The ProEd team recently hosted an interesting webinar about various ways our solutions help career colleges stay compliant with the wide range of laws and regulations they must follow.  I found the webinar to be informative not only because it discussed important Blackboard capabilities, but also because it served as an overview of the trends in for-profit regulation and policy that currently impact our schools.

Below is a list of some of the regulations we covered during our webinar, along with a discussion of the ways Blackboard can help professional colleges and universities comply with these rules:

The Clery Act:  Under the Clery Act, career colleges must provide emergency notifications to students when there is an immediate threat to their health or safety. With Blackboard Connect, schools can send mass messages to students and staff via text, email, recorded voice messages, and even social media quickly and reliably. Blackboard Connect has been so useful to universities that entire communities are now using this technology to notify residents of an emergency! At the same time, institutions can use the same system to communicate with students regarding course deadlines and changes, as well as policy updates.

Check Fraud: As we have discussed in a recent post, there are regulations in place to address debit cards and other banking mechanisms used to disburse Federal Student Aid (read more here).  Blackboard Pay helps professional colleges and universities avoid violations of these rules by eliminating many fees to student aid accounts, including credit exposure and overdraft fees.

Many professional learning institutions have mission statements related to convenience.  You may have seen commercials that talk about learning in your pajamas, whenever and however you want, with world-class services to help you achieve your goals. Mobile access to education is the embodiment of that convenience. For career colleges, the “anytime, anywhere” access to education provided by online learning is increasingly important.

Our recent post comparing online and traditional learners highlights that demand for online courses exceeds demand for traditional courses across higher ed institutions, and that 30% of today’s students take at least one class online.  This should come as no surprise when we consider that today’s learners are accustomed to a highly-connected world, with access to social networks and other online tools constantly at their fingertips.

In today’s hyper-connected world, it should come as no surprise that educators are constantly seeking ways to engage students through the Internet.  Even though more and more students are taking classes entirely online, traditional classroom-based education can also be greatly enhanced with web-based capabilities.  This blended strategy, which combines face-to-face classes with online components, has proven to be highly effective amongst various types of educational institutions. Blackboard’s solutions for online learning and content management are perfect for enhancing classroom learning with engaging, social, online capabilities. Here are a few best practices for leveraging these solutions after your students have left the classroom:

Extend the School Day: Drive traffic to the learning environment by allowing access to important information online as an incentive.  Post grades, homework, or anything else interesting to the student inside your LMS, and make sure the students are aware that this desirable content is available there. Once learners are in the system, engage them with additional learning content to help reinforce what happens in the classroom to achieve greater learning outcomes.