Blackboard Blogs

BbWorld Commerce '09 Registration Is Open!

It’s that time of year again. Plans are rapidly coming together for BbWorld Commerce '09, and now is the time to make your plans to attend. We'll return to the Pointe Hilton Tapatio Cliffs Resort in Phoenix, Arizona, from February 9 to 11, for what will be a highly interactive and useful conference. You won’t want to miss it.

This year we've added new pre-conference training opportunities on topics such as PCI Compliance, as well as discounted package pricing options that include a full registration with either a full- or half-day training session.

Click here to register for BbWorld Commerce '09, the premier users conference for campus commerce and security management administrators. It's the one event each year that truly focuses on you and your success.

So reserve your hotel room today. Speaker discounts are also available.

Do you have a story to tell? If you do, submit your proposal to share your story with your peers.

And if you have any questions, you can always email us at bbworldcommerce@blackboard.com.

Exploring New Trends in Online Learning for K-12

This week the Blackboard K-12 team and Project Tomorrow hosted a web presentation to discuss new trends in online learning.  The event included a panel of online learning practitioners who gave first-hand perspectives on data presented in a recently-released report: "Learning in the 21st Century: A Trends Update."

During the event, which was attended by nearly 100 people, we learned about student and teacher perceptions of, and experiences with, online learning.  Some of the data might surprise you.  For instance, the majority of middle school students want to take an online course to get extra help and to learn more about a certain subject.

We also gained valuable insight from Janet Herdman (North Kansas City Schools) and Cheryl Rowley (Cobb County School District), our online learning practitioners, who have years of experience implementing online learning, from offering totally virtual student courses to providing enhanced professional development for teachers.

If you're interested in listening to the web session, please click here.  Feel free to pass the recording along to your colleagues!  Also, I encourage you to download "Learning in the 21st Century: A Trends Update" from our main Blackboard K-12 site here.

We are currently recruiting for participation in Speak Up 2008.  Visit the Project Tomorrow website for more information on how you can participate to make the 2008 survey bigger and better.

Stay tuned here for our newest, upcoming report, "Leadership in the 21st Century: The New Visionary Administrator."  I'll let you know when it's released.

Blackboard Managed Hosting: Doing More . . . Better

As one of more than 100 full-time professionals on the Blackboard Managed Hosting team, I’m proud of the fact that we are supporting educational successes everywhere in truly remarkable ways.  Our team provides services and technology that ensure the overall stability, reliability, availability and scalability of the Blackboard application platforms so that millions of users around the world don't have to worry about whether or not their Blackboard software will be available and ready, wherever they happen to be.  But we’re always pushing ourselves to do more.

In simple terms, Blackboard Managed Hosting is now hosting more clients in our datacenters than ever before—over 500 and counting.  As a result, not a day goes by that we don’t remind ourselves that students are accessing online learning tools through at least one Blackboard Managed Hosting datacenter every hour of every day.  Whether studying the latest advancements in vocational procedures in South America, collaborating with classmates in Japan, downloading lecture notes in North America or taking an online exam in Europe, learners expect and deserve the best software and support, and we are keenly aware of this.

Our clients are also doing more with their Blackboard implementations; and they’re setting peak records in terms of data transfer rates, numbers of users, and sizes of their databases and content storage, among other things.  We now have datacenters in five locations on three continents.  And we’ve spent more time and resources preparing for this busy back-to-school period in August and now September than ever.  As a result, the majority of our hosted clients have told us that they’ve had one of the smoothest beginnings of the semester experiences than ever before.  To me, that’s the most satisfying feedback we can receive.

We’re also doing more to communicate with our hosting clients and provide easy access to updates and further information.  Let me tell you about just four ways we’re doing that: