I am proud to announce the 2012 Catalyst Award Winners. The Blackboard Catalyst Awards honors those who push the boundaries of their educational programs and technology in order to deliver innovative and effective learning experiences.  This year we had 61 submissions for the Catalyst Awards and 151 submissions for the Exemplary Course Award.  This represented over a 50% increase from last year’s submissions. We changed the award structure slightly; there are Platinum and Gold Winners. For the Exemplary Course Award, there were a total of 37 courses rated as exemplary but 6 winners will be awarded the ECP Director’s Choice for Courses with Distinction.

We are excited to honor the winners and their achievement at the Catalyst Awards luncheon at BbWorld in July 2012. Please stay tuned as we highlight the individual winners in an upcoming blog series.

And the winner are…

Guest post by Dr. Deborah Everhart, Chief Architect in Product Management, Blackboard Learn and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Georgetown University.

As a Director in the Exemplary Course Program, I have the privilege and pleasure of reviewing dozens of course submissions each spring. Every year the Directors see course innovations that we’ve never seen before, and I’m personally gratified to see how faculty and instructional designers are using Blackboard Learn in ways that effectively address the needs of students. It expands my understanding of how we can continue to evolve our products, as well as giving me best practice ideas for my own course!

Delving a little deeper into the ECP experience, I interviewed Leslie Koberna from Texas Woman’s University, one of the 2011 ECP winners. When I asked her what makes her Oral Radiology course exemplary, she described her methodology for getting students engaged during the first week of the course. They are expected to complete activities that acclimate them to the course and familiarize them with the course materials and objectives. For example, they take a practice quiz based on the syllabus, which not only demonstrates that they’ve read and understand the syllabus, but also introduces them to the structure of Blackboard quizzes that they will be taking throughout the semester. Leslie makes sure every student is engaged from the very beginning, greatly improving their opportunities for success in the course.

A “Course Tour” guides students through the structure of the course and explains how “all assignments are designed around the module objectives to help you learn and apply the material.” Each topic includes both textual and video materials to help the students learn the material from different perspectives. Such a well-organized course makes even a challenging topic like oral radiology approachable.

As the person who helps manage our upgrade resources and change management programs, I am pleased to say that in the past year, we experienced the largest migration of clients moving from older platforms to the latest version of Blackboard’s learning management system. Over 2,000 institutions are now using or in the process of moving to Blackboard Learn™, Release 9.1. They are enjoying the benefits of improved workflow efficiencies for instructors and administrators as well as digital content integrations.

There are a few recent decisions that I want to take a moment to highlight. Both the State University of New York (SUNY) and Idaho State Board of Education recently selected Blackboard as a technology partner for online learning. This represents a trend in more decisions being made at the state-wide or system-wide levels.

Guest Post by Dr. Shirley Waterhouse, Senior Director of the Office of Academic Excellence and Innovation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

January is the time of the year when we all seem to do some reflecting.  As a director in the Exemplary Course Program (ECP), I look forward to this time of the year because I have the opportunity to begin the review of course submissions.  I also take time to reflect on the progress of the ECP program and the yearly advancements in e-learning pedagogy throughout the academy that are demonstrated in the course submissions.

To go a step further in reflection this year, I recently interviewed several of the 2011 ECP winners to ask them to reflect on the process of submitting their courses.  All of them commented on how valuable it was to receive input from peers at other institutions, and they all indicated that the recognition they received was very nice too.  When I asked Lorna Kearns, an instructional designer with the Center for Instructional Development and Distance Education at the University of Pittsburgh, about her experience with the ECP program and their winning course, Organization and Management Theory, she indicated that the self-review process was the most valuable component of the program for her and her colleagues.  “Going through the self-evaluation process revealed insights not only about the course I submitted but also about other courses for which I provide instructional design support. Working with two of my colleagues as course reviewers offered additional opportunities for understanding what constitutes effective online course design.”

Maisie Caines, a Blackboard Exemplary Course Director and Faculty Development Specialist at College of the North Atlantic, recently spent time chatting with Teri Herron of Delta State University.  Teri received the 2011 Exemplary Course Program Award for her Music in American Culture online course.  So, how does a classically trained opera singer and music historian design and deliver an exemplary online course?  According to Teri, it was a “completely wild ride.”

According to Teri: “We need projects that push us out of our comfort zones, because that’s what I’m asking my students to do every time they enroll in any of my classes.”  When Teri approached Dr. Susan Hines, Director of Instructional Technologies at Delta State, about designing an online course, she asked for no forgiveness.   “I want you to be really hard on me.,”  Teri said, “I would rather work diligently one time and then have something upon which multiple layers can be built.  You know, build a really solid foundation into which you can add or subtract content, add or subtract media, fuss a little bit with your learning modules… but have something really, really good, structurally sound…something that a student climbs into and thinks, WOW!, this person really cared when they put this together for me.”