Welcome

My name is Chris Borales, I’m the on the Blackboard Learn product marketing team and I wanted to talk a little bit about some great strides that Blackboard has made in the area of accessibility.

Blackboard strives to deliver a quality experience for all of its users, regardless of ability. In fact, in Service Pack 11, we continued to build on the considerable progress we’ve made in the area of accessibility by becoming the first LMS in the world to achieve third-party verification of conformance with the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.0 Priority AA standards issued by Deque Systems.

What does that mean exactly for users with disabilities? In service pack 11 Blackboard has:

• Increased focus on color contrast throughout the application ensuring that contrast ratios meet or exceed the 4:5:1 contrast ratio requirements of WCAG 2.0 Priority AA.
• Updated keyboard navigation within contextual menus and list action menus to ensure they follow commonly understood keyboard patterns.
• Controlled focus when completing tasks within the screen reader view of the Grade Center, ensuring the user is returned to the proper cell in the main Grade Center table.
• Made improvements to the screen reader interaction within the ‘fill in multiple blanks’ question when building and taking a test.

These enhancements greatly improve the experience navigating within Blackboard Learn and completing key teaching and learning tasks for users with disabilities. See more about what else we are doing to make Blackboard Learn more accessible here.

“Making accessible software is about so much more than meeting the standards. We continue to drive toward the usable and enjoyable experience for everyone,” notes Vice President of User Experience Stephanie Weeks.

With Blackboard Learn 9.1 we continue to provide all users a quality experience, and you can expect some great things to come as we move forward in 2013.

Our mission at Blackboard, “everyone educated,” is admittedly ambitious, but this past week, we teamed up with the U.S. Embassies in the Philippines and Thailand to take a step toward this goal in those countries. Blackboard hosted two round-table discussions with world leaders in higher education on how we can work together to provide students a world-class education as a means to improve those nations’ economies.

These events featured engaging conversations with key education leaders from the Philippines, Thailand and abroad on regional educational technology imperatives, and how technology can be used to drive economic growth and move these countries to more knowledge-based economies. Speakers shared how Blackboard technology was used to train close to 7 million citizens to build a better labor market and improve local economies in Latin America.

We at Blackboard are proud to share our expertise in using technology to enhance learning, and will continue to partner with world leaders to lead the discussion around the future of education in the U.S. and abroad.

 

Learning is not a spectator sport. Learning requires discussion, engagement and debate, all while actively looking back on experiences and interacting with others.

Katherine Dowdell, District Chair for Social and Behavioral Sciences at Des Moines Area Community College, knows how difficult it can be to encourage students to engage in their education. Katherine began her tenure teaching online courses after volunteering for the role never having previously done it. Seven years later, she’s now coaching colleagues on how to be successful online.

Katherine’s tip on getting student’s engaged? Set up an engagement triple play. Online classrooms can facilitate student engagement in new and different ways than in-person training. With online learning: 1. Students engage with instructors. 2. Students engage with content. 3. Students engage with one another.

58% of faculty members say that the growth of online education makes them more fearful than excited. Originally, Katherine wasn’t sure that her students were “getting it.” Her fears subsided, though, and she’s helped us put together an Instructor’s Field Guide titled, 5 Ways to Get Started with the Online Classroom.

Every once in a while, we have to tackle something outside of our comfort zone. Whether that something is running a marathon or teaching an online course after years of in-person instruction, everyone goes through moments of discomfort.

Katherine Dowdell, an instructor with over 20-years of in-person classroom experience, was thrown into an uncomfortable situation. Asked to teach an online-course at Des Moines Area Community College, Katherine was at first unsure if her students were “getting it,” or how she was coming across. After plenty of trial and error, and now with seven years of online teaching under her belt, Katherine is an expert. She even coaches colleagues on how to succeed in an online classroom!  (Especially important since 58% of faculty said that the growth of online education made them more fearful than excited!)

Just a few years ago, the “smart money” for school districts was on 1:1 computing where schools issued each student a laptop. While there is a role for 1:1 initiatives, increasingly the dialogue has evolved to bring-your-own-device (BYOD), which focuses on the use of student-owned mobile devices, and for good reason. Research shows that “active learners” (students who have grown up with technology and expect it to be readily available) want to bring their own devices to school – and are driving changes in mobile phone use policies.

Blackboard Inc. and Project Tomorrow’s Speak Up National Research Project found that in the fall of 2010, nearly 50 percent of middle and high school students said they carried some type of smartphone – a 47 percent increase from fall 2009. The National School Board Association found that 63 percent of students use mobile devices in schools, even when prohibited.

But what does an effective BYOD policy look like? And how are districts overcoming the biggest challenges of mobile adoption: equity and access?

I’m learning a lot from the innovative schools and administrators Blackboard works with – educators who are successfully leveraging technology to enhance learning experiences for their students. They first tackle the real issue of how they want to use technology to improve teaching and learning. As a result, they create a clear strategy before making a purchase or developing a policy. Here are some effective practices from clients who went down the BYOD route.

Getting Started

If a school decides to adopt BYOD, a further challenge lies in finding the budget to not only to get a program off the ground, including bandwidth for school buildings and devices for students who don’t have them, but to maintain it. Several schools are overcoming this hurdle by seeking donor and government support according to Education Week’s Mobile Learning Costs Add Up report:

• Through donated funds, St. Marys City School System in St. Marys, Ohio received free smartphones for six classes of 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th graders and pays for broadband service and software licensing from the local provider. New phones are provided each year and the district expects the cost to drop as more students participate. This arrangement saved approximately $60,000 in startup costs by relying on the service provider’s infrastructure.

• Many schools turn to E-Rate funding, a program for discounted telecommunications services from the Schools and Libraries Division of the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC), a division of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The program provides 20 to 90 percent discounts for services based on location and need.

Student Preference

After forming a stable and effective BYOD policy, working with students’ technology preferences can be another challenge; today’s active learner wants more control over the education experience. Once you open the door to BYOD, you’re also inviting various experience levels using different devices, applications and technology systems.

Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland, Ca. relaxed its requirements for what applications students can use to complete assignments. For example, both PowerPoint (for PC/Android-based devices) and Keynote (for Mac/iPads) can be used for presentations. The school has found that students are more productive when they can make their own choices, as long as instructors can view and grade the end product.