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We recently announced that Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) won a Gates Foundation grant for the creation of a Developmental Education Math MOOC. Tri-C chose to use CourseSites (powered by Blackboard) as their MOOC platform of choice. We checked with Dr. Charles Dull, Assistant Dean of eLearning and Innovation at Tri-C, to understand their motivation for creating a MOOC and its design goals.

Sign up for the Tri-C Pre-Algebra MOOC starting April 1^st and check out the CourseSites MOOC Catalog to see what other institutions are doing.

Q: Why did you create a Math MOOC specifically for Developmental Education? Who was the course designed for?

A: The Tri-C Math MOOC was created for multiple audiences, including first generation college students, adult students, and high school students who need to prepare to enter DevEd courses post-graduation. It is also designed for students who need help bringing their math skills to a college-ready level or improving math placement scores by preparing them prior for taking the test. The intent for the MOOC is to allow students to lessen their time spent in remedial coursework by testing into a higher level math than they otherwise would have without taking the MOOC.

Q: How will the creation of this MOOC help you meet your institution-wide goals?

The product management and user experience teams at Blackboard make it our primary goal to listen, constantly seeking out how we can be of service.

We’ve heard about the struggle for some educators to keep up with their active learners; we’ve also seen the scrutiny that is applied when institutions are faced with retention goals; we know the value that our ANGEL instructors are enjoying from the WhoDunIt report. All this and more led us to an investment in giving educators a tool to that made spotting the risks simple, so they can spend their time working with students to help them improve.

Over 330 customers helped us achieve the final design of the Retention Center. Members of the Blackboard Idea Exchange responded to surveys about how they assess risk and even what to name this feature. Instructional Designers talked with us about the conversations they have with the faculty members on their campuses as they help them deal with student retention challenges. Instructors talked with us about their needs, and spent time usability testing the details of the design itself.

In our final testing, the words most commonly selected by instructors to describe the feature were: organized, customizable, desirable, relevant, motivating, and empowering. Those last two really made an impact on us; we knew this feature was going to help educators. After one professor tested the feature she commented, “It motivates me to think about how I can help the students improve and succeed. I want to use it.”

Are you an educator? Get motivated. Be empowered. Check out the new Retention Center in Blackboard Learn. We know you’ll love it.

Did you help us design the Retention Center? Give us a shout out on Twitter! Want to help us in the future? Make sure you’re signed up for the BIE.

The most satisfying part of my job is seeing progress in attacking “big problems” in education. It’s when we take on these bigger challenges that we arrive at breakthrough thinking and innovation that matters. Today we’ve shipped a new feature for our Learn platform that I think fits that bill—a new feature called “Retention Center.”

The big problem: inability to track student performance and take action before it’s too late. There’s been much ink spilled in the industry about big data and analytics, and we’ve developed an entire product line focused on mining data to create institution-wide perspective. But academic research has shown that one doesn’t need “big data” solutions to yield meaningful insight at the grass roots, course level. There’s insight in patterns of student behavior, and in relative performance through course progression that can be very valuable to both instructors and the institution.

There’s a clear tie between the institutional level goal of student retention and the astute instructor’s early awareness of behaviors or results that suggest underperformance. Our new Retention Center is offered to help gather every piece of information about this area we can, using the power of technology to create insight, perspective and opportunities for instructors to take immediate action. Our hope is that it can help bring insight to instructors so they can intervene earlier than they might otherwise be able to, and to help them prioritize their increasingly limited time.

What does it do?

The Retention Center gives critical insight on learning and activity gaps to instructors, within the LMS, that helps them quickly diagnose students that are falling behind. Pre-configured and automatic so they don’t have to hunt for it. No set-up: it automatically calls out students that are at risk while instructors still have time and space to do something about it. With the feature instructors can see:

• Who’s logging in: this is a simple but powerful predictor of student success. Instructors see how long it’s been since students have logged in to the course and how many have been away for five days or more. And not by fishing through student profiles or reports but in an automatic view complete with red flags where they’re needed.
• Whether they’re engaged: which students have had low levels of course activity, at 20 percent or below the average in the last week.
• Whose grades are suffering: which students are currently trending at 25 percent or more below the course average so they can target extra help to where it’s most needed – even when it isn’t asked for.
• Who has missed deadlines: instructors might know this anecdotally or on a case-by-case basis, but now they can get a real-time view of all students that have missed one or more deadline.

Student retention is a big problem, and it’s being addressed at lots of levels with a variety of approaches. But few of them give instructors as much actionable data that can be used immediately. Few of them offer instructors so much specific insight on areas to engage without requiring heaps of time that they don’t have. That’s why we built this feature: to give instructors a leg up in tackling a tough education challenge right in their course.

If you’re interested, take a quick peek at our new feature in this video.

Cheers,

Ray

See how to win a free trip to BbWorld 2013!

Building—and launching—a career is a team effort.

Students, of course, are responsible for finding their own internships and jobs.

Career services offices, of course, provide resources to do this.

But a third ally in this quest may be less obvious: Blackboard System Administrators. In fact, you Sys Admins wield more power than you may realize.

Simply by downloading and installing the Internships.com building block during the busiest time for applying to summer internships and jobs, you are opening up countless opportunities for your students. One small click for you, one giant leap for student-kind.

It’s all about access. You and only you can unlock this veritable treasure trove of Internship listings within the Blackboard Learn environment for students.

 

 

As if that is not incentive enough, doing so can win you a paid trip to BbWorld 2013 in Las Vegas, where you will learn more ways to help the student body—and yourself.

Enter in two easy steps:

1. Download and install the Internships.com building block by March 22, 2013.

2. Let us know you installed it.

We are here if you have questions. Either way, let’s help get these kids some respectable work.

Guest post by Suzan Harkness Ph.D., Director of the Center for Academic Technology, University of the District of Columbia and ACE Fellow, Mount St. Mary’s University Class of 2012-2013

No matter how endowed or respected the institution, there are five essential elements of equal importance that bind together to affect the functioning of the other in a successful online initiative. Successful online initiatives require a basic understanding of how core elements work together and separately to create a sound and successful online education program or college. Building a successful online model is much like baking bread – there are really five key ingredients that make or break the recipe.

Flour – Flour provides the foundation for all other ingredients – Colleges and universities need a sound strategic plan, supportive infrastructure, policies and procedures, and dedicated budget to support the strategic initiative.

Yeast – Yeast is a living organism that grows and reproduces – Colleges and universities need their strategy and key administrators, faculty and staff to grow the initiative through peer review, peer-to-peer learning, collegial collaboration, collaborative support structures and shared services, vision, and continual improvement. A program, staff, faculty, and vision in the technological paradigm that does not grow and stay current will rapidly become out-of-date and insignificant.