Your college or university needs a mobile application to better connect with students, faculty, and alumni, on the go, and often in their preferred medium.
The Opportunity
According to Pew Internet research, 85% of American adults own a cell phone and now use the devices to do much more than make phone calls. Furthermore, a new eMarketer report found that nearly 90% of students in the class of 2016 will own a smartphone by the time they graduate.
As a result of this increase in mobile usage, along with increased demand for university-student interaction, more and more schools are turning to mobile apps to better engage their community.
This infographic, which illustrates data from a Pew Internet survey, illustrates some key metrics around digital engagement and higher education.
Specifically, we’re excited to see that there is plenty of expected growth for students using mobile devices to engage with their curriculum.
Here are the three stats that we found most interesting:
77% of surveyed college presidents say their school offers online courses.
60% of respondents believe that by 2020, hybrid classes will combine online learning with less-frequent on-campus, in-person class meetings. (A trend also known as blended learning!)
84% of college graduates say going to college was a good investment for them.
You see one in most every student’s hand as if it’s a permanent tattoo…and, most likely, it is.
Smartphones and tablets are experiencing market adoption rates far greater than those we saw with the killer tech of the past three decades. College students don’t just hope their schools will incorporate mobile learning into their education…they expect it.
To make it easier for institutions to manage classroom information from their administrative and academic systems, Blackboard Learn is partnering with another of the industry’s leading educational products, Colleague by Ellucian.
“We are always trying to create improvements in the overall learning experience,” said Jessica Finnefrock, Senior Vice President of Product Strategy and Development at Blackboard. “This partnership is part of our commitment to help our clients get the most out of their technology investments and our mission to create more open and interoperable frameworks for education technology.”
Using rich media solutions, like video, in the classroom helps enable the development of media literacy, higher order thinking skills, and a deeper connection to the curriculum being explored. Recently, Blackboard expanded its partnership with Kaltura, the world’s first Open Source Online Video Platform, to all institutions using Moodlerooms’s Moodle-based platform, joule. Also new, Blackboard and Kaltura are now offering the Blackboard Building Block™ more broadly to Blackboard Learn™ customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, expanding the availability of Kaltura’s video tools and capabilities in Blackboard’s flagship learning management system.
Like Blackboard, Kaltura strives to make the learning experience seamless for faculty and students. Video wasn’t always easily accessible to Blackboard users, as you can learn from the video below. In the past, instructors would go to one system to upload and manage content and then grab an embed code to add video to the appropriate web page or course. At the very least, this was an inconvenient workflow; in a worst case scenario, this could be time consuming and problematic for the instructor.
The Kaltura Video Building Block removes these manual steps from the process of assigning videos to various courses, assignments and pages. Users can stay within the Blackboard Learn platform through the entire process – essentially all content can be pushed into Blackboard programmatically and any Blackboard specific data can be synched back to the Kaltura system automatically. The result? A seamless experience for faculty and students.
