Blackboard teamed up with ADP – a company based in New Jersey that provides business outsourcing solutions – to transform its learning programs. The organization decided to make a change in how it trained its sales force. That investment meant an improved learning environment for its employees through our Blackboard Learn™ platform.

Just a few years ago, ADP’s new sales associate training was an intensive, lengthy, and expensive process that required trainees to spend a great deal of time away from customers and prospects. ADP wanted to improve that process, and its business results, so the company decided to pilot a distance-learning program in order to streamline, and improve, its sales training regimen. Benefits of the new learning platform were evident right from the start. Although time inside a formal classroom lessened, students became more engaged in the sales process. Plus, comprehension quickly increased while retention and grades rose. In the end, ADP experienced a true impact on business. ADP Benefits from using Blackboard Learn:

Everyone knows that one of the hottest trends right now is Google+ (read “plus”). Despite limited access to the highly-coveted online tool slash social network, it is never too early to begin thinking about how trainers can use this forum in the near future. These FOUR ways to use Google+ in corporate training will have you hunting down an invite today:

1)     Centralize your professional and personal information. Not everyone wants to be friends with professional connections on Facebook. Google+ enables users to personalize their information in all the same ways as “the social network,” but now users can more easily separate the personal from the professional. (Insider tip: The trend is now leaning toward more professional use for this social network so take this opportunity to brand you and the work you do!)

Here in Washington, DC, a city filled with countless combinations of letters, the Acronym blog is an appropriately-named blog run by ASAE (an acronym no less), which stands for American Society of Association Executives. One of the aspects that I find most interesting about ASAE’s Acronym blog is its wide array of topic coverage for those within the association sector.

The blog focuses on issues relevant to association community, broaching a range of topics from learning and professional development to philanthropy. A post on e-learning within associations recently caught my attention. The blog, written by Joe Rominiecki, discusses a new report about associations’ usage of online education. The results were definitely positive. This recent Tagoras survey, titled Association Learning + Technology: The State of the Sector, showed that nearly 80 percent of participants found their association’s use of e-learning to be either somewhat or very successful. This is certainly fantastic news to us at Blackboard ProEd!

The ProEd division of Blackboard recently caught up with the Future Workplace founding partner and corporate learning consultant Jeanne C. Meister. She talked to us about the disconnect between learning experiences in the corporate setting and those in our personal world. Meister says that our behavior within and outside of company walls tends to differ greatly.

Why?  What is driving the difference in how we act in our personal lives and how we function in an office setting? As Meister puts it, to optimize the learning experience, the two approaches really should not be separate: social learning – the way we learn in our personal lives – translates extremely well into the professional setting, often providing unexpected rewards and benefits. The workplace learning expert offered up some thought-provoking questions on how we might contribute ourselves more fully in the workplace:

·        Would you book a hotel without looking at reviews on TripAdvisor?

·        Would you buy a book without reading the reviews on Amazon?

·        Would you make a restaurant reservation without looking at what others are saying on Yelp?

When enterprise decision makers are trying to determine the best software solution for their unique needs, they often turn to the Technology Evaluation Center (TEC) for analysis and recommendations.  TEC uses a unique technology to impartially evaluate and select the optimal fit for a business among vendors.  We are pleased to announce that Blackboard Learn ™ has been officially certified by TEC for online evaluation of learning management suites in the Human Capital Management Evaluation Center. This means that TEC has verified that the level of support Blackboard had identified for each learning management module (e.g., classroom training, e-learning management, virtual classrooms, etc.) was reviewed by TEC experts and found accurate.