Professional Education

We are so excited to share that Blackboard Inc’s Blackboard Learn™ , Release 9.1, was recognized by Bersin & Associates 2011 Learning Leaders® Program for vendor innovation in learning and talent management.   As you probably know, the Blackboard Learn platform is implemented by corporations, small and medium-sized businesses, associations, and government agencies looking for cost-effective ways to deliver training, customer service, leadership development and much more.

Every once in a while you discover a blog where the content and voice truly resonate with you (which of course we hope you find with Next Level Learning!).  For me, that blog is Many Ways to Learn by Mike Petersell.   Petersell is currently Director of the Management Center for Learning & Performance, but has spent over twenty years in the professional education world through positions ranging from stand-up trainer to e-learning course developer to instructional designer. Petersell explores the latest topics and trends in the world of learning technology.  Some of my favorite postings include:

Let’s say your company has a new product update and you need to get the information out fast to your team of sales and product managers. Or maybe your company is growing quickly and you need to train a brand new team in a matter of days.  Did a new certification just get released and you need to get information out to your association members ASAP?  No problem!  This is where Blackboard and rapid e-learning tools like Brainshark and Captivate come in.

Brainshark is an online presentation tool for business communications and e-learning, where you can easily create voice-enhanced presentations with slides, images, video, the works!  No need to gather everyone in a single room or even to schedule a webinar.  This is truly on-demand creation, deployment, and learning. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO0eJsJ6yhs

Captivate is a part of the Adobe suite and goes beyond normal teaching tools to create engaging, online teaching tools.  Some of the benefits touted in the video below include  the rapid development of simulations or scenario learning , the reduction of development and deployment costs, and of course, improvement in training effectiveness.  Oh, and don’t forget the Adobe Learning Summit is coming up March 21^st in Orlando, FL. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaBb8Wi25Pg

“By 2020, the United States will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.”

This is President Obama’s 2020 attainment goal that he committed to during his 2009 State of the Union address. As a college degree is becoming more and more essential in order to find a job and achieve financial success, it is interesting to look at how this standard has changed over the course of the last 65 years. This map from the Chronicle of Higher Education depicts the number of adults with college degrees in the United States, by county, since the 1940’s. It is fascinating to look at how much more prevalent a college education has become, even over the past 10 years. Some interesting stats from the graph are:

• In 1960 only 9.7% of men and 5.8% of women had a college education. This took a major jump over the course of the next 30 years and by 1990, 23.3% of men and 17.6% of women were college educated.
• By 2005-2009, women were within 2 percentage points of their male counterparts.
• The northeast appears to have the densest concentration of college graduates.

During a recent trip to New Orleans, the Blackboard ProEd team arrived a day early to provide a day’s worth of service to the Samuel J. Green Charter School, a K-8 school with nearly 500 students.  As a company, we focus on technology to enhance the teaching and learning experience across education– but on this particular day, we rolled up our sleeves to paint, garden, clean, serve lunch and experience day-to-day life at this extraordinary school. The Samuel J. Green Charter School is one of four schools that is part of the FirstLine Network, an open-admission public school that fosters community in New Orleans.  On this day, we were lucky enough to assist the students in their Edible School Yard, an organic teaching garden where students get hands on experience, learning to grow and harvest their own food, then prepare the food which is served in the school’s cafeteria. Needless to say, we were all inspired by this interactive and positive learning environment and we words can’t describe how exciting it was to lend a hand to such a wonderful school. Watch the video below to see the Professional Education division of Blackboard in action. In addition to our manual labor, the ProEd team members also made personal contributions to be able to donate a much-needed SMART Board to Green Charter.

ProEd in New Orleans from Kevin Alansky on Vimeo.

Giving back