Blackboard Education on Tour, October 2013

On October 22nd Stephen and I attended the ‘Blackboard Education on Tour’ event in London. This was our chance to learn from the experts, speak with the team behind the current Blackboard service, and to speak with the developers on what is being developed and proposed for the Blackboard (Bb) Learn system we use at Leicester.

From the introductions we knew we were in esteemed company with some of Bb’s most senior directors and vice presidents in attendance and ready to be questioned about all things Bb. One of the most important aspects of the introductory presentation was where Blackboard outlined their commitment to the UK and EU market, and that we are no longer seen as an add-on to the US. The development of the Learn product is being made more ‘local’ and that the UK and EU customers/users have as much impact and say in the development as the US. We heard that Blackboard is refocusing it’s efforts on the core product for teaching and learning, and that Blackboard has confirmed that it is centralising its teams responsible for Collaborate, Learn, and Mobile in an effort to get the teams working closer together for a single joined-up approach to product development and support.

We heard about the development and ‘road-map’ of Bb Learn, with a number of interesting and welcome developments being highlighted. These are:

• Date management: manual and automatic adjustment of dates (available in SP12)
• Student preview option (in development)
• Anonymous and multiple marking (in development)
• Mobile marking/grading (in design)
• SafeAssign integration (in development)
• New Grade Centre user experience (in development)
• Offline marking/grading (in research)
• Competency-based education (in research)
• Improved user experience (in design)
• Responsive (browser) design (in design)
• Portfolios (in development)
• Blackboard Polls (beta testing: http://polls.bb)
• Blackboard analytics
• Blackboard Collaborate for mobile
• Student opt-in for Bb Cloud Services
• Virtual classroom to be replaced by scaled-down version of Collaborate (white board and chat functions only)
• Bb Learn & Tribal (SITS) two-way information flow (in design)

The day was split into two strands: product discussion and personal development (training). Stephen and I both attended the development strand where we saw various aspects of Blackboard Learn highlighted and explained in more detail. These were:

• Text/content editor (see our write up of this from February 2013)
• Organising content (items, folders, learning modules, content collection)
• Flipped classroom (‘mark as reviewed’, mash-up, Bb Collaborate)
• Social learning & ‘retention centre’ (see our write up of the retention centre from October 2013)
• Digital assessment (rubrics, test item analysis)
• Mobile (tests for mobiles)