Bells and Whistles
Written by Mark Fitzgerald
MAE 2010 Volume: 5 Issue: 1 (February)
Speaks to the Next Generation
These are just some of the bells and whistles of Blackboard Learn, an online application that brings engagement and assessment activities together on a single platform that spans course delivery, content management and collaboration.
“This is really a monumental leap for us,” said Kevin Alansky, a senior marketing director for professional education at Blackboard Inc. “A lot of the development occurred on the visual side, in the user interface and the user experience. We really had to bring the platform into the Web 2.0 domain to make learning more relevant for the next generation of learners.”
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
Effectively engaging distant learners, especially students currently serving in the military, is a challenging task. The Learn platform seeks to address this by enabling instructors to create and deliver custom content that can be quickly updated and redeployed as processes, standards or technology change. It includes collaboration tools that combine formal instruction with informal learning and structured social interaction to produce a continuous learning environment.
“You can tailor your views on this platform,” explained David Harpool, president of Westwood College Online. “You can build one view that just the student sees. You can build a faculty unique view that also allows faculty to know what the student sees. You can also build an administrative view. This is especially important for assessment and offers a reporting and metrics type look. Students aren’t bogged down with it and faculty don’t have to be obsessed with it.”
Westwood, which operates 17 campuses and offers associate’s, bachelor’s and master’s degrees online, recently awarded Blackboard a multiyear contract to provide the learning platform across its curriculum.
The development of Learn’s assessment ability was driven out of a desire to create a culture where learning programs could be in-sync with an educational organization’s goals. Assessing learning outcomes was a key focus. The upshot is that through a broad suite of tools including portfolios, testing, and surveys, Learn is able to support the entire cycle of assessment and evaluation with multiple measures of personnel progress.
Besides assessment capabilities, Westwood also wanted an application that could meet the needs of its faculty, particularly in regard to streamlining class interaction and discussion. It also wanted a media rich and easy to navigate learning environment that students would be comfortable with.
“As students have become more sophisticated in how they use online learning technology, they’ve demanded a much higher engagement from faculty,” added Harpool. “This is not unlike when you have a faculty member in a small class and students can ask questions and get immediate feedback. One of the many things we like about this platform is that we believe it is going to make it easier for faculty to be highly engaged with their classes. So we think it’s a win-win for faculty and students.”
EASY DELIVERY
Westwood is in the process of converting more than 400 courses to Blackboard Learn, which makes full use of Web 2.0 contextual menus and a personalized, flexible and media rich course environment that is tailored to meet student needs. The Blackboard platform will be rolled out to Westwood’s online students through a fully managed, enterprise level hosting environment that is secure and reliable and offers 99.9 percent uptime.
“We are very excited to work with Blackboard and join the company of other institutions who have come to rely on their learning management platform to provide high quality online education,” Harpool remarked. “The depth and breadth of Blackboard’s platform will enable us to deliver to our students and instructors the best overall teaching and learning experience and an incredibly robust assessment system for our deans and academic leaders.”
Because of its open architecture, Blackboard Learn can be extended through integration with other organizational systems to give students a seamless and personalized learning experience. Moreover, with the support of its active developer community, access to over 100 Blackboard Building Blocks enables functionality or integration with other products.
“The platform allows for a tremendous amount of customization and flexibility, the kind of learning that’s the best fit for both the student’s and teacher’s needs,” said Alansky. “That level of personalization has been taken to a whole new level and there’s a lot of enhanced functionality, stuff like blogs and wikis that are very popular today. But even the traditional discussion boards still remain incredibly popular with learners and students.
They can access information anytime and anywhere and this provides wonderful opportunities for students who have very complex lives. Whether they’re in the military, or have demanding jobs that they’re managing or families, this technology aims to advance their education and their own way of life.”
CONTENT MANAGEMENT
Blackboard Learn also emphasizes content management and helps instructors maintain a high quality of teaching material and personnel engagement. Its central, web-based system harnesses the collective wisdom of instructors and subject matter experts so they can keep content current and share it effectively.
About 15 percent of Westwood’s online students are either active military or veterans. According to Harpool, Blackboard Learn is particularly suitable for the way military students tend to learn. “All students are individual learners, but we’ve found that this is especially true for military students. They have set ways that they want to learn online. How military students interact and how they communicate differs from one to the next, but we’ve found that to the extent that we can allow them to shape the learning platform themselves, the happier they seem to be about the results.”
Westwood’s gaming and design degree are especially attractive to military students, pointed out Harpool. “That part of the platform was always ahead of the others in terms of individuality,” he said. “You can’t teach gaming and design online without letting the student basically create his or her own studio.” ♦