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Digital Content Resources to Help You Get Ready for the Fall Semester

With the publisher building blocks which you’ve no doubt heard a lot about this past summer, faculty have the opportunity to integrate digital content from Higher Ed’s leading publishers into their courses. Faculty can pick and choose rich digital content from a wide variety of publisher sources, including Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill, Pearson and Wiley, all seamlessly integrated into the Blackboard Learn platform.

If you’ve already installed these building blocks, you may be wondering how you help your faculty get started. We’ve consolidated a number of publisher resources on linking accounts, pairing courses, adding content and more – all within Blackboard Learn.

The debate over the value of online learning has been going on for a while now – and has featured speculation from many critics who assume that there is no way that online education can fulfill the educational needs of today’s students, and vocal support from many who tout the importance of online learning platforms for education today. While there may be a few conversational tactics to address the doubters – the supporters of online education are getting a boost from a study released over the summer.

Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist recently contributed to The Washington Post’s “The Answer Sheet” blog, mentioning the possibility that students are more successful in school when they’re motivated by cash, prizes or other tangible goods, rather than by learning for learning’s sake.  Willingham points to a study by Freakonomic’s author Steven Levitt, which found that students did actually perform better with a payoff tied to good performance.

Imperial Valley College, a member of the California Community College system, has chosen Blackboard Learn as its new learning management system (LMS) for Fall 2012.

The decision comes after a thorough evaluation of alternative enterprise learning systems, and was driven after a comprehensive round of strategic planning at the College.

“We are really striving to be an exemplar among the California Community Colleges,” commented Todd Finnell, Vice President for Informational Technology. “When we sat down to implement our strategic vision for our institution, it became apparent that a review of our current e-Learning systems was necessary.”

I recently came across an interesting learning analytics infographic developed by Andrianes Pinantoan and his team at Open Colleges: