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Tips for a BbWorld First-timer

Newbie.  Freshman.   First-timer.  Whatever the name for it, there is always a first time for everyone and everything.  Are you a first-time BbWorld attendee?  Are you wondering how best to take advantage of all the resources and opportunitites at BbWorld?  How can you make the most of it?

Here are some tips for first-time BbWorld attendees:

My "Final Exams" at BbWorld '08

Even though it’s been awhile since I was a college student, I can’t help but feel like these are the last weeks before the end of the semester and final exams.

You remember the all-nighters, and the study groups and term papers that seemed to never make it to “perfect,” but eventually reached the point where you just couldn’t do any more with them.  Was it just me or did you somehow vacillate between feeling nervous, confident, worried and excited all within a very short time span?

Over time I learned to accept those feelings as a good thing, since it generally meant I was taking things seriously and trying my hardest to put my best foot forward, so that I could look back after all was said and done knowing that I would have no regrets.

At the end of this “semester,” my “final exams” will come in the form of two Blackboard Managed Hosting presentations taking place at BbWorld ’08 in Las Vegas:

Opening a New Door at Blackboard

Choice, diversity and experimentation are core values of educational communities.  We see this reflected in the continual experimentation with alternative course management systems at colleges and universities around the world.  Many schools have a Sakai or Moodle instance running alongside their Blackboard service.  While supportive of faculty members who want to experiment, this can create a problem for students who get lost in a fog of different systems.  To solve this problem, some institutions elect to choose a single course management solution on campus.  But that approach won’t work for everyone.

At Blackboard we’re expanding your teaching and learning technology choices.  We’re opening up the Blackboard Academic Suite and enabling connections to different course management systems through a new technology called The Learning Environment Connector, which is being developed as part of Project NG, Blackboard’s multi-year, multi-release project to deliver a next generation teaching and learning solution.  And while we believe that our course management system is the best solution for most instructors, we want you to have the ability to experiment, and to have the teaching and learning choice that you need.

Imagine a world where students go to a single URL and connect to their course regardless of which course management system it is hosted on.  Dashboards consolidate information for users from these many systems.  Administrators easily access accounts and information across these systems; thus simplifying helpdesk operations.  The Learning Environment Connector makes this world possible.

To demonstrate the power of this technology we’re working to build a connector to Sakai.  We have partnered with a university that uses Sakai and Blackboard and shares our vision.  When complete, the Blackboard Sakai connector will be available as open source to the education community.

From Christopher Columbus to Globalized Higher Education

(This entry is part of a series by Gordon Freedman, Blackboard's VP of education strategy, in which he reflects on technology and education as he travels around the world to meet with innovative education leaders and researchers, government leaders, and members of the Blackboard community who are experimenting in e-Learning and changing the education landscape.)

When the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development (www.OECD.org) chose Santo Domingo for its site for the 2nd Global Education Forum, it struck me as unusual.

But when I recalled it was from these waters that Christopher Columbus searched in vain for a passage to India, it began to make sense.  The city’s safe harbor, first entered by the great European explorer in 1492, has been the site of centuries of global intrigue and then national independence in the mid 1800’s.  The Dominican Republic, all these years later, became the gracious host to this international gathering that looked for the new gold standard in today’s global village – education.   

It is hard to argue with an island nation that was the initial point of discovery for Europeans coming to the Americas as a venue for a global education conference in the 21st century.  In our fully globalized society today, education has clearly become the one similar resource by which all nations will measure themselves going forward.  And the OECD, a champion of economic development based on investments in the human potential of nations, is one of the very strongest organizational voices in the international arena.  It is dedicated to large-scale education improvement in both developed nation members and in its developing nation partners.

The Important Role of Open Source Software in Education

Over the past several months, there have been many articles highlighting the growth in popularity of open source software solutions in education.

Here at Blackboard, we also feel that open source plays an important role in education.  The recent incorporation of a non-profit organization called OSCELOT (the Open Source Community for Educational Learning Objects and Tools) by a group of passionate members of Blackboard’s developer community reflects this trend.

OSCELOT’s mission is to promote the development and sharing of open-source plugins and extensions for learning environments, including Blackboard Building Blocks and Blackboard PowerLinks, that allow Blackboard users and our partners to customize, enhance, integrate and extend our core LMS products using our open API architecture.

By pairing open source plugins with Blackboard’s commercially supported teaching and learning platform, we’ve seen rapid uptake of educational tools and platform enhancements that everyone can benefit from.

To date, there are over 70 projects hosted on OSCELOT’s site and over 150 known free or open-source plugins contributed by the community, which can be used today with Blackboard solutions to address a wide variety of teaching, learning and institutional priorities.