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5 Ways Career Colleges Will Get the Most from Technology in 2013

Angela Goldman — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 07:49:15 +0000

With a new semester kicking off at many professional colleges and universities, we’ve
been thinking about the ways these institutions will evolve over the coming year. There’s no doubt that technology will continue to play a pivotal role in the way career colleges educate learners – helping these schools maintain their leadership in leveraging technology for student success.

Here are the top five ways professional colleges and universities will continue to get the most out of technology in 2013:

MORE hybrid and online-only classes
Did you know that 30% of today’s higher education students take at least one class online? Recent studies show that those numbers are growing, and we believe professional and career colleges continue to lead in the pack when it comes to transitioning classes to the online environment. Of the many benefits to online learning, perhaps the most pertinent to career colleges is that e-learning will allow more non-traditional students to gain access to higher education.

MORE mobile course content
We’ve written before that nearly half of all students already use smartphones for school-related tasks, and with increasing adoption of smartphones and tablet PCs alike, we expect this number to grow in 2013. Professional colleges and universities are already delivering campus news and information, as well as course content, on mobile devices, and we look forward to seeing how they develop mobile-specific content such as lectures and exam delivery this year.

MORE “flipping the classroom”
With the growing prevalence of online learning and hybrid classes, there is increasing potential for the classroom to be “flipped,” with lectures being delivered online on the students’ own time and homework or group work occurring in class. There is significant potential for this learning model at schools with non-traditional students, since the flipped classroom can allow these students to more easily balance education and their busy work or family schedules.

MORE disruptive innovation
Something we enjoy discussing here at Blackboard is the way career colleges lead in higher education as agents of disruptive innovation and change. Of the many ways these institutions will drive innovation in 2013, I believe their ability to use technology to integrate professional skill instruction with academic coursework will rise to the top—especially as more students seek education on the path to new or improved careers.

MORE student success
The bottom line is that leveraging more technology at professional colleges and universities will only be worthwhile if these innovations help to increase student success. We believe that as more institutions adopt technologies that allow students flexible, on-the-go access to coursework, as well as increased access to academic resources, these students will build the strong foundation needed to succeed in today’s professional world.

What would you add to this list? Are there any new and innovative ways your professional or career college will leverage technology in 2013? Tell us about it in the comments section below!

Infographic: A Roadmap to Online Learning

Angela Goldman — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 21:01:21 +0000

As colleges and universities of all types continue to expand their online learning offerings, professional institutions continue to lead the way in adopting the latest technologies to enhance the educational experience. So, we asked some of our cutting-edge professional college and university clients about their journeys into online learning, and what ‘best practices’ and ‘lessons learned’ they uncovered along the way.

In our new infographic, we explore some of these findings, questions, tasks, and ‘bumps in the road‘ schools often face as they develop and execute an online learning strategy, such as:

Creating a business plan
Avoiding mission creep
Knowing your market and how to reach it
Preparing your faculty

Ultimately, we believe that a well-planned journey is the surest way to reach success in the e-learning environment, and hope this infographic can serve as a guide to any colleges or universities in all stages of online learning development.

To see the full infographic click here or view the image below!

Best of 2012: Your Favorite Reads for Next Level Learning

Paul Terry — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 21:26:27 +0000

As we prepare for another great year on the Next Level Learning blog, we wanted to look back at some of your favorite posts from 2012. So, without further ado, here is a list of some of our most popular blog posts from the past year:

Career Colleges
Mulgrew: “The lecture does not work.” Do you agree? At this year’s Professional Colleges and Universities Summit, Frank Mulgrew of Post University discussed the disadvantages of passive learning at career colleges. This post explores his arguments as well as the important role active learning plays in professional education.

Military/Government
Best Practices in Military Training How can military trainers adapt to today’s constant technological changes while preparing soldiers for what lies ahead? In this post, we discuss some of the key ways our modern military leverages technology to provide cutting-edge learning and to execute mission goals.

Corporations
Salesforce + Sales Training = Recipe for Success One of our favorite things to do at Blackboard is to meet with our clients and discuss how professional training is helping them meet and exceed their business goals. In this post, we sat down with training leaders at Living Social to hear how Blackboard Learn for Salesforce was making a real impact on their sales team.

Once again, this year’s posts show the variety of interests among our readership as well as the broad range of professional education solutions offered by Blackboard. But are there any topics you would like to see more often as we kick off 2013? Be sure to leave any thoughts or suggestions you may have in the comments below!

5 Benefits of Blackboard Mobile for Professional Colleges and Universities

Angela Goldman — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 17:30:46 +0000

One of the best ways to reach today’s active, tech-savvy students is to deliver learning where students already are: on smartphones and tablets. Since studies show that smartphone users spend the majority of their phone time on apps, and nearly half of all students already use smartphones for school-related tasks, leveraging mobile platforms is an easy way for schools to connect with students whether they are on campus or on the go.

That’s why we developed Blackboard Mobile Learn and Blackboard Mobile Central, two robust online platforms that give learners, educators, and school communities access to all aspects of the educational experience on their mobile devices. Blackboard Mobile Learn extends the experience of the online learning management system, Blackboard Learn, onto mobile devices. Blackboard Mobile Central is a suite of features in a single mobile application that provides campus life resources and information – like student and faculty directories, news, brick-and-mortar campus maps, dining menus and more – on mobile devices.

If your professional college or university is looking for ways to go mobile, here are my top 5 reasons to choose Blackboard:

1. Develop a secure, user-friendly mobile platform.
Blackboard Mobile Central is more than just a “one size fits all” app. Institutions that leverage this solution are given plenty of room for customization, allowing them to develop modules that reflect their school and the student experience. They can start with the modules we’ve already created and easily add new capabilities to their apps beyond the features we make available “out-of-the-box.”

2. Help students get to campus and to class on time.
Some professional and career colleges are virtual, while others have traditional brick-and-mortar classrooms. For those students attending your institution on-ground, Blackboard Mobile Central offers digital campus tours, maps, and even augmented reality that uses a smart phone camera and GPS to identity buildings on campus.

3. Leverage push notifications to keep students informed.
With Blackboard Mobile Learn, students can receive automatic, personalized notifications delivered straight to their mobile devices to help them stay informed. These notifications include new announcements, new graded items, a test being posted, and many other course activities. No more constant checking for midterms being available and grades being posted. Now, course updates go right to the student!

4. Bring your high-tech educational experience to mobile devices.
Today’s professional and career colleges operate in a fast-paced world where technology and the student experience are key. Since your school is already investing in technologies that create the modern classroom experience that students demand, take it to the next level by offering that same high-tech learning experience on mobile devices with Blackboard Mobile Learn.

5. Meet the unique needs of your professional college or university.
Blackboard Mobile offers more than just a user-friendly platform: it allows university staff to boost engagement with students and extend the reach of their university. By providing insight on which students are involved at school and which students need encouragement, your institution can identify what resources students need to succeed while boosting retention in the process. What’s more, every Blackboard Mobile site can be customized with university branding, so current and prospective students can get a true inside look at your school.

Blackboard Mobile isn’t the only way you can harness mobile technologies for your professional and career college. For example, Blackboard Connect allows colleges and universities to send mass emergency notifications to students and staff to help ensure safety on campus. If you’re interested in learning more about Blackboard’s wide range mobile-enabled solutions, visit our website to learn more about our Mobile features, or check out a case study from schools already leveraging Blackboard Mobile, including Berkeley College.

Driving Innovative Solutions for Professional Colleges and Universities

Tom Holz — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 19:52:53 +0000

You don’t need to work in the education space to see that technology is playing an increasingly important role in higher education. These days, it isn’t unusual to see innovative tools such as Smart Boards, e-books, and even mobile devices in the classroom. This pervasive state of technology in higher education is especially evident at professional colleges and universities, which have been leaders in bringing disruptive technologies to the classroom.

Just as career colleges have been leveraging new technology for education, we at Blackboard have also been working to drive innovation in our own solutions. We’ve asked ourselves:

How can Blackboard course administration become more efficient and effective for instructors?
How can our solutions give instructors more insight into their classroom and help them retain students?
What can we do to improve the student experience on Blackboard?

With these questions in mind, along with feedback from real Blackboard users across the country, we sought to develop new features and tools to truly enhance the learning experience in Blackboard. I am particularly excited about some upcoming updates to our Learn solution that will be highly useful to professional colleges and universities.

These updates will come through Service Pack 10 (SP10), a new upgrade that we will be unrolling over the next few months. Nearly 600 students and over 600 instructors at 640 schools provided feedback that helped us make SP10’s redesign of Blackboard Learn simple, intuitive and focused on you. As we like to say, SP10 makes the entire Learn experience Simply. Better.

Some great new features of SP10 include:

People and Full Profile: In SP10, students and instructors can create personal profiles and easily communicate with each other right within the LMS. It’s like Facebook for Blackboard, where all of your most important class information comes to the top of your Blackboard home page in a stream of activities.
Improved quizzing and grading capabilities: With new changes to quiz administration and analytics, instructors can develop more accurate questions and take a deeper dive into test results.
Mobile: We have developed an array of new mobile features with SP10 including push notifications, mobile tests, and social network integration.
Two-way text messages: Allows instructors to easily send SMS text messages to their classes to keep students up-to-date without relying on message boards or email. Along with our mobile developments, these will be some of the most useful tools for professional and career college students who live life on the go.
New calendar features: An enhanced calendar feature that allows students and instructors to keep track of upcoming events and deadlines, helping students to better balance academic life with their other work and personal commitments.
Spaces: This new feature gives students and instructors the ability to create groups within their class or across courses so students can collaborate with others for a more useful studying experience.
Analytics: New analytic features go beyond just the assessment of an individual classroom, giving instructors access to the full enterprise for useful data to help them motivate students with university-wide statistics and comparisons.

Innovation isn’t something those of us at Blackboard think about once a year, or just when we want to develop a new product. Innovation is something we think about constantly, and we are excited to see how our new developments, including features in SP10, will help professional colleges and universities do what they do best: educate tomorrow’s next generation of professionals by leveraging new and exciting technologies.

Click here to view the new features of SP10.

Position Paper: How Professional Colleges & Universities Can Use the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Drive Change

Angela Goldman — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 18:04:34 +0000

“For more than a decade, for-profit colleges and universities have been agents of educational change—driving innovation by promoting online learning as an alternative to traditional classroom instruction. Now it’s time for these institutions to use their years of experience as leaders on the online learning front lines to shape what must come next for higher education: increased student success.”

As higher education becomes increasingly important in today’s job market, student success at all institution types is key. But what can colleges and universities that focus on professional education do to lead other institutions on this path to student success? We address this question in our new position paper, “NOW is the Time to Raise the Bar for Student Success: How Professional Colleges & Universities Can Use the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Drive Change.”

From where we sit, career colleges must continue to embrace disruptive innovation to bring effective change to higher education, even if this requires overturning norms that are taken for granted. For example, we believe some of the most important disruptive trends today – which are already embraced by career colleges – include:

Focusing on competency-based outcomes instead of credit hour completion.
Increasing rigor in the course-building process to better emphasize learning outcomes.
Integrating of professional skills into coursework.

If more institutions of higher education embrace these innovations, we believe students will be better able to thrive in both their studies and their careers. To learn more, please click the image below or visit this link to read our “NOW is the Time to Raise the Bar for Student Success” position paper, and feel free to add your thoughts on this topic in the comments below.

How to Best Educate Non-Traditional and At-Risk Students

Angela Goldman — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 08:46:35 +0000

On this blog, we often discuss the reasons professional and career colleges can offer tremendous opportunities to non-traditional students who may not otherwise have a chance at higher education. But what exactly is a non-traditional (or “at-risk”) student, and how can those of us in the higher education space ensure that those students receive the best education possible?

First, let’s define what it means to be a non-traditional student. According to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), students are considered non-traditional if they have one or more of the following characteristics when they are first-time, first year students:

Financially independent
Over the age of 25
Delayed entry into college
Full time work
Attending school part-time
Have dependents
Single parent
No high school diploma

You may be surprised to learn that during the 1999-2000 academic year, 73 percent of all undergraduates had one or more of these characteristics. In other words, as NCES states, “the ‘traditional’ undergraduate—characterized here as one who earns a high school diploma, enrolls full time immediately after finishing high school, depends on parents for financial support, and either does not work during the school year or works part time – is the exception rather than the rule.”

While the majority of today’s undergraduate population is considered non-traditional, however, research shows that these students are less likely than their traditional counterparts to attain a degree after five years of enrollment. As a result, the characteristics listed above are often seen as risk factors in higher education, since they indicate that a student is less likely to graduate or achieve other academic and professional goals.

Despite the challenges presented by these risk factors, we have found that non-traditional students at professional and career colleges are achieving incredible amounts of success even when the odds are stacked against them. These students may be academically underprepared, balancing work or family life, or much older than their peers, yet the successes they have in the classroom can be remarkable considering their out-of-school responsibilities.

From where I sit, there are several best practices that institutions of higher education—and professional colleges in particular—can adopt to help non-traditional students balance these commitments for greater academic and professional achievement:

Develop high-quality e-learning programs to give students maximum flexibility to take classes wherever works best with their busy schedules.
Leverage mobile technologies for students who live an on-the-go lifestyle so they can access coursework on a smart phone or tablet PC.
Offer asynchronous learning so students have flexibility to take classes on their own time.
Flip the classroom by delivering virtual lectures and doing coursework in person, so students can get the most out of their time with their instructors and peers.
Provide opportunities for continuous learning so students can reach back for important information when they are on the job or whenever they will need it most.

What would you add to the list above? We would love to hear your thoughts and questions in the comments below!

If you are interested in learning more about the impact professional and career colleges can have on non-traditional students, check out our post on how we define “success” in higher education, or visit articles here and here from Career College Central featuring stories of the challenges faced by non-traditional students.

Stop the Drop: How Professional Colleges and Universities Can Use Learning Management Systems to Identify and Engage At-Risk Students

Angela Goldman — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 09:00:46 +0000

Recently, there has been considerable discussion about the need for professional colleges and universities to better assess learning outcomes and student success. What we have learned, however, is that before measuring student outcomes, institutions must first consider the risk factors that affect their students and how those factors will impact educational outcomes. This presents both unique challenges and opportunities for career colleges, who enroll more at-risk students than their traditional counterparts and face higher drop-out rates as a result.

With this in mind, how can professional colleges and universities best identify at-risk students, in order to help them overcome these potential challenges? In our recent white paper entitled “Stop the Drop: How Professional Colleges and Universities Can Use Learning Management Systems to Identify and Engage At-Risk Students,” we discuss the ways schools can leverage tools contained in learning management systems to engage and monitor at-risk students. In other words, career colleges and professional universities can pull the information they already have about students from their LMS to help identify those who might be at risk. Since demographic and past-performance clues are already in learning management system and admissions data, schools simply need to employ the right analytical tools to turn these clues into actionable information.

The immediate benefits of schools that leverage LMS data in this way include:

Allowing schools to know which students are most at risk today so instructors can provide one-on-one attention to those students from the start.
Providing longer term, analytical information that can help schools create environments where students have the best chance for success. By knowing what kinds of characteristics are shared by students who have succeeded in the past, a school can identify which applicants are most likely to do well at its institution.
Giving schools predictive data on the entire student experience, from which classes will need student support counselors on standby to which graduates are most likely to remain involved as alumni.

Are you ready to start leveraging your LMS to boost student success and lower the drop-out rate at your professional college or university? Check out “Stop the Drop: How Professional Colleges and Universities Can Use Learning Management Systems to Identify and Engage At-Risk Students” for further information, including the ways Blackboard already helps professional colleges and universities!

Ensuring Student Success through Best Practices in Instructional Design

Angela Goldman — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 08:30:00 +0000

We’ve likely all heard myths about online learning. Specifically, that anyone can succeed in an online learning environment and that online classes are easier for students than traditional face-to-face classes. In a recent webinar, however, Instructional Designer Loren Kleinman of Berkeley College dispelled these myths while discussing how best to design engaging courses with Instructional Design Theory, using her school’s unique online learning prep course as an example.

Kleinman argues that while many students are savvy when it comes to accessing the web on mobile devices or using social networks, this does not always translate to skills necessary for success in online learning. As such, Berkeley College ensures that incoming students will have positive outcomes during their tenure at the school by requiring a Road to Success in Online Learning (RTS) course to evaluate and determine students’ motivation, commitment, and ability to function effectively online. In order to create this course, Loren implemented best practices of Instructional Design Theory to ensure it was developed to foster student success and accurately reflect their comfort in an online learning setting.

Here are some of Kleinman’s tips for using instructional design when designing online learning courses:

Know your audience: Are your learners primarily Millennials or adults? Traditional or non-traditional students? These and other demographic questions will impact the teaching methodology used in online curriculum development.
Identify learning outcomes first: Knowing what students’ end goals are for the course will also impact the way it is designed. For example, if your course will involve intensive multimedia usage or peer-to-peer collaboration, your course should be designed accordingly to facilitate these activities.
Provide opportunities for assessment and feedback: Since many of today’s students are used to real-time updates and feedback, providing opportunities to be assessed and to see results will help them track progress and identify areas for improvement.
Use learning modules and Adaptive Release: By breaking learning into modules by theme, students can achieve mastery in specific areas and build skills incrementally. With adaptive release, they will move systematically through each module and progress until they reach all learning outcomes without skipping critical information.
Include a navigation tool: At Berkeley, students watch a web video at the onset of the course that walks them through what they will find in each module. This helps students see the big picture of their course so they don’t feel stranded from the start, while also learning where to go for help along the way.

In addition to these best practices, Kleinman left participants with this food for thought on the role of technology in learning at the end of her presentation:

“Technology alone cannot support student engagement and success, but the construction of a suitable online learning environment that integrates good design can promote cognitive abilities, higher order thinking, and critical discourse.”

If you’re interested in learning more about best practices in online instructional design, you can view the slides from the webinar below, or click here to listen to the full recording of this presentation.

Road to Success in Online Learning from Blackboard Inc.

Webinar: Best Practices to Design an Effective Online Learning Prep Course

Angela Goldman — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 13:21:18 +0000

We are excited to announce an upcoming webinar to explore best practices in instructional design, which can help professional colleges and universities determine students’ chances for success in an online learning environment.

Leading this webinar is Instructional Designer Loren Kleinman from Berkeley College, an institution which requires all students to enroll in Road to Success in Online Learning (RTS) as a prerequisite to registering for online courses. RTS was designed to evaluate and determine students’ motivation, commitment and ability to function effectively in Blackboard. Since Berkeley College has experienced notable results from their RTS implementation, they want to share advice with others who seek to implement Instructional Design Theory for similar programs at their respective institutions.

If you believe your professional college or university can benefit from strategies in implementing Instructional Design Theory and best practices in developing online learning prep courses, be sure to tune into this webinar!

Details:

When: Wednesday, September 12, 2012 at 2:00 p.m. EDT

Speakers: Loren Kleinman, M.A., Instructional Designer, Berkeley College

Hope to see you there!