Higher Ed

Buffalo State will be launching a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on January 16^th called “Locating, Creating, Licensing and Utilizing OERs”. They have utilized CourseSites by Blackboard as their MOOC platform.

I interviewed Beth Burns and Mark McBride, from the course design team, to learn more about their experiences throughout the design and development process. Beth Burns is an Instructional Designer at Buffalo State and Adjunct English Instructor, Genesee Community College. Mark McBride is the Coordinator of Library Instruction and Coordinator of Library Liaison Program at Buffalo State.

1. What was the motivation behind providing a course on Open Educational Resources (OER)?

We are both strong advocates for affordable and accessible education for everyone. We believe that everyone should be able to achieve their educational goals regardless of cost. We also have witnessed first hand that many educators either are unaware of what OERs are or how they can be used in their teaching and scholarship. Furthermore, we know many faculty who are using OER and their work with them is not being recognized as scholarly. We wanted to build a course that could create a community of practice. A place where like-minded people could gather, discuss, support each other and create.

When Scott Davis, Technology Services Director of Applications Services, and his team set out to create a mobile campus application (“app”) for Virginia Commonwealth University (“VCU”), they didn’t just envision creating another app but rather, an extension of the school. To ensure this, Davis and his team partnered with Blackboard to develop a platform that combined VCU’s vision to bring technology to the campus and Blackboard’s expertise in building mobile applications that transform learning.

In the competitive environment to attract talented students in higher education, universities are looking to have an edge. They struggle to meet the needs and expectations of millennial and non-traditional students. Students are using their mobile devices for email, text messaging, and social networking.

Furthermore, today’s student is entering college already familiar with a course management system from their K12 environment. Through VCU Mobile, VCU is able to keep students engaged so they are more invested in the classroom, more likely to capitalize on resources provided by the institution, and ultimately perform better academically.

“Mobile brings down the classroom barrier and makes for a more engaging experience” says Davis.

Today we announce the launch of a new MOOC powered by the CourseSites Open Course Series, Designing an Exemplary Course.

If you’re not familiar with the term MOOC (Massive Online Open Course), read on to learn how the latest (free) trend in Professional Development can impact your classroom instantly.

The newest addition to the CourseSites Open Course Series centers around the Exemplary Course Program (ECP) Rubric, which is a useful guide created by distinguished educators and instructional designers that will empower you to improve your online teaching experience. Whether you are just getting started or are an advanced online educator, this course will provide you with a framework to help identify and disseminate best practices for designing engaging online courses. But you will not be alone in your journey!

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.”

Last week the IMS Global Learning Consortium announced its certification of the Basic LTI 1.1 standard, and at this week’s IMS Learning Impact conference in Toronto you’ll hear much more from the standards organization about this new standard. For those of you not familiar, LTI stands for Learning Tools Interoperability. The LTI standard allows for third-party tool providers to easily plug their applications into Blackboard Learn and other learning management systems. I’m a musician at heart, so when I explain LTI I often use Noteflight as an example. Noteflight is an online music writing application that lets you create, view, print and hear music notation with professional quality, right in your web browser. Since Noteflight supports the LTI standard, a music teacher can create composition-based assignment and grade the assignment all within Blackboard Learn. That’s just one example! The LTI standard has been used by educators to integrate content from other providers into their courses creating truly rich course content. At Blackboard we’ve prided ourselves on rapid implementation of IMS standards, and Basic LTI 1.1 is no different. Blackboard’s support of IMS open standards demonstrates a continuing commitment to creating a learning management system devoted to interoperability and openness. We continue to work with the IMS Global Consortium to expand standards support in our software and lead in the establishment of other industry standards.