Professional Education

I’m very pleased to announce the 2009 Blackboard Exemplary Course Program is now open and accepting course submissions for review and applications for ECP reviewers.

Since its launch in 2000, the Blackboard Exemplary Course Program has helped faculty members use e-Learning technology more effectively by identifying and disseminating best practices for designing engaging online courses.  Using a rubric, instructors and course designers are able to evaluate how well their own course conforms to best practices for Course Design, Interaction & Collaboration, Assessment and Learner Support.

Please consider participating in the 2009 Exemplary Course Program by submitting a course of your own, volunteering to be a reviewer or doing both!
 
There are many benefits to participating in the Exemplary Course Program:

During T-BUG 20008, the annual conference held by the Texas Blackboard User Group, there was dinner and entertainment, of course.  Here's a quick view (early in the evening, while conference attendees were choosing dinner from the buffet) of the Texas Zydeco musicians who played, The Stringbenders:

More videos from T-BUG 2008 can be found on the BlackboardTV Channel on YouTube.

During T-BUG 2008, the annual conference held by the Texas Blackboard User Group, a Blackboard Client Success team member (Sahar!) recorded a series of brief interviews, including a Q&A with Sharon Davis and Kathryn Latham of the distance education group at Central Texas College in Colleen.

Sharon and Kathryn presented during the conference on how they use the Organizations feature in their Blackboard implementation as a "student center" to orient their students.  In this clip they discuss the diversity of their community college's student population, which is spread around the world and mainly comprised of U.S. military service personnel:

See the BlackboardTV Channel on YouTube for more video interviews from T-BUG 2008.

My Blackboard colleague, Sahar, who's on the Client Success team, recently attended T-BUG 2008, the annual conference of the Texas Blackboard User Group (T-BUG).  She took her Flip video camera and interviewed attendees, asking them about sessions they attended, the tips and lessons they learned, and important points from their own presentations.

Here's a brief clip of Rhonda Blackburn, associate provost, University of Texas at Dallas, and T-BUG conference planning committee member, reviewing the new Blackboard Connections community site:

To see more brief interviews recorded during T-BUG 2008, and other videos created by and for the global community of Blackboard users, just click over to the BlackboardTV Channel on YouTube.

Looking for an easy way to find your colleagues at other learning institutions?  Seeking a regional or special-interest user group?  Want to learn best practices for e-Learning and the use of educational technology?

You can do all of these at the new community website for Blackboard users, Blackboard Connections.

To access the new Blackboard Connections site, you can use the same easy login as you do for Behind the Blackboard and EduGarage.  If you don’t have one of these accounts, you can simply sign up for a Connections account on the new site.

(If you had an account on the previous Connections site, that account ID and login will not work on the new site.  Rather, your Behind the Blackboard ID will work.  If you need to visit the previous Connections site, please go to: http://communities.blackboard.com.)