Developers+

In 1924, Kleenex launched its “facial tissue”, a disposable makeup remover. Makeup remover? While there are no doubt lots of people who use facial tissue to remove their makeup, clean up spills, hold chewing gum, and a thousand other things, I’d venture a guess that most of us, when we say, “I need a Kleenex”, mean we need a handkerchief. Therein lies the lesson: expect the unexpected.

In Part II of my blog series highlighting our clients’ successful upgrade to Release 9.1, we take a look at the University of Richmond. Home to NCAA basketball’s Richmond Spiders and one of the highest ranked liberal arts schools in the U.S., University of Richmond supports a growing population of 4,045 students and 379 faculty members. Of the university’s 60+ majors and thousands of courses, zero (yes, that’s none, folks) are taught by teaching assistants. That means Richmond’s faculty is highly involved in the hands-on education of its student body. It’s Fred Hagemeister’s job to ensure they have the best tools to do so. Fred is the Academic Technology Services Coordinator at the university’s Center for Teaching + Learning +Technology and Richmond’s leading Blackboard expert.

Hi. My name is Tiffany Tooley and I am the Blackboard Community Manager. In this role, I have the opportunity of working to support a unique series of programs, developed to help our clients have a more valuable and meaningful experience as they engage with the platform and seek input and experiences from their peers  across the  greater Blackboard Community. In doing so, I get to meet our terrific clients and listen as they share their stories and ideas about impacting education and their relationship with Blackboard. I also get the opportunity to retell them here. With over 1,200 Blackboard clients currently using our latest generation platform, my new blog series will highlight several of our clients that have successfully upgraded in the past year. My first spotlight will focus on Concordia University.

The Arkansas Blackboard Users Group (ARbug) recently held their annual user’s conference, and I was lucky enough to take part in the festivities. The conference took place in beautiful Hot Springs, Arkansas on the campus of National Park Community College. The theme of the conference was, “Educate. Communicate. Collaborate,” and the group of ~100 clients, Blackboarders and Blackboard Partners did everything they could to make that theme a reality. The conference began on Wednesday, March 9 — in the brand new Frederick Dierks Center for Nursing and Health Sciences, a beautiful building with a state-of-the-art Amphitheater – with two workshops designed to build collaboration amongst two groups of the educational community – Online Course Builders and System Administrators.

Pilot rounds of Suggestion Squads for Course Delivery, Community Management, and Xythos just concluded voting a few weeks ago.  Now, we are in the middle of recruiting for Blackboard Learn, Release 9.1 Service Pack 8 Product Development Partnerships (PDPs).  We also just announced two new programs for ANGEL clients, a Content Conversion PDP and a new Office Hours Cohort program; we are making plans to kickoff another Bug Squad,  we have a SCORM Beta program in progress, as well as the Accessibility Grant program.  And, we have installation and integration testing opportunities coming soon along with the ongoing user experience testing and product surveys that we conduct.