Developers+

By John Bourke, Educational Designer, Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia)

It’s official: the 2009 Blackboard Exemplary Course Program (ECP) is underway.  I know some readers of Blackboard Blogs are considering the idea of submitting a course for review by the program, so I thought I’d try to inspire the instructors and course developers among you to take the plunge, commit some time and submit a course!

For me, the ECP is a fantastic program with the worthy aim of identifying and sharing best practices in engaging online course design.  I’ve been honored to be part of the program as a director, and I find myself becoming more passionate about the program, exemplary course design and the idea of sharing best practices in online course design with the community.

Let me give you a closer look at why you should submit a course to the ECP.

For starters, and rather importantly, you will spend quality time reflecting on your course because built into the ECP nomination process is a comprehensive self-evaluation exercise using the ECP rubric.  Make no mistake: this is not something to be taken lightly, as there are over 50 criteria, covering course design, interaction, and collaboration, assessment and learner support. In addition, you will need to provide anecdotal and visual evidence to support your evaluations.  The immediate benefits are obvious; for instructors and course developers, this is a valuable and rare opportunity to undertake a reflective, self-evaluation of their course.

Last week in the United States, we celebrated National Customer Service Week.  While many of you have probably never heard of this, it is meant to recognize a commitment to service and customer loyalty while recognizing the importance of customer service throughout any organization.

Coincidentally, last week Blackboard announced the launch of our annual client satisfaction survey.  We view this annual survey as our most important tool for gathering feedback from our clients.  Your feedback gives us crucial information related to our performance over the past year and compares that performance to previous years.  More importantly, the survey gives our clients a say in the future plans for our business.

I hope that you can take the time to fill this survey out when you receive it by email.  If you have filled it out already, thank you for participating.  If you haven’t yet, a reminder message will be sent to you this week.  While we hope all our clients view their relationship with us positively, we realize there is always room for improvement.  I hope you will take a few minutes now and share your candid views about your experience working with Blackboard.

The survey will be available until Friday, October 24.

History dictates that when institutions are performing Blackboard system maintenance, testing, tuning, upgrading and related activities en masse, the Blackboard Support team becomes very busy.  This heightened activity tends to swell in the August – October timeframe and again during the December – February months.  We typically refer to these periods as "Back to School."

Naturally many people are calling Blackboard Support seeking guidance and assistance as they venture down these numerous paths.  And when you include the high level of adoption that Blackboard is experiencing, you can imagine how busy it must be.  In addition, the capabilities of the Blackboard application itself are being used at higher and higher levels everyday as system administrators and instructional designers become more and more engaged with the products.

Just how busy do things get for Blackboard Support during what is referred to as the Back to School season?  Well, here are some numbers that just might make your head spin . . .

As one of more than 100 full-time professionals on the Blackboard Managed Hosting team, I’m proud of the fact that we are supporting educational successes everywhere in truly remarkable ways.  Our team provides services and technology that ensure the overall stability, reliability, availability and scalability of the Blackboard application platforms so that millions of users around the world don’t have to worry about whether or not their Blackboard software will be available and ready, wherever they happen to be.  But we’re always pushing ourselves to do more.

In simple terms, Blackboard Managed Hosting is now hosting more clients in our datacenters than ever before—over 500 and counting.  As a result, not a day goes by that we don’t remind ourselves that students are accessing online learning tools through at least one Blackboard Managed Hosting datacenter every hour of every day.  Whether studying the latest advancements in vocational procedures in South America, collaborating with classmates in Japan, downloading lecture notes in North America or taking an online exam in Europe, learners expect and deserve the best software and support, and we are keenly aware of this.

Our clients are also doing more with their Blackboard implementations; and they’re setting peak records in terms of data transfer rates, numbers of users, and sizes of their databases and content storage, among other things.  We now have datacenters in five locations on three continents.  And we’ve spent more time and resources preparing for this busy back-to-school period in August and now September than ever.  As a result, the majority of our hosted clients have told us that they’ve had one of the smoothest beginnings of the semester experiences than ever before.  To me, that’s the most satisfying feedback we can receive.

We’re also doing more to communicate with our hosting clients and provide easy access to updates and further information.  Let me tell you about just four ways we’re doing that:

An exciting, recent development in e-Learning is the ability to create new and powerful learning tools for a course using "mashups."

Defined simply, a mashup is the combination of two or more data sources to create a unique result.  Often a mashup involves a map, photo, video and/or news.  For a more detailed explanation of mashups, check out this definition on Wikipedia.

Mashups are a popular topic of discussion amongst developers, but why do they matter to education?  They matter because they are . . .

• Alive: They are current, up to date, and so consistently relevant.  For instance, live election mashups show you how an election is changing as those changes happen.
• Interactive: Mashups can immerse you in the educational experience.  Google Earth, for example, provides the ability to traverse ancient Rome, visually follow the growth of the world’s population or examine more than 50 years of U.S. Geographical Survey data.
• Engaging: Because they are always relevant and immersive, and because they bring students into the learning process, mashups have the potential to be highly engaging.

At Blackboard we’re trying to envision ways to help increase student achievement by making learning experiences increasingly engaging.  Imagine being able to include a mashup in an assignment within your Blackboard learning environment.