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Since my first day working for Blackboard, I have been greeted by the same puzzled expression when I tell someone which department I work in: “ASP?”
It didn’t matter whether I was talking to Blackboard users, co-workers or our partners, there always seemed to be a lack of understanding of what our hosting organization was all about. Are we really an ASP? If not, then what are we? Does it really do us justice to just say we are hosts to Blackboard applications? While we do set up and maintain the servers on which applications runs, this is such a small fraction of what we do for Blackboard users.
I’ve found one of the main reasons our clients stay with us year after year is that we provide a fully managed hosting solution. This means we have people available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, monitoring servers, performing upgrades and troubleshooting any problems.
In addition to those more task-related duties, we have teams of engineers working on the “next big thing.” A few of the types of experts we have working behind the scenes to improve our solutions and optimize performance include:
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By Connie Weber, Senior Manager, Blackboard Training
I asked myself that question before I recently participated in a professional development program focused on building my training skill-sets. I didn’t expect that I’d really learn anything new since I had been teaching for 20 years and training for five years. But during that program – wow! – I was amazed at how much self-awareness I gained of my strengths and weaknesses as a trainer, and the new and useful techniques I learned for using technology as a tool in good teaching.
OK, admit it: How many times have you gone to a technology training class and learned all about clicking and pointing, but you never figured out how to use those tools in real life?
A quality technology training experience encompasses many factors, including:
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Blackboard Professional Education President Tim Hill invites you to attend our annual users conference, BbWorld ’08, in Las Vegas, July 15-17:
Tim and the ProEd team also invite you to join them for a Customer Appreciation Dinner during the event:
- Tuesday, July 15, for our government clients
- Wednesday, July 16, for our corporate and “for-profit education” clients
For more specific information about the conference, I recommend viewing the list of very useful client-led sessions reviewed and chosen by the BbWorld Program Committee, comprised of 325 Blackboard clients.
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By Kim Zartman, Senior Manager, Educational Programs
Lately, my team at Blackboard has been hard at work updating and developing a series of online courses to help faculty members design and teach in the Blackboard Learning System – Enterprise License. As a team, we unanimously agreed that the courses should not only include best practices, but demonstrate them as well.
But here’s the rub . . . perhaps because of our varied backgrounds (in higher education, K-12 and the corporate world) and experiences (in teaching, instructional design and web development), we each wanted to focus on different sets of best practices.
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By Eric Wilson, Technology Trainer/Part-time Faculty and Blackboard Certified Trainer, Orange Coast College
BbWorld ’08 is nearly around the corner now—it looks to be exciting and, as you know, what better way is there to learn about and share lots of different teaching and training techniques with e-Learning tools.
I look forward to attending this year’s users conference as both an attendee and presenter. I’m thrilled to be able to present during a pre-conference workshop, on collaborative learning and how the Blackboard Learning System – Vista Enterprise License can be an easy and effective tool for this. The title of my workshop is “Learning Together Online – Collaborative Learning.” Check out the list of pre-conference workshops for details about mine and others.
My hands-on workshop will include a workbook I’m developing with lots of useful information, best practices and resources. Here is a sneak peak of the topics I’ll be covering:
