Professional Education

Today, I want to share a website by someone who is passionate about leadership, learning, enterprise 2.0, and social business (not unlike myself!). Dan Pontefract, the man behind the site “trainingwreck,” is a learning and leadership advocate who believes that the two are both a collaborative and continuous process. On his blog, he writes about the confluence of enterprise 2.0, leadership 2.0, and learning 2.0 whether that is for audiences of corporate, higher education or K-12. So is your corporate culture ready for the 2.0 world?   Take look at some of Pontefract’s ideas and you’ll see that connected, always-on learning is the key to 2.0 level success.

Congress is taking steps to help our nation’s veterans find jobs in the current challenging economy.  Lawmakers are introducing legislation that would require training programs for separating and retiring service members and modify federal hiring practices to help new veterans find jobs. According to the Military Times, the Labor Department recently reported that one in four veterans age 20 to 24 are unemployed, and that the April unemployment rate for veterans discharged from active duty since 2001 is 13.1 percent, which is higher than the 9.9 percent national unemployment rate. I am curious as to what these new training programs will look like and how they will be implemented.

Today’s generation of warfighters are faced with numerous challenges – from evolving threats, to longer deployments, to humanitarian missions.  They need learning and training strategies that are agile enough to cope with such a landscape.  And that’s where Blackboard comes in.

Blackboard Learn™ is an agile, rapidly deployed learning system that integrates with existing learning environments to provide both the structure and flexibility recommended by Advanced Distributed Learning and trainees, and to accommodate how people are actually learning today.

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the trade association representing the software and digital content industries, just released the results of their prestigious CODiE Awards.  With only thirty-one winners from 395 nominations recognized for industry excellence, Blackboard is proud to take home two awards for Best Corporate Learning Solution & Best Professional Education Solution.  Both of these were for Blackboard Learn, Release 9.1 for Professional Education.  Also note this is also the industry’s only peer-reviewed rewards program, making the honor even greater for us!

If that wasn’t enough, we also just recently received several 2010 Brandon Hall Excellence in Learning Technology Awards.  Brandon Hall is the preeminent research and analyst organization focused on developing learning, talent management and business research to help drive organizational performance.

Blackboard is proud to be recognized in the following categories:

•    Best Advance in Learning Management Technology for Blended or Informal Learning (Bronze)

•    Best Advance in Social Learning Technology (Bronze)

•    Best Advance in Learning Management Technology for Small and Medium Sized Businesses (Bronze)

Cloud computing is taking the enterprise world by storm.  In fact, thousands of people gathered last week at the Washington Convention Center for Cloudforce, the biggest cloud computing event ever held in Washington, D.C.   Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff delivered the keynote address to a crowd ready and palpably excited about the shift to social, mobile and open cloud computing. Blackboard naturally was a part of the action.