So ideally, these posts would be notes from the road. But . . . unfortunately, in the run-up to EDUCAUSE, I haven't had a chance to blog. Which is too bad, because I went to a couple of really cool user group events a few weeks back, Maryland BUG and SLATE, and wanted to share some of the great ideas and best practices I saw. At Maryland, I got a chance to hear UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski speak at the keynote; and at SLATE, I got a chance to sit in on a very engaged session of "Hey Blackboard," where the community gives us feedback about how they're using (and would like to use) our suite of products.
At Maryland, President Hrabowski discussed the steps we (as a community) need to take to ensure the success of our students. One interesting statistic he mentioned had to do with engineering degrees: in the U.S. only 5% of college students graduate with a degree in engineering versus 30% in Europe and 40% in Japan. In short, he said one of the greatest challenges of educators, and those who support their success, is to make sure we are producing top caliber graduates who can compete globally. This is certainly one of the trends we have seen in our interviews with dozens of campus leaders. You can read about it in our vision paper "A View from the Top: Building the 21st Century Campus."
Also at Maryland, we got a chance to see condensed versions of many of the breakout sessions through a "Five Minutes of Fame" general session that included everything from using a virtual help desk program to using interactive tools to learning about child labor in the nineteenth century. One particularly interesting session showed how UMBC was able to pull system usage data from its Blackboard implementation to report on institutional success. For instance, they were able to show the positive correlation between the number of times a student logged into Blackboard software and their grades.
At SLATE, the Midwest user group, there were some really interesting sessions. Paul Heydenburg from Northeast Illinois University showed how they were creating learning objects that could be used campus-wide to help better align course content with curricular goals. Hadin Rangin and Sarah Grinson from the University of Illinois discussed strategies for making instructional content more useable and accessible for students with disabilities.
I sat in on a listening session with clients who were discussing "what keeps them up at night" in the ways they're using Blackboard software. The responses were certainly enlightening and really focused in three areas: training faculty (e.g. How do you create a scalable training offering for a faculty with a high degree of turnover?), pedagogy (e.g. How do you create a more fluid interaction with elements of Blackboard software for a more engaging student experience?), and interacting with Blackboard (e.g. How can we find a better way to find and share information about the direction of the product?). We definitely look forward to working with SLATE to help answer some of these questions going forward.
That's it in a nutshell for recent user group events. On Friday (10/19/07), I'll be in Eugene, Oregon, for the Pacific Northwest/Washington Blackboard Users Group and hope (with a much longer airplane ride to write) to give an update on the event much quicker than this one.
