Blackboard Blogs

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.

Why Blackboard ASP Became Blackboard Managed Hosting

Since my first day working for Blackboard, I have been greeted by the same puzzled expression when I tell someone which department I work in: “ASP?”

It didn’t matter whether I was talking to Blackboard users, co-workers or our partners, there always seemed to be a lack of understanding of what our hosting organization was all about.  Are we really an ASP?  If not, then what are we?  Does it really do us justice to just say we are hosts to Blackboard applications?  While we do set up and maintain the servers on which applications runs, this is such a small fraction of what we do for Blackboard users.

I’ve found one of the main reasons our clients stay with us year after year is that we provide a fully managed hosting solution.  This means we have people available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, monitoring servers, performing upgrades and troubleshooting any problems.

In addition to those more task-related duties, we have teams of engineers working on the “next big thing.”  A few of the types of experts we have working behind the scenes to improve our solutions and optimize performance include:

Technology Makes the World Smaller, Closer and More Connected

Watch this YouTube video clip of an e-Learning conference held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (and recorded two years ago, almost to this day), and compare how similar it is to the footage captured by a BbWorld conference attendee last year during BbWorld '07 in Boston, USA, which I discussed in a post yesterday:

If you'll be attending BbWorld '08 in Las Vegas, July 15-17, and plan to bring your video camera, please let me know at BlackboardTV@blackboard.com.  And watch for BlackboardTV crew members filming there.  During a session break we can discuss how wonderfully small, close and more connected the world is becoming because of technology -- both e-Learning and video.

How Could I Possibly Become a Better On-campus Trainer?

By Connie Weber, Senior Manager, Blackboard Training

I asked myself that question before I recently participated in a professional development program focused on building my training skill-sets.  I didn’t expect that I’d really learn anything new since I had been teaching for 20 years and training for five years.  But during that program – wow! – I was amazed at how much self-awareness I gained of my strengths and weaknesses as a trainer, and the new and useful techniques I learned for using technology as a tool in good teaching.

OK, admit it: How many times have you gone to a technology training class and learned all about clicking and pointing, but you never figured out how to use those tools in real life?

A quality technology training experience encompasses many factors, including:

BbWorld '08 Video Invitation to the Higher Ed. Community

Many Blackboard team members are involved with the planning for BbWorld ’08, our annual e-Learning conference for members of the global Blackboard user community, so BlackboardTV recorded a series of short videos in which some of the planners just sit and discus a few things about the conference that they look forward to, and extend an invitation to join them in Las Vegas, July 15–17.

Here’s a message from Blackboard's senior vice president of Product Development, Jessica Finnefrock, who, in her office, has the most comfortable arm chair I may have ever sat in:

(The music at the end?  From one of my favorite songs: "Big Butter and Egg Man" recorded in 1926 by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five.)

You can find Jessica's video invitation and more BbWorld clips at the BlackboardTV Channel on YouTube.

Facebook + Blackboard = Blackboard Sync

At BbWorld '07 in Boston, Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen announced we were going to help our clients connect with their students on their level and in a way that gets them the information they want, when and how they want it.

Today we took a big step toward that goal with the launch of Blackboard Sync, which combines Facebook with our Blackboard software.

Now, when a student is logged onto Facebook, they can use Blackboard Sync to receive a notification that there's an update or other information has been posted on Blackboard about their courses.  Receiving course information and updates through Facebook will help students be more in touch with their academic studies on a day-to-day basis.  The idea behind Blackboard Sync is to make academic information available to students wherever they are—and we know a lot of them are on Facebook.

Wizards of Widgets: Carnegie Mellon Students Create Blackboard Building Block for Yahoo! Dashboard

Earlier this year, I received a random e-mail from a student at Carnegie Mellon University named Ed.

Now, I have to admit that as the manager of Blackboard’s developer community, I receive quite a number of random e-mails, which range from students asking me how they can enroll in their courses to professors who can’t remember their passwords.  I don’t quite know how some of these folks find my name, but I do know that I can attribute the particular message I'd like to tell you about here to EduGarage.

Ed's email began: "I am a junior at Carnegie Mellon University . . ."  He continued: “CMU utilizes the Blackboard Learning System . . . one of our ideas for our group project was [to create] a widget of sorts . . . I have been researching your site and EduGarage . . . I thought you might know someone who could be of assistance.”

A few months later, which I’m sure included many long nights of coding by Ed and his peers, I found myself at CMU this past Friday, admiring the handiwork of Ed and his team – a completed Blackboard Building Block that displays such information as course announcements, calendar items and new course content alerts inside of a Yahoo dashboard widget.

Remaining Cool in a Crisis: Tips for Blackboard Trainers

By Kevin Reeve, Blackboard Certified Trainer, Utah State University

I have always been told the key to being a professional and successful trainer is the ability to adapt and take control of the situation at hand.

Perhaps the Internet goes down, computers are not set up properly, a particular demonstration doesn’t go as planned or a certain participant dominates the conversation, trying to take the agenda off task.  All of these events can test the true skills of any trainer.  I have had my fair share of these problems.

Thanks to the training I received in the Certified Trainer Program, and hands-on experience, I have learned to always have a back-up plan and to stay cool in a crisis.  I’ll share here some of the tips I follow to make the best of any training or presentation.