As the U.S. Peace Corps celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, my husband and I were fortunate enough to spend it with our great friend, Sheila, who is now working as the Country Director for the Peace Corps program in Romania. Sheila and I met ten years ago on our flight to Ukraine to serve as Peace Corps Volunteers ourselves. Little did we know we’d be back in the same part of the world a decade later continuing to fulfill the goals of the program John F. Kennedy started half a century ago.
For those less familiar with the Peace Corps, it has 3 simple goals:
1. Bringing technical skills to interested countries through volunteer service
2. Promoting a better understanding of Americans in the countries where volunteers serve
3. Promoting a better understanding of other countries and peoples through volunteers
Edge Hill University in the UK recently selected Blackboard Learn 9.1 to replace WebCT Campus Edition 8 as part of a larger initiative for institutional growth and improvement. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Megan Juss and David Callaghan, Learning Technology Development Officers at Edge Hill University specifically about their evaluation of virtual learning environments (VLE).
During this podcast, you’ll hear from Megan and David about the factors that led Edge Hill’s VLE evaluation, the range of VLE providers they considered in addition to Blackboard Learn 9.1, how Blackboard compared to other options in the market and recommendations for other institutions who are beginning an evaluation of their own.
To keep up with the Edge Hill community, check out their blog, The Learning Edge. And to listen to the podcast, please click here: Candid Conversations: A Chat with Megan Juss and David Callaghan, Edge Hill University.
Ray Henderson, President Blackboard Learn, delivered the keynote at Blackboard’s 2011 Teaching + Learning Conference at the University of Leeds earlier this Spring. More than 200 clients across EMEA came together to network with their peers and to hear from Blackboard about the latest product and support innovations happening across platforms. If you missed Ray’s keynote, you can view it here in its entirety.
We were also fortunate to have Dr. Sugata Mitra, from Newcastle University deliver the second keynote. Dr. Mitra has spoken at TED and his “Hole in the Wall” research inspired the book “Slumdog Millionaire.” You can view Dr. Mitra’s keynote here.
Statements regarding our product development initiatives, including new products and future product upgrades, updates or enhancements represent our current intentions, but may be modified, delayed or abandoned without prior notice and there is no assurance that such offering, upgrades, updates or functionality will become available unless and until they have been made generally available to our customers.
“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.
