Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Yesterday’s chalkboard served a less complicated world than today, in a time before the worlds of economics, business and politics intersected and began to demand that educators and their institutions produce graduates who are prepared to enter a rapidly evolving job market. This inherent tension has resulted in a series of large and small shifts that together have stirred up a perfect storm of change. On the one hand, storms can cause destruction of old models and ways of being; on the other hand, the need to rebuild and remodel offers an exciting array of opportunities to rethink the delivery of education.

Students today are dramatically different from students ten years ago. They’re not attending college just for a degree and “the college experience;” they want assurance of a job at the end of it all. And in addition to their heightened concern for finances, schedule flexibility, degree options, and a rewarding career, they want personalized answers—immediately. In short, they’re tough customers for marketing and enrollment departments to serve. Blackboard can help you navigate the marketing and enrollment needs of today’s students.

In an effort to better understand the challenges associated with retention and graduation, Blackboard surveyed hundreds of higher ed administrators and students from public, private, and two-year community colleges to produce this research-based eBook.

Rapid changes in student demographics, advancements in technology, and alternative learning models are forcing a rethink about how higher education interacts with—and supports—its students.  Find out what role the learning management system (LMS) of the future will need to play in this new learning environment of mobile-accessible, interconnected applications and services.

Today’s modern learning management system (LMS) isn’t just a repository for storing, managing, and delivering course materials—it’s a fully-featured platform, designed to increase student engagement and retention.  We talked with officials from several colleges and universities who recently evaluated learning management systems for use at their institutions. Based on the lessons they learned, here are seven important factors to consider.

Choosing a Learning Management Systems (LMS) that will work for your institution, now and in the future, can be a challenge, especially as the LMS has moved well beyond course management, and even overall learning management, and into the realm of providing a  full learning environment. Download this guide to help you get past the competing claims, the long lists of feature-by-feature comparisons, and focus on the most essential factors to keep in mind as you make your evaluation.

Reinventing and transforming education begins by knowing and understanding the universe of today’s learners.  Who are today’s students? What technologies do they use and how?  What motivates them to interact with their institutions, their professors and one another. This paper addresses those questions and more, while  exploring how education is poised to be transformed through the lens of a learner-centric model.

With increasing demand for online learning coming from both distance learners and on-campus students, colleges and universities must provide a synchronous learning platform. Beyond satisfying this need, institutions are increasingly interested in providing web conferencing and real-time collaboration capabilities as well.

This guide lays out critical considerations that can spell the difference between a solution that excels and one that doesn’t. Based on our long experience with academic institutions worldwide, we share the essential guide to synchronous learning, web conferencing, and real-time collaboration. Helping institutions move beyond just-for-meeting tools to a solution purpose-built for the academic environment.

Free Guide: More than 80% of IT leadership consider analytics a priority for higher education’s continued success.

In this guide, we have drawn on the experience of a wide range of institutions to assemble four key steps that will help justify the cost of an analytics strategy in higher education.