1. New Client Adoption Cohort
Session 4: Blackboard
Partners
BLACKBOARD K-12
MARCH 19, 2012
2. Cohort Sessions
Session 1 – Feb. 27: Course Design
Session 2 – Mar. 5: Communication with Stakeholders
Session 3 – Mar. 12: Important Success Measures
Session 4 – Mar. 19: Blackboard Partners
2
3. Today’s Agenda
• Program Goals
• Introductions
• This Week’s Guest Speaker
• Q and A
• Resources
3
4. Cohort Goal
To enhance the implementation and adoption
experience for new Blackboard clients and enable a
successful Blackboard experience, the “New Client
Adoption Cohort” will bring together new and
experienced clients to build a community of
practice.
4
9. Blackboard Learn™ Partner Ecosystem
Building Blocks and Digital Content: Countless Ways to Integrate
LEARNING CONTENT TOOLS TO CREATE & ENGAGE CAREERS & TRAINING
TOOLS TO ASSESS SYSTEMS & TECHNOLOGY
9
Blackboard Inc. CONFIDENTIAL
15. NBC Learn K-12: Increase Student
Success With Dynamic Multimedia
Content
15
Blackboard Inc. CONFIDENTIAL
16. Deliver Standards-Based Content
• NBC Learn is the educational arm of NBC News, dedicated to providing instructional
resources for students, teachers and lifelong learners.
• NBC Learn is uniquely positioned to offer both primary source resources from the
richest news video archive in the U.S., and to leverage NBC News global
newsgathering output to update these resources daily.
• NBC Learn has 13,000+ broadcast-quality resources aligned to 30+ subjects, State
Standards, and the Common Core, including:
• Biology, Chemistry, Physics, • Business & Financial Literacy • Special collections including
Agriscience, Forensic Science, “Science of NFL Football”,
• Health & Wellness
Lives and Careers in Science Chemistry Now”, “Finishing the
• Niche collections including Dream: Civil Rights” and more.
• U.S. History
“African American Studies”
• U.S. Government & Politics “Hispanic Heritage”, “Women’s
Studies” and more.
• Language Arts
16
Blackboard Inc. CONFIDENTIAL
17. NBC Original Content
Science of NHL Hockey Science of NFL Football
The 10-part educational video series explores the basic science The Science of NFL unravels the physics, engineering, math
and math behind professional hockey. and
more behind professional football.
Chemistry Now Finishing The Dream
This series of video, documents, images and more explores This series brings the Civil Rights era to life with over 100 clips
chemistry in everyday life and in the world around us. from NBC News archive and original town hall conversations.
Science of the Olympic Winter Games Changing Planet
Original video collection explores the physics, biology, This series of educational videos explores the impact that
chemistry climate
and math behind the Olympic Winter Games. change is having on our planet.
17
Blackboard Inc. CONFIDENTIAL
19. Publish Interactive Content Directly To
Your Blackboard Learn Course
• Educators can create interactive, engaging e-learning content on their
desktop, then publish it directly to their Blackboard Learn course from
within the SoftChalk application.
• One-button publishing is available for the Blackboard Learn platform™ (v.7
and above). 19
Blackboard Inc. CONFIDENTIAL
22. BbWorld ‘12 New Orleans
July 10-12, 2012
Why Attend BbWorld?
▸ Get connected with your community
▸ Find ideas you can implement now
▸ Influence the Blackboard roadmap
Who should attend?
▸ CIOs, Provosts, District heads
▸ Program managers, System Administrators
▸ Instructional Designers, Curriculum Coordinators
What’s New at BbWorld 2012?
▸ Revamped program focused on important Education topics
▸ 30% more sessions delivered
▸ Bigger rooms and more must-see sessions
Register at BbWorld.com, and get a special discount of
$75.00 off the current registration rate through March 30. 22
Use promo code BW2012KPA
23. Join the K-12 Listserve
Sara Loges
Manager, K-12 Marketing
sara.loges@blackboard.com
Mike Petersen
Manager, K-12 Solutions Engineering
mike.petersen@blackboard.com
23
Editor's Notes
Hi everyone, and welcome to the last session of the New Client Adoption Cohort. We are so glad to have all of you joining us today. My name is Sara Loges and I am a K-12 Marketing Manager here at BlackboardWe encourage you all to participate during the session, so if you would like to be able to speak, please dial-in to the teleconference. I have posted the dial-in information into the chat box. For now, please be sure to mute your line in order to eliminate background noise. If you have questions, we will save time for you to ask them at the end of the presentation. Feel free to type questions into the chat box as well.And lastly, this session will be recorded and we will send it out to you in a follow up email in the next day or so. Okay, let’s get started…
Today is our final adoption cohort session. I see that a lot of you have attended the three previous sessions, and thanks for joining us again today.
Today, like last week, we will start by talking about the goals of the cohort, followed by some brief introductions. Then we will hear from our guest speaker from Blackboard Partnership Team, we will answer any questions you have, and then at the end, we will touch on some additional resources available to you.
In order to improve the adoption experience for new clients, and enable a successful Blackboard experience overall, Marketing is working with the K-12 Solutions Engineers to package together a series of WebEx sessions as a part of a “New Client Adoption Cohort.” We are hoping to bring together both new and experienced Blackboard clients in order to build a community of practice.
Today we will hear from Katie Drossos, Sr. Partnership Marketing Manager here at Blackboard. We also have Mike Petersen from the Blackboard K-12 Solutions Engineering team on the line. He will provide additional insight and will help to answer any questions you have.
Before we hand it over to Katie, we would love to have everyone on the line give a brief introduction. If we could just have you state your name and your school or district, that would be great. If you did not dial into the conference, please type your name and school into the chat box and I will introduce you. Let’s start with…Now I will hand it over to our guest speaker, Katie Drossos who will talk about how to take advantage of the Blackboard Partners Program, building blocks, and some of our already established premier partnerships.
Hi, my name is Katie Drossos and I’m the Senior Manager of Partnership Marketing at Blackboard. In our time together, I would like to talk to you, generally, about Blackboard Partnerships and then specifically about three Partners which pertain specifically to the K12 space.
In the partnerships group, we build on Blackboard’s overall company mission—Building a Better Education Experience—and focus on how we can Do More with partners to build that better experience Together.From a client-perspective our partners help Blackboard institutions: Do More by supporting over 160 commercial partners whose technologies, tools and content can extend the Blackboard Learn platform in innovative ways. Integrate Learning Content: by working with large and small publishers around the globe to integrate thousands of digital content objects in the Blackboard learning environment to enliven teaching and learning And we help schools equip themselves for success by allowing them to tailor their Blackboard Learn instance to meet their institution’s customized needs and initiatives Our partners share our goals of learner achievement and can offer Blackboard clients important benefits. By working with so many partners and solutions we can provide our clients access to some of the latest and most innovative technologies and content. Also our partners are industry leaders in their unique fields who are all eager to collaborate with you to ensure your deployment of Blackboard Learn is optimized for the unique demands of your administrators, instructors and students.You can also be confident of solution continuity as we are committed to providing partners the tools and resources they need to ensure their integrations remain compatible with each new release of Blackboard Learn
At a high level, we can “bucket” our partner capabilities into a few main categories, although many others certainly exist. Our Partners solutions EXTEND Blackboard’s native capabilities, allowing educators to incorporate content and rich media into their courses, to create innovative content that can be used in and outside the classroom, and to actively engage and easily assess learners.The big point here is that Blackboard is content agnostic - our partner program is not exclusive nor limited to a single provider of a certain type of tool or technology. Importantly, we understand that some times educators want more than just pre-packaged content, they want to be able to create and customize their own learning objects specifically for their course and students. Our APIs allow you to use a third party tool to create that content item and then directly publish it to a specific course, or courses, in Blackboard Learn all with just a few clicks.
What’s great about these integrations?I’ll show examples of single sign on, or pass-through, authentication, grade book integration and rich learning content integration. These are just a few of the many ways our partner integrations provide administrators, instructors and students with seamless workflows within Blackboard Learn.
Single sign is perhaps the most widely used and valuable type of integration in use today. What do we know is one key difference in how instructors and students use Blackboard as opposed to their other e-learning tools? We know that they log in and use Blackboard every single day. Most likely, several times a day. Blackboard Learn is truly the online equivalent of the school building and classroom. They may only go to a particular course or open a specific text book a couple days each week, but they are in Blackboard daily. This means that they won’t forget the Blackboard URL and their Blackboard username and password.However, for a student taking several classes, each with unique digital texts, assessments, learning objects, etc. it can be difficult to remember and manage the countless URLs, usernames and passwords for all those different items that they only use occasionally. But, by integrating with single sign on, developers can ensure that faculty and students gain fast, easy access to learning content and tools using just their Blackboard credentials.One example of a single sign on integration is the Building Block created by the content authoring company SoftChalk. The SoftChalk content authoring system gives instructors a variety of robust tools to create highly impactful, customized content items, learning objects, lesson plans and more. However, publishing those content items into the learning environment can be quite difficult to do manually. But thanks to their Building Blocks integration, SoftChalk users can easily publish items directly to a specific Blackboard course all with a few easy clicks. All they have to do is configure their account settings once and they never have to worry about it again.
Another useful tool that is highly valued by instructors is grade book integration.In this example I am showing the Respondus Lock Down browser. Lock Down browser is an online assessment environment that prohibits the student from exiting the assessment and accessing other tools on their PC—like a web browser, locally stored documents or even Blackboard—until they’ve completed and submitted their assessment. On a side note, the user initiates the assessment by clicking a link that is embedded in the Blackboard Learn course, they are seemlessly single signed on to the application and they begin their assessment. All made possible through the Building Blocks APIs.But, back to my main point here. Once the student completes and submits the assessment the results are automatically scored and published directly into the Blackboard grade book. This seemingly simple sounding process saves instructors hours of manually grading exams and entering results one by one and leaves them with more time to focus on teaching and learning.This is just another example of how we are providing efficiency for teachers and convenience for students.
Now I’d like to take a few minutes to touch upon a handful of partners relevant to you.The Kaltura Video Building Block opens up a new set of engaging teaching possibilities from integration of lecture capture and video materials to enabling video assignments and sharing of student and faculty contributed video content. It adds a layer of rich media functionality that works across the Blackboard Learn™ platform, so faculty and students can use media as easily.
Together, Blackboard and Kaltura help you engage more students by offering:Seamless authoring, uploading, recording, and streaming of campus media contentVideo hosting and streaming on desktop and mobile devicesRich media ingestion, transcoding, editing, content and metadata management, and analyticsEasy-to-use tools such as:My Media Tool Provides each user with a personal media library where they can upload, edit and manage content, as well as share content with fellow course members.Course Gallery Allows members to search and view rich media assigned to a course. Administrators and faculty can also define content permissions to control viewing, uploading and sharing privileges.
NBC Learn K-12TM makes thousands of historic and current events videos, documents, and images available directly within your Blackboard LearnTMinstance. Now teachers can access the latest current events for use in instruction and assignments, and students can explore the historic NBC News archive for research and projects.Access:Historic and current events videoThousands of documents, images, letters, and moreOriginal video series like “Science of NFL Football” and “Science of NHL Hockey”Resources correlated to state and common core standardsItems that can be easily embedded into Blackboard Learn discussion boards, assessments, wikis, and more.
Now let’s look at an example of rich media learning content being integrated into Blackboard Learn. For this example, I will use our partner NBC Learn, and the education division of NBC News in the United States. For more than 80 years, NBC News has been documenting the people, places, and events that shape our world and NBC Learn is dedicated to making these historic stories, images and primary source documents available on-demand to teachers, students, and parents. NBC Learn has already digitized more than 12,000 stories from the NBC News archives — one of the largest news archives in the world, dating back to the 1920s. In addition, collections are updated daily with stories on current events from all of NBC highly regarded news outlets.NBC Learn also has a Building Block integration with Blackboard Learn. The Building Block allows an instructor to directly access the NBC Learn archives directly from Blackboard Learn—another example of single sign on—search for and discover a learning object or other piece of learning content and then with only another single click, publish that video learning object directly into the course page. The ability to integrate this type of primary content directly and seemlessly into the student workflow is incredibly impactful and powerful.
NBC Learn is committed to applying science to the real world and the segments, which will be aligned to lesson plans and national and state education standards, are available to the public free of cost.
SoftChalkenhances Blackboard by providing tools for creating highly interactive content that can be easily integrated into and delivered through the Blackboard learning management and content systems.Two products:SoftChalk - SoftChalk’s award-winning desktop software enables educators to create professional, engaging,learning content quickly and easily, which enhances their teaching and improves the learning experience for theirstudents.SoftChalk CONNECT - SoftChalk’s cloud-based learning object repository with hosting services where educatorscan share SoftChalk learning content with the global community, discover shared content to use in their ownmaterials and collaboratively edit SoftChalk e-learning content. SoftChalk puts the power of content authoring where it belongs – in the hands of educators. SoftChalk reduces training, development time and cost – Educators can create powerful and interactivelearning experiences quickly and easily. Institutions can benefit by using SoftChalk to offer onlinealternatives for professional development reducing time and costs associated with trainers/instructors,materials (production/updates), location, travel and attendee time away from the office/teaching. SoftChalk content can be created once to share and reuse anywhere – Lessons and eCourses becomehighly portable. SoftChalk enables teachers to easily classify their content by state curriculum standards, allowingcolleagues to search for standards compliant content for their courses. SoftChalk includes built in accessibility features making compliance an integral part of the contentauthoring process.
SoftChalk offers your clients a complete content authoring solution with sophisticated integration with theBlackboard Learn platform – making it a powerful companion authoring solution. Static PDF and PowerPointpresentations become, engaging, interactive learning experiences - improving student outcomes.SoftChalk provides seamless integration with the Blackboard Learn platform including one-button publishing tocourses and tracking of student scores into the Blackboard gradebook.
Let me end by saying there are many Building Blocks already available that were developed by both third party commercial vendors and other Blackboard client developers around the world. Some of these are freely shared amongst our clients and others are available from the developer for a fee. You can go to www.blackboardextensions.com to search through all the integrations and learn more about the individual features, technical specifications and how you can request more information.
Any Questions for Katie?
Now I’d like to spend a couple minutes to talk to you about BbWorld, Blackboard’s largest annual users conference. This year, BbWorld will be hosted in New Orleans, July 10-12. The conference is one of the best places to connect with the larger Blackboard Community, include your K-12 peers, with institutions represented from around the world. With over 400 sessions and a dedicated K-12 track, you’ll get lots of ideas about implementing new programs with Blacobaord and you’ll learn some best practices from other schools and districts.BbWorld is open to all current Blackboard clients, including technology and curriculum leaders. It’s a lot of fun and we hope you’ll join us this summer!Because you are some of our newest cients, we’d like to offer you $75 of the currentreg rate. Now through March 30.
Questions?If you have any additional questions, please feel free to reach out to me or to Mike and we will be happy to assist you.Thanks again for joining us today, we hope that you found the New Client Adoption Cohort series beneficial and were able to take away some good ideas and resources to apply within your school or district. Please look for a follow up email in the next few days with the webinar recording.Thanks again, and please send questions or feedback to either me or Mike.
