“Golf is the closest game to the game we call life. You get bad breaks from good shots; you get good breaks from bad shots – but you have to play the ball where it lies,” said the American amateur golfer, Bobby Jones. The game is catching on with more and more young athletes, playing for fun, on school teams, and in youth golf tournaments. Aside from the life-lessons golf teaches — among them problem-solving, honor and honesty, and patience — golf is also a great illustration of STEM concepts, from friction and spin on tee-off, to the math of calculating a handicap.
NBC Learn’s newest Special Collection is “Science of Golf,” a new video series produced in partnership with the United States Golf Association (USGA) and Chevron. Among the video titles:
“Volume, Displacement & Buoyancy” “Evolution of the Golf Ball” “Calculating a Golf Handicap Index” “Evolution of the Golf Club”
Using rich media solutions, like video, in the classroom helps enable the development of media literacy, higher order thinking skills, and a deeper connection to the curriculum being explored. Recently, Blackboard expanded its partnership with Kaltura, the world’s first Open Source Online Video Platform, to all institutions using Moodlerooms’s Moodle-based platform, joule. Also new, Blackboard and Kaltura are now offering the Blackboard Building Block™ more broadly to Blackboard Learn™ customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, expanding the availability of Kaltura’s video tools and capabilities in Blackboard’s flagship learning management system.
Like Blackboard, Kaltura strives to make the learning experience seamless for faculty and students. Video wasn’t always easily accessible to Blackboard users, as you can learn from the video below. In the past, instructors would go to one system to upload and manage content and then grab an embed code to add video to the appropriate web page or course. At the very least, this was an inconvenient workflow; in a worst case scenario, this could be time consuming and problematic for the instructor.
The Kaltura Video Building Block removes these manual steps from the process of assigning videos to various courses, assignments and pages. Users can stay within the Blackboard Learn platform through the entire process – essentially all content can be pushed into Blackboard programmatically and any Blackboard specific data can be synched back to the Kaltura system automatically. The result? A seamless experience for faculty and students.
A presidential campaign is, by nature, ripe with material for current events. Intensified by the explosion of social media channels over the last few years, the campaign trail is now a prime source for instant course content. Instructors can replay videos from last night’s debate, stream live-footage from a rally or display results from today’s election on a moment’s notice. Now, history can literally be taught, learned and relived in the making.
Amidst the excitement in America over today’s Elections, NBC Learn launched a new collection of free resources for students and teachers “Decision 2012” . This special collection of online content is designed to help students research and analyze the 2012 election based on the candidates, the major issues, the calendar of events, and the process behind the campaigns. Using stories from current and past presidential elections in teaching and learning modules, this collection supports student learning and engagement around the presidential election. The free “Decision 2012” offering includes premier content from partner organizations and institutions such as NIEonline.com, Carnegie Learning, Lynn University, the Newseum, and Scholastic Inc. Read more here.
The following post is from Lisa Bennett, Senior Director of Public Relations & Marketing at Kaltura.
As a Premier Partner of Blackboard, we are delighted to be part of BbWorld again this year. No doubt that this is the year’s biggest event for “all things Blackboard” and our EDU team will be there in full force. We have all sorts of activities planned, so make sure to stop by our Booth #129 and catch a demo of the new version of our Video Building Block for Blackboard. The Video Building Block will be coming out in a few weeks, in time for the conference. You can also check out a live demo of our ‘Campus YouTube’ application – Kaltura MediaSpace, which provides universities and educational institutions with their own private video portal, and more.
In addition to stopping by booth 129 to meet the team, you are invited to participate in our session about how video is becoming a key to learning and engaging students across campus. Below is the description of our session and what we will discuss. We hope to see you there!
In the meantime – you can learn more about the Kaltura Video Building Block for Blackboard, start a free trial, or download our recent case study with Indiana University/Purdue University – Fort Wayne.
It’s almost that time of the year again – Blackboard World is right around the corner. This July in New Orleans, educators from across the country will not only soak in the latest technology advancements in education, but for the first time, will also have the opportunity to help kick start their students’ careers.
More and more employers say real-world experience is the key to getting a job in today’s increasingly competitive global economy. Internships.com and Blackboard have partnered to help students differentiate themselves from the pack and land jobs and internships through the free Internships.com Building Block.
Troy University Director of Educational Technology, Ronnie Creel, will be joined by Internships.com Chief Marketing Officer, Stuart Lander, to share their experiences on the launch of the free Internships.com Building Block within Blackboard Learn. Mr. Creel will present a case study of institutional adoption at Troy University – sharing analytics information including user activity data, time on site, building block usage, and more. Mr. Lander will discuss the importance of internships to students in today’s economic climate, and present the product features of the Building Block.
In this challenging economic environment, where students can use every bit of help in landing a job or internship, this is a session that you cannot afford to miss.
