by Angela Goldman
Date: Thursday, January 26, 1:00 pm EST (1 hour) Speaker: Tim Naylor, Director of Market Development, Blackboard To register: Click this link and enter your information in the spaces provided. According to a 2009 survey by The Campus Computing Project and the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications (WCET), nearly half of campuses that offer online programs report institutional profits from their online initiatives. And, nearly half of the surveyed institutions say they charge higher tuition rates for online classes.
The business case is clear: professional and career colleges that move online have an opportunity to greatly boost reach, enrollment and revenue – all without adding a square foot of real estate. However, moving to an online model is not simple – whether a professional or career college’s plan is to offer Web-only courses, provide hybrid courses that blend online and face-to-face delivery or complement campus-based courses with online tools – the challenges are cultural, bureaucratic and financial.
by Tim Hill
Through my career in marketing and sales management, I have learned how integral training and knowledge is to success in selling. Whether your company is launching a new product or service, updated features, a robust B2B or B2C promotional campaign or training your distribution channel partners . . . your sales team should be constantly kept up to date with the knowledge and skills needed to drive sales.
If you are already spending the time and money to leverage online tools such as Salesforce to enhance your sales efforts, whywouldn’t you include an integrated training component to dramatically impact your business results? Salesforce without this focus on training can be a real train wreck!
That’s why we developed Blackboard Learn for Sales: the first fully-featured sales training platform that is fully integrated with Salesforce. It has already received a tremendous amount of press and acceptance in the market, and we are looking forward to watching it have a significant impact on sales in 2012.
by Lee Perlis
As we approach the New Year, we are
reflecting on what we learned in 2011 and looking forward to all that 2012 has to bring. One of the top trends we think will change tomorrow’s workplace will be the spread of
the social enterprise.
What is the social enterprise, you ask? As it is described by
salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Mark Benioff, in the
video below, the social enterprise represents the new and meaningful ways that your organization can connect with both customers and employees.
by Jenn
Our recent blog post on the 5 Myths About Informal Learning generated a thought-provoking discussion on the landscape of informal learning in the workplace. We want to elaborate upon that discussion here, since it highlighted some key points about the importance of different learning strategies used in today’s professional training environment.
Much of this conversation hinged on a question from a commenter who asked about our definition of informal learning. He asked, if informal learning is defined as any learning that occurs beyond a classroom setting, then isn’t it just a normal part of our daily interactions, instead of it being a new strategy used by professional educators? Is it really something that can be directed, quantified, and oriented towards a larger goal? And can a LMS really aid this informal process?
by Kevin Alansky
As the New Year approaches, we wanted to reflect on some of the most important developments in professional learning that occurred in 2011. What stood out after looking at this year’s trends could be summarized in a single word: mobile. Mobile technologies are not only increasingly important in our daily lives, but are also playing a more substantial role in workplace training and education. Here are just a few examples of mobile developments in various professional working and learning environments this year:
Corporations and Associations: One interesting trend in corporate education this year was the integration of social media into workplace learning. Mobile education expert Gary Woodill has noted that the enhanced collaboration from social and mobile learning tools can benefit companies that adopt them early, especially by allowing employees to share best practices and ideas in real time.
Career Colleges: Students at professional and career colleges often pursue their education while balancing commitments such as holding full-time jobs or raising a family. Considering their busy lifestyles, these students depend on their schools’ online learning and mobile capabilities to take classes on-the-go.