Company

Guest post by Julie Evans, CEO, Project Tomorrow

• Did you know that 30% of high school students now say that they have had some kind of online learning experience in school, be it either in a virtual class, a blended class or a self-directed online class?
• Did you know that over 1/3 of teachers would like their districts to provide more online professional development courses?
• Did you know that almost twice as many administrators in 2010 are providing blended learning opportunities for students as in 2009?

“By 2020, the United States will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.”

This is President Obama’s 2020 attainment goal that he committed to during his 2009 State of the Union address. As a college degree is becoming more and more essential in order to find a job and achieve financial success, it is interesting to look at how this standard has changed over the course of the last 65 years. This map from the Chronicle of Higher Education depicts the number of adults with college degrees in the United States, by county, since the 1940’s. It is fascinating to look at how much more prevalent a college education has become, even over the past 10 years. Some interesting stats from the graph are:

• In 1960 only 9.7% of men and 5.8% of women had a college education. This took a major jump over the course of the next 30 years and by 1990, 23.3% of men and 17.6% of women were college educated.
• By 2005-2009, women were within 2 percentage points of their male counterparts.
• The northeast appears to have the densest concentration of college graduates.

Some have said that the sizzle has gone out of the franchise of the Virtual Learning Environment / Course Management System.  They’ve held funerals at conventions and proclaimed the death of the franchise; much like the sci-fi geeks said of Star Trek after Star Trek: Nemesis.   Yet these old franchises at their essence were powerful and by reconnecting to their original story and “re-booting” they have risen again.  If Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and Dr. Who can do it, why not the VLE and CMS.

During a recent trip to New Orleans, the Blackboard ProEd team arrived a day early to provide a day’s worth of service to the Samuel J. Green Charter School, a K-8 school with nearly 500 students.  As a company, we focus on technology to enhance the teaching and learning experience across education– but on this particular day, we rolled up our sleeves to paint, garden, clean, serve lunch and experience day-to-day life at this extraordinary school. The Samuel J. Green Charter School is one of four schools that is part of the FirstLine Network, an open-admission public school that fosters community in New Orleans.  On this day, we were lucky enough to assist the students in their Edible School Yard, an organic teaching garden where students get hands on experience, learning to grow and harvest their own food, then prepare the food which is served in the school’s cafeteria. Needless to say, we were all inspired by this interactive and positive learning environment and we words can’t describe how exciting it was to lend a hand to such a wonderful school. Watch the video below to see the Professional Education division of Blackboard in action. In addition to our manual labor, the ProEd team members also made personal contributions to be able to donate a much-needed SMART Board to Green Charter.

ProEd in New Orleans from Kevin Alansky on Vimeo.

Giving back

As evident from the outbreak of the H1N1 virus, pandemics can happen at any time, anywhere. In this day and age of transient populations, pandemics pose a serious threat as they can easily spread across borders and continents. Such significant global human and economic implications from pandemics demand proper preparation procedures to be in place, especially in terms of communication.