Higher Ed

I have never blogged before.  I use Twitter . . . more as a social experiment and to keep my girlfriend up to date with my business travels, but I don’t really consider that blogging.  Sending a text message to my Twitter account that I’m in the process of eating a cheese sandwich just doesn’t seem to be very interesting to anyone . . . including me.

My goal in posting to EducateInnovate this year is for this blogging experience to be a little different, because 2008 is the year we at Blackboard take a new look at “Client Success.”  In my role as Blackboard’s senior vice president for Client Success, I continually interact with students, faculty members and administrators who explain to me the impact Blackboard products are having at their institutions, and about the benefits they are receiving.

It’s easy to see that e-Learning, in general, is scaling rapidly across the world.  New clients in new markets are coming online with Blackboard software everyday.  Institutional and political leaders are supporting major investments in e-Learning infrastructure.  Online teaching and learning using Blackboard has clearly become mission-critical to institutions around the globe, and its importance continues to grow.

For Blackboard this means our clients’ expectations of us our growing, as well.  Implementations of our software are more complex than ever, and the stakes are certainly higher.  We’ll focus much of our time, energies and resources this year on improving the quality of our product development and the experiences our users have with Client Support, making Blackboard an easier company to do business with, and measuring the success of our efforts in these areas.

Those of you who know me, know I’m a metrics nerd.  I don’t start anything unless I know exactly how I’m going to measure how well it works.  Here’s an example why:

I read an article recently about Continental Airlines.  The company decided several years back that it would give financial bonuses to its pilots for using less fuel on their flights.  Seems like a simple enough of an idea: Save money by having pilots cut back on unnecessary fuel use and then pass some of the savings onto the pilots.

Of course, something else happened that Continental couldn’t predict.

The pilots started to wait to turn the air conditioning on in their planes until they were pulling back to the gates.  That meant passengers sitting on the planes got hot, sweaty and angry.  Then the pilots started slowing the planes down, as this uses less fuel . . . and also means planes were arriving at their destinations late, and passengers were missing their connections.  The hot, sweaty and angry passengers naturally took their rage out on Continental’s gate agents, who had to work overtime to rebook their passengers on other airlines.  What a disaster.  Continental’s pilots received their bonuses, but they sure didn’t make their passengers happy, nor did the company save the money it was hoping to.

An interesting aspect to this story is that I would bet the person who originally proposed this less-fuel program did so with the very best intentions.  Yet the impact of the program on both the airline’s clients and employees was awful.

We at companies like Blackboard must understand thoroughly what we’re doing; how we’re doing it; our impact on clients; and, most importantly, how we’re measuring the success of our efforts.  Communicating what is working and what isn’t working is how a company – or learning institution – builds credibility with both staff members and clients.

I interact with many companies that say they measure quality in their organizations, but I wonder how often the data they capture is shared with their internal business units, let alone their client bases.

Recently, I hired Matt Painter to be Blackboard’s Business Intelligence Analyst.  Matt previously worked in Client Support and, after a brief stint away from Blackboard, is back and dedicated to helping us measure client success throughout our organization.

Matt’s role will be to ensure we have control over the day-to-day analytical reporting of the client experience.  Specifically, this means measuring the impact our programs have on our clients and employees.  We’ll look to share this data with our clients as well, so you can see how we’re measuring up . . . pun intended.

Here’s looking forward to a measurable 2008.  Pass the peanuts.

As we begin the New Year, I’m pleased to announce we already have great news for Blackboard users: Last Friday afternoon, we signed a formal agreement to acquire The NTI Group, Inc., a leader in the mass alert and notification service industry.

This acquisition will enable Blackboard to better help institutions address several key challenges and trends within the education community, which we outlined in a press release issued today:

1. As online learning continues to grow and more institutions utilize the Internet to connect with traditional and virtual students, it is becoming increasingly important to have the capability to deliver mass communications with large populations of users across an array of technical devices;

2. In addition, it has become imperative that academic institutions have the ability to quickly and effectively communicate with their entire campus constituency in the wake of a range of school and campus incidents, severe weather and other safety concerns; and

3. Institutions are focusing on mobile-centric strategies and looking to tightly integrate their learning environments with cell phones and PDAs.

In the coming weeks, we’ll announce further details regarding the integration of NTI’s products into Blackboard’s offerings.  Additional information about the acquisition is available now, however, at www.blackboard.com/connect.

(This entry is part of a series by Gordon Freedman, Blackboard’s VP of education strategy, in which he reflects on technology and education as he travels around the world to meet with innovative education leaders and researchers, government leaders, and Blackboard clients who are experimenting in e-Learning and changing the education landscape.)

E-Learning is part of a larger set of changes in higher education globally, both in practice and in policy formation.  In this entry, “The New Education Agenda,” I aim to examine these changes from a traditional education point of view, and toward an education point of view that is more flexible, transportable, and interactive.

One can argue that the first level of technology revolution is simply to automate or translate what existed in a previous form into newer technologies.  The next level is often described as a departure, where more efficiency is brought to the previous form, but the functions are similar.  The final level, the level of innovation, is where the original objectives are met and, hopefully, substantially exceeded, but the means, or technology, is no longer the same.

E-Learning, in the first instance, was very much the conversion of distance or correspondence courses translated into Web-based courses or the extension of class-based materials onto the World Wide Web.  It was a matter of taking text and graphics and adding minimal functionality and moving these online.

Today’s e-Learning is in the second phase, that of efficiency and expediency, where what was done in the traditional classroom is expanded into e-Learning formats that either, one, extend the classroom; two, create a blended model of courses a student attends physically while studying, collaborating, and building projects online; or, three, move to fully online distance education courses.  These are the three common online modalities.

However, we are now on the border of the third level, that of innovation and departure from previous forms.  How will this final level materialize and in what ways?

Blackboard held its second forum in the Blackboard Education Leadership Series on November 14.  The forum, titled “Promises and Pitfalls of Accountability in Higher Education,” was held at the National Press Club in downtown Washington, D.C.

Five experts on assessment in higher education participated in a panel discussion of the increasingly important and innovative roles that data, measurement, and technology play in the improvement of student learning and institutional accountability.

Pictured above are the forum panel members, from left to right:

• Dr. Catherine Finnegan, Director, Assessment & Public Information, Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia
• Dr. Cathy Kelley, Assistant Provost for Educational Technology, Fairleigh Dickinson University
• Dr. Steven Crow, President, Higher Learning Commission
• Dr. Peggy Maki, International advocate for student learning assessment and author of Assessing for Learning: Building a Sustainable Commitment Across the Institution
• Moderator Terrell Rhodes, Vice President of Quality, Curriculum & Assessment, Association of American Colleges and Universities

Forum Attendees

Following their informative exchange, the panelists answered questions posed by audience members, comprised of representatives from several learning institutions, including Baltimore International College, Bowie State University, Georgetown University, Howard University and Morgan State University; education associations, such as the American Council on Education, and Center for College Affordability and Productivity; U.S. Congressional staff members; and writers from industry publications and the mainstream media, such as The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Magazine Group and U.S. News & World Report.

Panel Discussion

To open the forum, after introducing each of the panelists, Mr. Rhodes slyly framed the discussion with a provocative question: “A culture change is occurring.  We live in a culture with NCLB [No Child Left Behind], rankings for everything, and we want to know the score of everything.  What’s wrong with that?”

(This journal covers my travels, meetings, and reflections about technology and education around the world with education and government leaders, education researchers and innovators, and Blackboard clients experimenting with changing the education landscape.)

Lisboa, Portugal | October 15, 2007

It was 10 a.m. in the ancient capital of Portugal.  Several kilometers from the place on the river where Vasco de Gama and others launched their voyages of discovery centuries ago, eLearning Lisboa 2007 was about to launch.  In a modern glass and steel structure, the Congress Center, a conference with well over 1,000 people attending from Portugal and across Europe came to life.  This was the fourth major European Union conference on education.

eLearning Lisboa 2007 was planned as Portugal takes over the presidency of the European Union.  Across the EU, there are a handful of important initiatives that allow the European members to coordinate and integrate discussions about innovation in education.  E-Learning is seen as a part of the important process of bringing together learning standards and processes, using technology as a lever for social change.