Products & Services

Renee Citlau and her colleagues at Cypress High School in Anaheim, California, were puzzled why a student was performing much better in the online class Citlau taught than in his face-to-face classes, so she asked him why. The answer was heartbreaking.

“I feel more comfortable in my online class because no one can hear my voice and make fun of my accent.”

Renee Citlau, the 2013 Online Teacher of the Year, tells that story not to pull at heartstrings, but to demonstrate the potential of online classes to encourage student engagement and foster a sense of community.

“In the online classroom, it’s so important that community is developed, and we know that because we really have to work at making that online course engaging, or our students aren’t going to come back,” she said.

Renee, an online business teacher at Cypress High School, spearheaded the Anaheim Union High School District’s online program in 2007, and now helps her fellow teachers incorporate online tools into their classrooms. She uses Blackboard Collaborate to meet with students in her online classes through weekly virtual sessions.

We had the honor of sitting down with Renee in our Washington, D.C., offices and hearing from the best in the business what classroom teachers can learn from online teachers. Watch Renee explain the importance of developing community in online classes:

To learn more, check out EdTech: Focus on K-12’s interview with Renee on 5 Must-Have Elements for Every Online Class.

In 2012, we released the first Blackboard Collaborate Mobile app for iOS devices. The immediate response was rewarding: over 60,000 downloads worldwide. Now we’re expanding our reach even further.

Blackboard Collaborate is itself a collaboration. By working closely with our Product Advisory Council, I was able to gather feedback to help guide the future of our mobile initiatives. You asked for Android support and now you have it! We are pleased to announce Blackboard Collaborate web conferencing for Android, which includes the Kindle Fire HD.

Putting students first is worthy of praise. But don’t take our word for it.

After being named Best Consumer Value during the Paybefore Awards at the Prepaid Expo in Orlando, Florida, an independent panel of industry experts and visitors to Paybefore.com designated BlackboardPay^™ Best-in-Category, edging out offerings from American Express, Walmart and Blackhawk Networks for this honor. BlackboardPay is the only program designed specifically for higher education recognized with a Best-in-Category distinction.

BlackboardPay is an FDIC-insured prepaid card program that gives students immediate access to their financial aid and student payroll funds without having to wait for a paper check or an ACH disbursement, providing the institution with a phenomenal opportunity to provide their students with a program that’s practically unheard of in the student market.

With the cost of education becoming a progressively hotter topic and the long-term impact of debt becoming clearer to students, we know how important it is that students have free and clear access to their financial aid funds. Not just for the sake of compliance with federal regulations, but because every penny of these disbursements possible should go towards tuition, room, board (and pizza!), not to a bank. That’s why we designed BlackboardPay to protect students from things like overdraft charges and PIN debit fees, and made it simple to withdraw funds, surcharge-free, at 50,000 Allpoint® ATMs around the world, more than 3,600 Walmarts and thousands of in-lobby banking partners in the U.S.

Working with 1000 instructors, students and administrators to develop our last major release in November seemed hard to top, but I was humbled and proud to hear that more than 2000 have guided us in the development process since then as we hit another milestone with today’s release of a simply better Blackboard Learn.

Through our wide array of client programs, we empowered you to take ideas and work hand-in-hand with us through the development process, from the initial creation of the use case, to design and the field trials. And because we’ve invested heavily in these programs, I hope that when you see product videos, screenshots and ultimately get your hands on these features, you’ll say, “That’s exactly how I expected it to work.” Our goal is to let you focus on core teaching and learning tasks and not the technology support around those activities.

One of the first things that stands out to someone new to Blackboard Learn is the overall grading workflow. Starting with the Needs Grading View, you have an instant, streamlined view into what requires your attention.

This new release extends our inline (i.e. onscreen in the browser) grading capabilities from blogs, discussions, wikis and journals to assignments. Imagine the traditional workflow for scoring these. You would need to download the file, save it to your desktop, make edits, save again and then re-upload. Now you can make all those annotations (text edits, highlights, comments, strikethroughs) right on the screen. And it doesn’t stop there! Once you grade one student’s work, in just one click you can easily navigate to the next assignment – without having to go back to the GradeCenter to enter grades.

Assignments are one way to measure student learning, and of course, tests are another. You outlined certain scenarios that required us to change design, deployment and feedback options for tests, and today’s release delivers on those. You now have the ability to set different test availability rules for different users, or groups of users – for example, for students with disabilities who might need more time to complete a test. And on the feedback side, there is more granular control for what a student sees. So after submitting the online exam, a test-taker can immediately see the final grade but not the answers to prevent cheating.

I’m a numbers guy, so I would be remiss if I didn’t use this opening to mention my favorite feature that came out Blackboard Learn last fall – Test Item Analysis. I’m not going to get into the algorithms and backend calculations that were created by people far smarter than me, but in a nutshell, this feature measures the effectiveness of your assessments. Perhaps a question was worded poorly, or a student can justify an alternate answer, or maybe it was just a simple mistake and the wrong answer was put into the system. This feature helps you identify – and then automatically correct  – those issues.

Fear not, you don’t need to manually go in and regrade each affected test. Within this workflow itself, you can edit the offending test question and then hit “update and regrade.” Whether it’s five tests or 500, you just fixed it with one push of a button!

Now that you’ve scored assignments and tests, you need to analyze student performance in your courses. One option is to look at grades and the information in the Course Activity Reports, which track which students access your online materials and for how long.

Suppose we did that for you? In, let’s say a dashboard that measures student engagement and performance? That’s exactly what we built, and we call it the Retention Center. This automatically identifies students could be at-risk, and allows you to take action before it’s too late. Whether that’s scheduling office hours, providing more personalized instruction or assigning additional content, that’s up to you. Now you have the tool to help you do just that.

If conducting some virtual sessions or scheduling office hours is part of the plan for your at-risk students, you can do that on our revamped, modern calendar. It addresses one of, if not the most requested enhancement to Blackboard Learn. Those of you who are J’s on the Myers-Briggs indicator like me will love the ability to color code courses and activities on the calendar. And if you need to modify the due date, you can simply drag and drop to the new spot on the calendar –the date associated with the assignment in Blackboard will automatically update!

That’s just a quick peek into what we’ve done in this release for you. I could go on about the rebuilt Discussions and ways that we’ve incorporated assistive technology into the system, but I’ll let you see those in action on our YouTube Channel

And our support for you, the educators, doesn’t stop upon the release of the features. We’ve made a significant investment in empowering faculty members, as is evidenced by a new Faculty Resources page. There, you can find the most up-to-date information including feature videos, training programs, our MOOC catalogue, and on-demand tutorials.

We recognize that the time that we make new functionality available to you doesn’t always sync up with when your institution plans to adopt those features. In order to leverage these innovations and enhancements, I encourage you to test drive the latest version of Blackboard Learn yourself for free with a Guided Trial. Whether you want to see how we’ve addressed your concerns or if you just want to get a head start on rolling out these new tools to your students, the Guided Trial can be tremendous asset for you.

Do you have two minutes and want to see these in action before jumping in? Take a look at the video below, and you’ll see why Blackboard Learn is simply better for you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxdJ3ar12bE&feature=share&list=PLontYaReEU1uivbr7MFnCcdSgLgELAkRP

At Blackboard Collaborate, we’re always boasting about our web conferencing software’s ability to foster a live online experience that’s almost as good as being there.  But sometimes it’s simply nice to just get everyone together face-to-face. So we were ecstatic to descend upon Atlanta last week for our first-ever Collaborate Now one-day user event where we brought together 100 customers from throughout the Southeast to learn about best practices, tips and tricks, and innovative uses of Blackboard Collaborate.  Collaborate Now featured an opening keynote and roadmap presentation, 12 customer and staff-led presentations, an Ask-the-Expert area, a birds-of-the-feather lunch, and unbridled enthusiasm.

Blackboard Collaborate’s VP of Strategy and Operations Annie Chechitelli and VP of Marketing Valerie Schreiner kicked off the day by providing an overview of our platform and roadmap.  Between Annie’s jokes about how much she ate for breakfast and planned to eat for lunch, she gave a detailed overview of our global customer base as well as the demographics of the schools in attendance in Atlanta.  Val then stepped to the podium to emphasize the fact that the Collaborate product team truly listens to its customers.  She initially discussed a slide from 2011 showing what features Collaborate users most requested two years ago, and then wrapped up by showing how those features have all either been delivered or will be shortly – all because of the active, open dialogue between us and our customers.