Professional Education

There’s no doubt that the growth of digital learning content is accelerating.  Multiple resources indicate that a higher ed world of blended and online learning is rapidly approaching, some resources even cite the “flip to digital” occurring in the next 5 years.  Textbooks aren’t going away any time soon but their use in the classroom is declining steadily.  And, expectations are that instructors will graduate from eTexts to the more sophisticated integrated learning systems being developed by publishers.

What does this mean for you?

Blackboard can be a channel for all this content and tools, helping faculty make sense of the numerous digital content options available to them.  Blackboard offers a broad choice of content to choose from right within the Blackboard Learn course.  I would like to take a moment to look at one of our newest providers of digital content: Cengage Learning.

At last month’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference, U.S. CTO Todd Park and U.S. CIO Steven Van Roekel made an announcement that will change the way we access and use government data.  Their announcement was centered on the launch of a new “digital roadmap” that will encourage wider use of government data while making that data more open and more easily accessible to the public.  As the writers at TechCrunch put it: “With the launch of the new digital roadmap, the U.S. government is hoping to increase the way that users can access data in many different ways. It’s also designed to decrease inefficiency in government and to allow developers to build applications that the government would never have dreamed up.” The digital roadmap is based upon the following concepts:

• Open Data as the new default
• Anywhere, any  time on any device
• Everything should be an API
• Make government data social
• Change the meaning of social participation

For the past year, I’ve had the pleasure of supporting the Blackboard User Group (or BUG) program and assisting a number of User Group Leaders to launch or support their groups. So I can confidently say that if you’re not an active member of a Blackboard User Group – unlike the more than 1600 of your peers that are – you’re missing out on a great opportunity to positively impact teaching and learning at your institution. So, what’s so special about Blackboard User Groups? They’re client-run groups that give you- its members- the opportunity to network, stay up to date on the latest trends and information, collectively give feedback to Blackboard management, engage with subject matter experts and share best practices with a community of peers. More importantly, it’s this new community of peers – dare I even say friends – that are leveraging technologies as you and have faced similar challenges or decisions, peers that you can now turn to for advice and ideas to help you successfully advance your institution’s e-learning programs.

In today’s digital age, we can easily be overwhelmed by the amount of information that is constantly available at our fingertips.  This is undoubtedly true when it comes to corporate training. Especially when starting at a new company, it may seem daunting to learn all there is to know about a new job, new coworkers, or an unfamiliar industry.

This information overload is only amplified by the Internet, which provides information about companies on blogs, social media channels, and mainstream media outlets. Despite this potential flood of information, employing a bite-sized learning strategy can help your corporate learners focus on the facts that matter most.

As a member of the professional college and university community, one topic that has been of great interest to me as of late is the future of student assessment.  Considering that many students at proprietary institutions come from non-traditional backgrounds, should these students be assessed differently than their more traditional counterparts? What can the education community do to improve academics across the board while finding accurate measures for student achievement at career colleges?

The Higher Education Capacity Gap

During last month’s PCUS gathering, higher education attorney David Harpool put this concept of student assessment into the context of the “megatrends” seen in higher ed today.  Harpool began by highlighting the education capacity gap in the United States, which continues to grow as demand for education increases while admission rates at traditional universities remain static.