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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:
I went to my first NASCAR race this month in Richmond, Virginia. I will be honest and say that my expectations were low. Before going, I just kept wondering, you stand at the track watching really loud cars drive around and around and around, so: “Where’s the real excitement?”
Wow, were my expectations blown out the tailpipe!
First, the feeling of adrenaline in the crowd at the track thrilled me. Then there was the excitement of the race itself, with car crashes, position changes amongst the leaders, more crashes and more lead changes.
My NASCAR evening was one of the most exciting times I’ve ever had at a sporting event. Now I am officially a NASCAR fan.
So, of course, the point of this post is to demonstrate that you never know what will happen when you try new things. This is the attitude I’m taking to a “Customer Care” conference I’ll be attending next month for our Client Success initiative. Customer care is what we do, but I can always learn more. And my work at a conference like this is to take every opportunity to discover new ideas about how other organizations are facing the challenge of communicating with, and providing the best service to, their clients.
For clients there are many ways to become more involved with us at Blackboard, such as joining a user group, participating in the Blackboard Idea Exchange, or reading and posting to one of the client-driven listservs.
And, during BbWorld ‘08 in Las Vegas this July, I encourage you to take every opportunity: try out a session you normally wouldn't attend, grab a Blackboard employee and ask her or him that question you’ve been dying to get an answer to, or – like a NASCAR driver – just take another lap around the buffet table for that third serving or piece of dessert.
Hello, All. My name is Matt Painter and I’m the newest addition to the Blackboard Client Success Blog team.
I started at Blackboard in June of 2005, as a technical support manager (TSM) and worked my way up the ranks to become the director of North American Support. Last August I decided to leave Blackboard to pursue a career in reporting and analytics. Luckily I had kept in contact with many of the good people at Blackboard and was aware of the company-wide Client Success initiative being planned. After discussing the position with Craig and Jan, I agreed to come back to Blackboard as the business intelligence analyst for the Client Success team.
In order for Blackboard as a company to become more proactive and foster greater client success, we’ll need to use the information we gather to find and react to problems before they are brought to our attention by users. It is my job to work with each of our departments across the company to determine the key factors that enable our clients to be successful, and then create reports that notify Blackboard employees if a client is not succeeding in the areas affected by those factors. This process might be easier for me to explain with an example.
Continue reading "BACK IN BLACKboard (A Window into Blackboard Client Support)" »
This month Blackboard hired a new vice president of Client Support. His name is Tony Mandaro, and prior to Blackboard he worked for a software company managing operations for 12 years. Tony's experience is just what Blackboard needs. He served in the United States Navy, received his BS and a Masters in Education from the University of Connecticut, and taught high school in Virginia for seven years!
While interviewing for his new position, Tony asked me some of the typical questions you would expect any interviewee to ask: What is the staff like? How do you measure success? What are the key operational challenges I will encounter, walking in the door? What do Blackboard users perceive as their biggest challenges? Where do I get a good cup of coffee around here?
Besides the coffee question, most of the answers were not short. Tony and I had a long discussion about the challenges we've encountered while the company and the size of our client base have grown, the benefits of our solutions and how we can exceed our clients' expectations of us. One of Tony's questions in particular did catch me off guard. Tony asked, "What is the one most important thing Blackboard can do to help clients view Client Support in a positive way?
Continue reading "Blackboard Client Support: Someone on the Phone for You" »
As you may be aware, we recently made the decision to partner with Sutherland, a best-in-class support company based in Rochester, NY.
We recently finished several weeks of training the Sutherland staff on all of our products, support tools and processes. We did this by sending a rotation of some of our best people from the DC Support team to be onsite in Rochester. Our Rochester team went through detailed training and then we looked over their shoulders as they began performing case work.
The feedback from the DC training team has been wonderful. They have been impressed by the enthusiasm of the Rochester staff and how quickly they’ve absorbed the material, and their best practices for implementation give us a ton of confidence they are ready to handle the support work ahead of them.
I know it is clichéd to talk about all the new things that Spring brings but I can’t help it. Here in DC the cherry blossoms are nearly at their peak, daffodils and tulips abound, and it seems that nearly every day I get an email announcement from a friend or co-worker who has had a baby. While I enjoy each of these things in their own special way, I can’t say that I was there to help.
Now, I can! Tomorrow I am going to be at the Arkansas Blackboard Users 2008 Conference in Little Rock. And I’ll be working with the attendees on forming a brand new user group. To keep you posted I’ll be tweeting while I’m there and afterwards I’ll blog about the experience. Little Rock – here I come!
This entry was written by Blackboard User Experience Architect Rob Fay (right in photo), a member of Blackboard's Product Development group.
Of all the courses I took in undergraduate and graduate school, only one of my classes used Blackboard software for limited course management functions. The instructor for that course chose to post her syllabus online; she posted the weekly assignments and readings to the space, and she encouraged the use of the discussion board. That instructor didn’t enable many features the system had to offer, but her effort was a start. And as a student, I didn’t know the full breadth of what Blackboard software had to offer anyway.
Nonetheless, I was excited that that instructor decided to use Blackboard software for her course management needs. Why?
Well, after all, the class focused on human-computer interaction methodologies. Why teach a course on system interface design and not leverage educational technologies?
Interestingly, we had a group assignment to apply traditional user-centered design methods and research to critique a chosen Web-based system. One group decided to critique the Blackboard system we were using.
Fast forward a few years.
Now I work with the User Experience ("UX") team in Blackboard’s Product Development group. It is my team's responsibility to critique Blackboard products and to make them easier and more enjoyable to use. "User Experience" is a somewhat nebulous concept, but our team follows Peter Morville's "User Experience Honeycomb" model (Morville, 2004) by striving to make our products accessible, credible, desirable, findable, usable, useful, and valuable.
To achieve such high standards, we must get you – Blackboard users – involved in the design process. So, how do we do it? And how can you help?
With the first days of spring under our belts, we in DC’s Blackboard office are looking forward to more warm days and sunny skies.
But I’ll be honest – my sights are set to a slightly warmer climate – Las Vegas in July.
Over 200 of you have already registered for BbWorld ’08. And I’m working hard with the Client Program Committee to select the most interesting client sessions! While you’re waiting for us to make the program announcement, how will you get your BbWorld fix?
130 of us have joined the BbWorld ’08 Facebook Group!
It’s a great place to connect with your “conference friends” all over the world – and to get special BbWorld updates.
What kind of updates, you might ask? Well...just the other day, I asked a question in the group’s discussion board:
If you were to ask Steve Wozniak, technology industry visionary and co-founder of Apple Computer a question – what would you ask?
Why, I wonder why KJ would ask this question? Does she know Steve Wozniak? Is she having lunch with him next week and need conversation topics? Or could it be because Steve Wozniak is the opening keynote speaker at BbWorld ’08? Why yes, that’s it!!
So seriously – what would you ask Steve? Check out the Facebook group and leave me your comments in the discussion board. We’ll pass your thoughts along to Mr. Wozniak as he plans his BbWorld keynote.
So in the meantime, check out BbWorld ’08 and the Blackboard Developers Conference at www.bbworld08.com to find all the information you need to register for both events. And come on, Facebook with us! You can always play a little Scrabulous while you’re at it!
Recently I completed an around-the-world trip for Blackboard to visit our offices in Amsterdam and Sydney. One of the many flights I took to accomplish this journey was a flight from Budapest to Bangkok on Malev Hungarian Airlines.
It was an old plane that clearly needed some interior upgrades. The in-flight movie was Tootsie . . . in Hungarian. You can't make this kind of stuff up. Not exactly a recent release. That experience got me thinking about staying current with the times.
My family typically makes fun of me because I hang out periodically on Second Life, use Twitter, or am daily checking my Facebook profile to see what people wrote on my wall. More than anything I do this to stay up to date with the latest technology trends.
I make these twice-annual trips to Europe and Asia for exactly that reason. I need to stay on top of what is happening in those locations in terms of staffing, operational effectiveness and any specific client issues we may be facing in those regions. Spending several days in our offices located in Amsterdam and Sydney enables me to help bring the team there up to speed on our latest products, processes and overall strategy. Visiting in-person also enables me to speak face-to-face with team members there about the overall direction of our company and Client Success initiative.
I recently spoke to a colleague at a U.S. higher ed institution, in the state of California. He and I discussed my trip, and he mentioned that one way he stays current with his faculty is by sending his instructional designers physically out to the different programs at his university to engage with faculty members. He explained to me how twice each week the Instructional Design office is actually closed, and those team members visit the different schools at the university to work one-on-one with staff members. What a great way to stay current with faculty needs . . . just showing up at their door a couple of times a week and talking with them.
When my Malev flight landed in Bangkok, the pilot thanked us passengers for flying with Malev and mentioned the airline had been awarded the designation "Best Airline in Eastern Europe" for the second year in a row. I wondered what the other airlines had as their in-flight movies.
I got an email from my sister Sue last week. She is a 9th grade guidance counselor at a high school in suburban Washington, DC. Sue wrote about a family with two children who was looking at an unconventional schooling path:
"The family is pulling the kids (2) out of school and traveling around the world for a year. They are going to "roadschool" the kids while they do this and have them blog about it on this site. I am so intrigued that I asked for the site so I can follow their adventures. I thought you’d find this interesting."
She was right. I’ve become engrossed by the plans that Dani, Craig, Caroline & Conor are making for their year-long around the world adventure. They leave in July and I hope you’ll join me in keeping track of them, the things they learn and the lessons I hope they’ll share with all of us faithful readers.
It takes a lot of work to organize a conference. There are so many moving parts, a constantly shifting timeline, and an increasing number of staff and vendors to keep on track and working to the project plan. Each year we get a little better at it and this year is no exception. BbWorld ’08 in Las Vegas is going to be great.
So I thought folks might enjoy a little behind the scenes look at BbWorld. Here is a screen shot of the conference registration page before it went live yesterday. Can you spot our mistake? Don’t worry, we caught it in time. Just.
Hope to see you in July!
I was recently visiting a Blackboard client in Canada. During my visit, with a Blackboard product expert, we demonstrated the capabilities of the Grade Center in the Blackboard Academic Suite Version 8. We met with faculty members to discuss its new features, and since the IT staff wanted to do a hardware upgrade at the same time, we met with system administrators to discuss the technical requirements of the implementation.
During the course of the day, the director of academic technology posed a question about how the institution was going to measure the success of the implementation. Ideas were thrown around about:
All of these seemed like legitimate ways to determine if the system is being used. Finally, the director spoke and asked how they would determine if this was truly impacting the student and teaching experience for the better:
These questions started a great discussion about the real, positive impact products can have on the teaching and learning experience. Soon ideas were flying around the room about figuring out ways to have a more meaningful measurement on the teaching and learning experience.
One discussion that particularly caught my attention was very close to my heart: measuring success by tracking the faculty and student support help desk tickets.
