Products & Services

The product management and user experience teams at Blackboard make it our primary goal to listen, constantly seeking out how we can be of service.

We’ve heard about the struggle for some educators to keep up with their active learners; we’ve also seen the scrutiny that is applied when institutions are faced with retention goals; we know the value that our ANGEL instructors are enjoying from the WhoDunIt report. All this and more led us to an investment in giving educators a tool to that made spotting the risks simple, so they can spend their time working with students to help them improve.

Over 330 customers helped us achieve the final design of the Retention Center. Members of the Blackboard Idea Exchange responded to surveys about how they assess risk and even what to name this feature. Instructional Designers talked with us about the conversations they have with the faculty members on their campuses as they help them deal with student retention challenges. Instructors talked with us about their needs, and spent time usability testing the details of the design itself.

In our final testing, the words most commonly selected by instructors to describe the feature were: organized, customizable, desirable, relevant, motivating, and empowering. Those last two really made an impact on us; we knew this feature was going to help educators. After one professor tested the feature she commented, “It motivates me to think about how I can help the students improve and succeed. I want to use it.”

Are you an educator? Get motivated. Be empowered. Check out the new Retention Center in Blackboard Learn. We know you’ll love it.

Did you help us design the Retention Center? Give us a shout out on Twitter! Want to help us in the future? Make sure you’re signed up for the BIE.

The most satisfying part of my job is seeing progress in attacking “big problems” in education. It’s when we take on these bigger challenges that we arrive at breakthrough thinking and innovation that matters. Today we’ve shipped a new feature for our Learn platform that I think fits that bill—a new feature called “Retention Center.”

The big problem: inability to track student performance and take action before it’s too late. There’s been much ink spilled in the industry about big data and analytics, and we’ve developed an entire product line focused on mining data to create institution-wide perspective. But academic research has shown that one doesn’t need “big data” solutions to yield meaningful insight at the grass roots, course level. There’s insight in patterns of student behavior, and in relative performance through course progression that can be very valuable to both instructors and the institution.

There’s a clear tie between the institutional level goal of student retention and the astute instructor’s early awareness of behaviors or results that suggest underperformance. Our new Retention Center is offered to help gather every piece of information about this area we can, using the power of technology to create insight, perspective and opportunities for instructors to take immediate action. Our hope is that it can help bring insight to instructors so they can intervene earlier than they might otherwise be able to, and to help them prioritize their increasingly limited time.

What does it do?

The Retention Center gives critical insight on learning and activity gaps to instructors, within the LMS, that helps them quickly diagnose students that are falling behind. Pre-configured and automatic so they don’t have to hunt for it. No set-up: it automatically calls out students that are at risk while instructors still have time and space to do something about it. With the feature instructors can see:

• Who’s logging in: this is a simple but powerful predictor of student success. Instructors see how long it’s been since students have logged in to the course and how many have been away for five days or more. And not by fishing through student profiles or reports but in an automatic view complete with red flags where they’re needed.
• Whether they’re engaged: which students have had low levels of course activity, at 20 percent or below the average in the last week.
• Whose grades are suffering: which students are currently trending at 25 percent or more below the course average so they can target extra help to where it’s most needed – even when it isn’t asked for.
• Who has missed deadlines: instructors might know this anecdotally or on a case-by-case basis, but now they can get a real-time view of all students that have missed one or more deadline.

Student retention is a big problem, and it’s being addressed at lots of levels with a variety of approaches. But few of them give instructors as much actionable data that can be used immediately. Few of them offer instructors so much specific insight on areas to engage without requiring heaps of time that they don’t have. That’s why we built this feature: to give instructors a leg up in tackling a tough education challenge right in their course.

If you’re interested, take a quick peek at our new feature in this video.

Cheers,

Ray

My name is Chris Borales, I’m the on the Blackboard Learn product marketing team and I wanted to talk a little bit about some great strides that Blackboard has made in the area of accessibility.

Blackboard strives to deliver a quality experience for all of its users, regardless of ability. In fact, in Service Pack 11, we continued to build on the considerable progress we’ve made in the area of accessibility by becoming the first LMS in the world to achieve third-party verification of conformance with the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.0 Priority AA standards issued by Deque Systems.

What does that mean exactly for users with disabilities? In service pack 11 Blackboard has:

• Increased focus on color contrast throughout the application ensuring that contrast ratios meet or exceed the 4:5:1 contrast ratio requirements of WCAG 2.0 Priority AA.
• Updated keyboard navigation within contextual menus and list action menus to ensure they follow commonly understood keyboard patterns.
• Controlled focus when completing tasks within the screen reader view of the Grade Center, ensuring the user is returned to the proper cell in the main Grade Center table.
• Made improvements to the screen reader interaction within the ‘fill in multiple blanks’ question when building and taking a test.

These enhancements greatly improve the experience navigating within Blackboard Learn and completing key teaching and learning tasks for users with disabilities. See more about what else we are doing to make Blackboard Learn more accessible here.

“Making accessible software is about so much more than meeting the standards. We continue to drive toward the usable and enjoyable experience for everyone,” notes Vice President of User Experience Stephanie Weeks.

With Blackboard Learn 9.1 we continue to provide all users a quality experience, and you can expect some great things to come as we move forward in 2013.

Blackboard Collaborate Customers and Partners,

I write today to acknowledge that over the past several weeks your Blackboard Collaborate web conferencing experience may have been below the high standard you expect from us.  I speak for the entire Collaborate organization when I say that we are deeply sorry for this, and we are totally committed to returning our service to the expected levels.  We thank you for your patience as we work to return this important service to the high level of performance you’ve come to enjoy.

Let me start with an executive summary of what’s occurring.  Collaborate has been subjected to a series of distributed denial-of-service attempts, or DDoS.  During these events a large number of connections flood our systems, draining resources and causing unpredictable behavior for end users.  Given the synchronous nature of our solutions, the impact to our service is much more noticeable and impactful.

It’s important to note that at no time have our systems been compromised nor has the Collaborate application failed.  Rather, network congestion caused by the DDoS attempts has prevented our community from enjoying typical levels of performance.

We have now researched and tested a path to resolution.  We have already taken steps to shorten the duration of the disruptions and are implementing a plan to prevent them altogether. It requires that we filter all traffic, and sort out the bad DDoS requests from the good client traffic.  As we implement these changes, there may be some temporary and relatively minor performance degradation, but we expect it to be a small inconvenience that allows us to confidently restore consistent and reliable service by early March.

We’ve emailed details regarding upcoming changes to Collaborate administrators earlier today.  Click here for details.

I want to extend our sincere apologies to not only our customers, but also to the impacted teachers and the students for the resultant service disruptions that these DDoS attempts have caused.  Every student deserves the best educational experience each and every day, and we take our responsibility to facilitate that experience seriously.

If you have questions or want to provide feedback directly related to this topic, please contact us at collaborateconfidently@blackboard.com.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Sincerely,

Maurice Heiblum

President, Blackboard Collaborate

 

Learning is not a spectator sport. Learning requires discussion, engagement and debate, all while actively looking back on experiences and interacting with others.

Katherine Dowdell, District Chair for Social and Behavioral Sciences at Des Moines Area Community College, knows how difficult it can be to encourage students to engage in their education. Katherine began her tenure teaching online courses after volunteering for the role never having previously done it. Seven years later, she’s now coaching colleagues on how to be successful online.

Katherine’s tip on getting student’s engaged? Set up an engagement triple play. Online classrooms can facilitate student engagement in new and different ways than in-person training. With online learning: 1. Students engage with instructors. 2. Students engage with content. 3. Students engage with one another.

58% of faculty members say that the growth of online education makes them more fearful than excited. Originally, Katherine wasn’t sure that her students were “getting it.” Her fears subsided, though, and she’s helped us put together an Instructor’s Field Guide titled, 5 Ways to Get Started with the Online Classroom.