A Launchpad for Your Transition to Remote Learning: Free Blackboard Analytics Resources

Rachel Scherer | Apr 10, 2020

Many of us are leading through change as institutions worldwide have rapidly transitioned their programs, studies, and communications online in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic.

The move to remote instruction is daunting even in the best of times. A lot of that comes down to the fact that what masquerades as a simple technology shift has a ton of other implications for your institution. The change in teaching modality sets off changes to instruction, content, practice, policy – and that’s just in the classroom. When we move to the context of the broader institution, administrators may need to monitor operational and strategic impact, and drive policy and practice accordingly.

We know that to lead confidently through change, you have to be able to measure the effect of change- to know where you are today, where you are going, and the steps along the way. Though individual steps will vary from institution to institution, in the Data & Analytics team we have had the opportunity to identify a series of common milestones institutions usually move through, and the key questions they have at each step:

As you are engaged in the process of transitioning to remote learning, you’ll want to start with the essentials: measuring adoption of tools, utilization of tools as they relate to cost, and user access times and peaks as they might relate to how you think about support resources.
As the activity of moving courses online levels out, users at your institution will want to start to think about the impact of that move: benchmarking new normals for utilization, beginning to understand how and when learners and faculty are engaging with tools and each other, looking for fit or deviation from desired practices.
As you take a longer view, your focus centers on outcomes: You’ll start to look for intelligence that can drive new policy, strategy, and practice supporting student and faculty experience, assessment, retention, graduation, recruiting, and other institutional KPIs.
And when you need a place to think through new or emerging problems with a group of like-minded do-ers, (or just a little less social distance) – you’ll benefit from our large and growing online Community, who are all thinking through many of these problems in real-time right now.

Wherever you are on this journey, we can help you get started. Here are some free resources for our data and analytics tool users on our Blackboard Community site.

These are technical resources that analysts, developers, researchers, and business intelligence teams can use to jump-start their work. Community Site login is required – check with your institutional admin to make sure they have access.

Feel free to share these queries and reports with your teams, modify them for your needs, and ask us or your peers in the Community if you have any questions about how to use them. Most importantly, if you hit on a query or a dashboard view that is really effective in supporting some of your thinking, decision-making, or analysis, please share it back to our Community Site with some notes on how to use it so that others can benefit, too.

We’re all in this together. Stay informed, stay safe, and stay connected.