Company

K-12 industry leaders and executives are starting to take serious note of Blackboard and our giant push into the market.

With the addition of Edline to the Blackboard family, we have increased our K-12 community of practice and now provide a complete end-to-end solution set. Despite being known as a “higher education company” we now have more clients in K-12 than postsecondary. Who knew?

Brett Frazier, SVP of sales, and Rick Noble, president of Edline, recently sat down with Tom Vander Ark (of GettingSmart.com and a former BbWorld keynoter) to discuss our new K-12 position, Edline and the ever-changing market.

Brett noted, “Our strategy is driven by a view of an active consumer. This type of consumer has changed many industries from banks to bookstores and is beginning to change expectations for schools.”

During Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Obama stated that higher education should be viewed as an economic imperative and urged Congress to provide community colleges with the resources they need to become “community career centers.”  Community colleges serve as a career gateway for many Americans, and with an estimated 62% of all jobs in the US requiring at least a two-year degree by 2018, postsecondary education is becoming a prerequisite for economic success.

Obtaining a college degree, however, no longer guarantees employment. With the unemployment rate hovering around 18%-20%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, American youth aged 16-24 are struggling to find jobs. More and more employers say real-world experience is the key to getting a job. 90% of new hires will have had work-related experiences prior to enter­ing the workforce. And, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 7 out of 10 internships turn into full-time jobs. It’s evident that in today’s increasingly competitive global economy, students must take advantage of every opportunity to enhance their skills and marketability in order to ensure successful entry into the job market.

Recent cuts to federal travel budgets now have a considerable impact on the way federal trainers approach learning delivery within their respective agencies.  As the President calls for a heavier reliance on video conferencing and web-based capabilities to replace face-to-face training courses, federal trainers must continue to foster core competency and skill set development within their workforce.

Here’s our solution: Blackboard Collaborate, a solution that delivers highly effective and engaging online instruction, meetings, and help—anywhere, any time—across your government agency.  Blackboard Collaborate combined with Blackboard Learn mimics face-to-face learning that many federal learners have grown accustomed to- but it’s cost effective.  So if your agency is ready to deliver succession planning, streamline knowledge transition, enhance collaborative learning, reduce training costs, and/or improve mission outcomes, Blackboard Collaborate is the solution for you.

Here are some top features of the Blackboard Collaborate solution that will deliver cost-effective results for your agency:

• Web Conferencing facilitates interactive instruction, help, and meetings through an enhanced user experience.

• Voice Authoring gives you the opportunity to create engaging and effective asynchronous learning by facilitating vocal instruction, collaboration, personalized coaching, and assessment.

When combined with solutions such as Blackboard Learn, your agency will also gain the ability to assess learning outcomes in real time to increase trainee success and measure which training programs are the most effective. Explore the ways that Blackboard Collaborate can help members of your agency stay connected and remain on-task with training plans, even in the face of today’s budget cuts and travel restrictions.

Guest Post by Dr. Shirley Waterhouse, Senior Director of the Office of Academic Excellence and Innovation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

January is the time of the year when we all seem to do some reflecting.  As a director in the Exemplary Course Program (ECP), I look forward to this time of the year because I have the opportunity to begin the review of course submissions.  I also take time to reflect on the progress of the ECP program and the yearly advancements in e-learning pedagogy throughout the academy that are demonstrated in the course submissions.

To go a step further in reflection this year, I recently interviewed several of the 2011 ECP winners to ask them to reflect on the process of submitting their courses.  All of them commented on how valuable it was to receive input from peers at other institutions, and they all indicated that the recognition they received was very nice too.  When I asked Lorna Kearns, an instructional designer with the Center for Instructional Development and Distance Education at the University of Pittsburgh, about her experience with the ECP program and their winning course, Organization and Management Theory, she indicated that the self-review process was the most valuable component of the program for her and her colleagues.  “Going through the self-evaluation process revealed insights not only about the course I submitted but also about other courses for which I provide instructional design support. Working with two of my colleagues as course reviewers offered additional opportunities for understanding what constitutes effective online course design.”