaster credits Connect with having made a real difference for her students.

There’s no doubt that the growth of digital learning content is accelerating.  Multiple resources indicate that a higher ed world of blended and online learning is rapidly approaching, some resources even cite the “flip to digital” occurring in the next 5 years.  Textbooks aren’t going away any time soon but their use in the classroom is declining steadily.  And, expectations are that instructors will graduate from eTexts to the more sophisticated integrated learning systems being developed by publishers.

What does this mean for you?

Blackboard can be a channel for all this content and tools, helping faculty make sense of the numerous digital content options available to them.  Blackboard offers a broad choice of content to choose from right within the Blackboard Learn course.  I would like to take a moment to look at one of our newest providers of digital content: Cengage Learning.

When the Federal Government created new educational regulations stating universities must better prepare students for gainful employment, Troy University saw it as a chance to fine-tune its own efforts. With unemployment at record high levels, Troy decided to make internship placement more readily available to all of its students in an effort to help them gain employment after graduation.

Troy already had career centers at each of its four campuses, but an increasing number of students were taking classes online from remote locations without access to the on-campus centers. With roughly half of the student body online, Troy University needed a new solution to help the students find internships prior to graduation. “There was definitely a need for internship placement for the online students,” said Ronnie Creel, director of Education Technology at Troy.