The growing number of campuses using notification systems was evident this spring, when schools across the Midwest kept students and their parents updated about school closings and weather warnings as tornadoes ripped through towns and cities.
Blackboard’s Connect system dispatched more than 18 million school alerts in a single day in May.
College and university officials who manage notification systems won’t have to be at a desktop or laptop computer to schedule or send the eMails and texts anymore.
The new Blackboard Connect lets administrators cue up a message and blast it to all students, or just certain students, while walking around campus, for example.
“The folks that have iPhones think they’ll use that as much as anything else,” Miller said. “You think about urgent situations, and there are a lot of educators enamored with the idea of sending it out this way.”
Miller said migrating notification services to a mobile platform was important for emergency alerts, since Blackboard research showed that about 25 percent of households don’t have a landline phone.
The newest version of Blackboard Connect also lets campus administrators translate voice messages from English to Spanish, ensuring the emergency recorded phone call is understood by everyone who receives it.
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