Blackboard World #2 - Blackboard Mobile

One of the really exciting topics at Blackboard World 2011 is Mobile.  This is an area where Blackboard has invested and is showing early returns in the form of great functionality and even greater promise.  The Blackboard Mobile Platform is made up of two modules;  Mobile Learn and Mobile Central.  The company presents lots of (probably unnecessary) evidence that the mobile space is taking off rapidly on college campuses.  There are already more smart phones being sold than workstations and laptops.  Moreover, the evidence is mounting that individuals spend more time connecting to the internet on their mobile devices than they do on other land-based devices.  There is no doubt that mobile will make a major impact on how educational content and student services are delivered to and consumed by learners.

The Mobile Learn module is in many ways simply an extension of the Blackboard Learn Platform.  The tool provides access for students as well as faculty and designers to their Blackboard course content.  While not all content can be automatically formatted for mobile devices, (and some content, like large charts or tables for example, lends itself to small screen real estate), a surprising amount of content and course features have been adapted from the traditional blackboard course.

At ATSU, we have installed a free version of the Blackboard Mobile Learn module for testing on our Blackboard Learn 9.1 environment.  It includes all of the same functions and features as the paid version, however, it can only be accessed on Wi-Fi or via the Sprint network.  Faculty and students who have courses on 9.1 are welcome to try it out.  You can download the app from either the iTunes App Store or the Android Market.  After downloading, you will need a special code (use 5DJZWX) in the search area to access A.T. Still University.  Remember though, this tool is still in test mode at ATSU.

The Blackboard Mobile Central app may prove to be even more exciting than Learn over the long term.   This tool allows Universities to develop their own mobile content.  While many schools rave about mobile campus maps and smart phone links to athletic information, these applications don't have much appeal for the ATSU community.  The tool, however, can be used to link to institutional systems outside of Blackboard to create features like student directories, access to library resources, or student grades.  As other third party systems like Google Apps for Education also expand into mobile formats, this tool may be a way to organize mobile development and official apps.  As an example, take a look at what the Medical College of Georgia has done with their mobile app.

I believe these tools have significant potential for ATSU and we are gathering information on how both tools can be implemented with our systems and how they match up with the mobile application strategy under development.  Let me know what you think and what features you would like to see in the mobile space.

Blackboard World #1 - Blackboard Analytics

I am in Las Vegas this week participating in Blackboard World 2011, the Blackboard User Conference.  I should have several posts this week about the conference and the various product announcements by Blackboard, not to mention the miscellaneous rumblings related to the announced purchase of Blackboard by Providence Equity Partners for ~$1.6 Billion.

On Monday and Tuesday, I am attending a Blackboard CIO Symposium event.  This event is targeted to CIOs and allows for some candid conversations about where Blackboard and the education software industry in general are headed.  The first session on Monday was about the Blackboard Collaborate Platform and the recently purchased iStrategy product.  This product is a BI (Business Intelligence and Analytics tool) that I have previously blogged about.  Not a whole lot has changed, so I won't say much more other than the fact that Blackboard has formally announced the addition of a Blackboard Learn Analytics module to this platform.  This module is the 6th module within the Analytics platform.

There session contained a very interesting conversation around the entire Analytics and Business Intelligence areas for education.  Several comments revolved around how the barriers to better use of analytics within our industry are not simply technical.  Many of my peers felt that administration within higher ed have been cautious about sharing data with faculty and other stakeholders and the culture in several organizations was perceived to lack transparency.  Thus, a culture shift may be needed as part of an Analytics and BI implementation.  Another barrier to immediate use of metrics is the fact that many organizations have not contemplated what data structures are necessary to get the desired metrics.   And for those organization which have defined their data, it was noted that there is a significant lack of expertise and even training for the types of skills needed to make analytics a fundamental part of the culture.  The best advice was to get data in many people's hands and then iterate repeatedly to improve both the usefulness and the skills.

Is Blackboard for Sale?

This week Blackboard, the LMS/CMS used by A.T. Still University, announced the company had retained  investment banking firm, Barclays Capital, as an advisor regarding an unsolicited proposal to purchase the company.  So does this mean that Blackboard is for sale?  Absolutely, it does.

To be fair, businesses are always for sale, but the receipt of an unsolicited bid puts the company "in-play" and sets some structure around the timing and pricing of any possible sale.  The fact that a purchase offer has been made is evidence that some outside party believes they can manage the assets of the company to provide more value (i.e. they can make more money) than the existing management is currently providing.  The consequences of this scenario are difficult to avoid, because an unsolicited offer changes not only the company, but also the company's industry.  Rarely can companies go back to business as usual after this type of development.  I suspect there will either be a change of ownership within 6 months, or the company will begin a slow and long downward spiral.

As a Blackboard customer, ATSU has first hand experience of the pain associated with the company's growth.  Our history includes a very difficult transition from WebCT after Blackboard acquired the company in 2005.  As the two companies merged, there was a great deal of product confusion and precious little product support.  Frustration was high.  That said, Blackboard was able, over time, to execute on their vision of integrating the Blackboard and WebCT LMS/CMS products.  The current version of the Blackboard Learn Platform includes many of (but not all) the best features from both products.  I would say that it is now a mature product.

But that may just be the problem.  Blackboard matured during a period when the education "business" was able to spend a lot of money on the promise of new technology.  Its business model depends on the revenue generated from sales of license rights and annual maintenance for the software.  The mature nature of the Blackboard product and its related business model may make it difficult for the company to compete with open source projects and cloud based software initiatives which many students and faculty increasingly see as more intuitive, responsive, and cutting edge.  To continue to grow and to be relevant, Blackboard needs ownership that constantly delivers new functionality in a way that customers can instantly experiment with, at no cost, and with no negative impact to existing features.  While Blackboard has shown signs of recognizing this need, so far they continue to expand and sell software features via a traditional platform model.

Perhaps new ownership (or simply the threat thereof) will be exactly what the company needs.

Blackboard Analytics

Today I participated in a webinar session on Blackboard Analytics with Jim Hermens, a Senior VP and General Manager of Blackboard Analytics (jim.hermens@blackboard.com) with Blackboard.  Analytics is marketed by Blackboard as a separate platform - this means it is independent of the Blackboard Learn tool and customers pay extra for it.  The product was integrated into the Blackboard portfolio after the iStrategy purchase (end of 2010).  The product is the base of the platform for education Analytics and Reporting and is Blackboard's newest platform.  The product is in use by over 100 education clients today.

Blackboard considers 3 components for Analytics

1. Performance Measurement
2. Reporting and Self-Service
3. Decision Support

The tool can take information out of the SIS.  Existing ETL packages (Extract, Transfer, and Load)  include Banner, Peoplesoft and Colleague.   Integration with other SIS systems, like Campus Management, would require custom consulting work.

Blackboard Analytics is not what they would consider a reporting tool, but rather provides the platform for the data warehouse that could integrate with existing reporting tools (hyperion, cognos, sas).  The tool really provides the OLAP Cubes to analyze the Data warehouse.  Other database tables can also be integrated to the tool for additional reporting and analysis.

The product currently has the following Modules (priced individually):  

• Student Management (Enrollment, Academic Affairs)
• Financial Aid (Still in process)
• Finance
• Human Resources
• Advancement (Still in process)

SUMMARY:  This tool would be an alternative to the eThority package that ATSU is considering testing.  Since eThority already has an ETL with Campus Management's database, ATSU would be able to get the eThority product up and running more quickly than with the Blackboard Analytics tool.

App Review - Flipboard integration with Google Reader

This past week, Flipboard, a personalized, social magazine app for the iPad, released a new version (Version 1.2) causing me to take a deeper look at this app.  What I was hoping for was an alternative way of viewing the content I have set up in Google Reader through my Google Apps (for ATSU) account.  My hopes were not disappointed.  The combination of Flipboard and Google Reader is fantastic!  My personalized content feeds really come to life with the beautiful layouts provided by Flipboard.

Over the past few months, I have learned how much time I can save in my professional reading by using an RSS news reader like Google Reader (see previous blog post).  I have set up my Google Reader feeds into about 20 folders which are dedicated to a particular topic.  I think of them as sections of a newspaper.  I have folders for local news, humor, sports, and vendor news, just to name a few.  By organizing my online reading into these sections, I can more easily stay up to date on topics of interest from several different sources side-by-side.  I'm sure it saves me more hours per week.

With Flipboard, I can integrate the content from "folders" in my Google Reader configuration into "sections" within Flipboard.  Now I simply click on a Flipboard section like "Open Education Courses" and all of my content is displayed in Flipboard with enhanced graphics and beautiful formatting.  I can simply click on any article teaser (which usually is shown with a headline, source, date, and the first paragraph or so of the article) to get to the full content of the article.  The response time is nearly immediate and the interface is incredibly intuitive.  It is much easier than turning the Newspaper to page 4 to read the rest of a front page story.

Flipboard also uses the wonder of the iPad's page turning metaphor to go from page to page to see a new list of articles.  Clicking on an article, or simply turning to the next page, triggers the "read" flag on Google articles so that I don't have to look at them more than once...even if I go back to the desktop or smartphone interface for Google Reader.  All of my reading on Flipboard synchronizes back to my Google Reader account.

Another awesome feature is how easy it is to share articles from within Flipboard to the rest of my Google Reader followers.  A simple click of an icon and I can choose to share an article not only on Google Reader, but through a variety of social tools, or even via email.  I can also set up Flipboard sections for my other Social Network tools like Twitter, but the Twitter integration is limited in its ability to track which Tweets have been read.

All and all, I am VERY pleased with this new version.  Being able to comment on my Google Reader feeds and share them is a huge benefit.  I'd like to see a few more options for personalizing section names, etc. but I am hopeful these will be coming soon.  I highly encourage any iPad fans to check out Flipboard and integrate it with your Google Reader account.

Adding Content - Blasts from the Past

In a previous post, I have written about my various fits and starts with previous attempts at maintaining a blog.  As part of this newest effort, I am also going to consolidate some of the entries from my previous blogs.  Not only will this clean up my electronic footprints and provide a single place for me to store my work, but it can also serve as an example of how blogger allows the writer to manually set the date and times for each post.  Thus I can add content from several years ago and maintain the actual dates of those entries.

Another item to mention is how easy it is to export and import blog posts using blogger.  Several of my old posts were simply exported from the old blog and imported to this one.  In a matter of seconds, I was able to move my old content.   This provides me with a level of confidence that if I were to find a better tool for sharing thoughts in the future, I could easily move my content from this area.  This is not a trivial feature.  The more time, thought, and energy that goes into your work, the more confident you want to be that it will be able to adapt to future media.

Finally, I should mention that a quick perusal of some of these older posts will showcase how my thoughts on blogging have shifted over the years.  I am amazed at some of the ways I thought about using this type of tool.  I am sure that my ideas will continue to evolve, but it is nice to now have several years of experimentation all in one place.

My First MOOC

To start off the new year, I decided to participate in an online course on Learning and Knowledge Analytics.  I didn't know much about the course.  What I did know was that I was interested in the topic, that the course was free, it required only the amount of time and effort I wanted to put into it, and was promoted to me via an email from George Siemens, a guy in Canada whose previous work on technology and education had caught my attention.  What I didn't know was that the format of the course would catch my attention at least as much as the content itself.

The course began last week with simple introductory type materials posted on a web site and then reinforced via email.  First, I discovered that there were over 400 people registered for the course.  That was impressive.  When it came time to do the obligatory introductions via discussion thread, I discovered that the registrants were from all over the world and included some very forward thinking educators, technologists, and perhaps some budding entrepreneurs.  VERY impressive.  Finally, as I started reviewing the introductory materials, I discovered a blog post from Dave Cormier, another Canadian education type whom I had been tracking via Twitter for over a year after hearing him on an edtechtalk podcast.  The blog post took me to three videos describing a MOOC, a Massively Online Open Course.  These videos and the work and ideas behind them caught my attention.

Rather than me describing a MOOC, I encourage you to view the 3 videos - What is a MOOC? (4 minutes and 27 seconds), Success in a MOOC (4 minutes and 17 seconds), and Knowledge in a MOOC (1 minute and 53 seconds).  I hope you find them worthwhile.  To me, this type of learning concept holds real promise.  I think of the MOOC as a practical application of a lot of the educational theory that has been related to technology.  For those of us at A.T. Still University, our new strategic plan talks about ATSU as a Learning-Centered institution.  For me, this concept brings together the components of technology to help build and practice a learning-centered culture.

I recognize that it is only week 1 of the course and the jury is still out.  I also confess that the method is a bit... well, messy.  There is a lot of disconnected content scattered in a wide variety of places.  But I also wonder if this isn't the real world experience that we need to help prepare future generations to deal with.  I'll keep you posted as the course progresses.  Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

RSS - How to Build, Organize and Read a Personal News Repository

Are you frustrated or overwhelmed by the ever growing amount of information necessary to stay even remotely current in your field?  Do you wonder how anyone can keep up?  Perhaps it is time to reconsider your strategies for professional reading and organizing your preferred web sites for news and information.  I have found that using a tool like Google Reader to build my own news repository, allows me to organize my routine reading material and better manage the landslide of information.  The method I use focuses on 3 concepts: Scanning -> Filtering -> and Sharing.  Here are some helpful hints I found as I put together my strategy.

1) Learn the Basics of RSS
RSS is a method for organizations to publish information and for you to easily consume it.  Organizations publish information (their articles or other content) into a feed.  You can then consume the information by subscribing to the feed using an RSS Reader, like Google Reader. Read on to get yourself up and running in less than 3 minutes - or skip to point 2 if you already have

To access Google Reader simply go to www.google.com/reader.  If you already have a Gmail or a Google Apps account (like we use at ATSU), then you can use your existing account.  If not you will have to create an account.  Once logged in, you will see the screen is segmented into 2 columns.  The left column is the navigation area, the right area is the content area.  Read through the helpful articles in the right hand column.  I suggest you minimize the All Items, People you follow, and Explore options on the left hand navigation and focus only on the Subscriptions option.  At this point you probably don't have any subscriptions listed, so let's get a few.

2) Organize New Feeds as you Add Them
 The ease of adding subscriptions is the power behind RSS.  Feeds to which you can subscribe are plentiful on the web.  Anywhere you see the orange RSS box (the image on the left), you can subscribe to a feed.  My suggestion is to organize feeds into folders within the subscription navigation area.  Each time you add a new feed, add it to a folder with similar feeds.  Think of folders as sections in a Newspaper.  It will make your reading far more efficient later when you have dozens of feeds.

Another powerful feature of RSS is the ability to use subscription bundles curated by others.  To see a selection of bundles, click on the Explore option to show the sub-items and then click on View all recommendations.  From here click on the Browse tab and find the bundle that is most interesting to you.   Another option is to look to the right of this article and subscribe to my "Education" bundle right from this blog site.  Bundles are a great way to add your first group of feeds.  Don't forget to organize them into your folder structure.

3) Scan Articles before Reading Them
Once you have set up a few folders and assigned subscriptions to each, it is time to really put Reader to use.  I find the best way to organize my reading is to review subscriptions one folder at a time.  Because similar feeds are organized into folders, I can more clearly focus on articles related to a given topic.  After selecting a folder, I make sure to click on the Show: List mode in the upper right hand corner of the content area.  This changes the view and allows me to see many more headlines at a glance.  I then review the list to quickly get a sense of hot topics or important news items.  Moreover, I can note articles about a particular event from 2 or 3 different sources giving me a more rounded account simply from the headlines.

4) Use the Control Key and New Tabs for Deep Dive Reading

After scanning a topic folder, it is time to read selected articles for more information.  I tend to maintain a pretty high volume and fairly wide variety of sources to scan from, but I end up reading a relatively small percentage of articles in detail.  If an article looks interesting, I click on the headline to get the article to expand and show a few sentences or paragraphs (the amount shown varies with the feed).  If I then want to read more, I click on the headline which opens the article in a new tab.  At this point, I switch to the new tab where I can read the full article at the original website.  

Here is where I use the power of the control key.  When reading a full article in detail, I will frequently use the links embedded in an article.  I will always click on these links while holding down the control key so the new link will open up in another new tab.  I will occasionally go two or three levels deep into an article, but by using the control key and tabs I can easily get back on track by closing out each tab.  

5) Use Your Network to Filter Content by Following People
One of the more powerful (and perhaps underused) features of Google Reader is the ability to follow people. This allows you to see articles that others highlight and share.  It is a great way to filter content and find new sources of information.  Within an organization, it could also be used to share updates on important projects, events or news of common interest.  Following people is easy.  Simply click on the sharing settings under People You follow and search by name or email address.  Feel free to follow me by going here.

6) Give Back by Sharing
As you start using Google Reader to regularly scan and review hundreds, if not thousands of articles, I highly encourage you to help others by sharing the articles you find interesting.  To share an article simply click on the Share or Share with Note buttons below an article snippet.  Think of sharing as an electronic version of a conversation starter.  Sharing may be the most useful part of the Scan -> Filter -> Share method.

Let me know in the comments what works and what doesn't work for you.

New Year Resolution

For the past couple of years, I have been considering writing a blog.  I've even started it a couple of times.  But as daily commitments mounted, I could muster neither the discipline nor the courage to keep it going for more than a handful of posts.  As we start the new year, I am again hopeful that this will be the year where the idea of regularly contributions to a blog takes deeper root and begins to grow and flower.

My reasons for blogging have matured a bit since my previous attempts.  At first, I wanted to write a blog because I viewed it as a forward-thinking use of technology.  While there is certainly still some part of me that wants to "test" the geek factor for blogging, I now look upon the idea as a more mainstream methodology for organizing my thoughts, fleshing out processes, and sharing ideas with anyone who may be interested.  For me, the concept of blogging has become less of a personal sandbox and more of a social responsibility to participate on the town square.  To relate my thoughts on blogging to the ideas of Mahatma Ghandi, I feel I need to become the change I want to see in the world.  If I want faculty and students to impact learning through using tools like a blog (and I do), then it is only proper that I also do it myself.

Blogging has matured and its power become better understood over recent years.  During its early days, blogging had a somewhat rebellious cache.  Those who wrote blogs were frequently (although somewhat silently) chided as self-centered mavericks, but the form is now recognized as a legitimate, even enlightened way of engaging in social discourse.  Leaders within many industries now regularly share their thoughts, sometime even half-baked thoughts, as a way of testing markets, gathering feedback, or sharing insight.  Use of blogs has grown from individual, consumer space roots into social, enterprise space branches.  When an institutional mission drives an organization more than profit, then motivation and inspiration result from shared values of the organization's stakeholders.  And shared values come from widespread, open communication... the kind of communication that blogs can facilitate.

In early 2011, Google will be adding blog services to the ATSU Google Apps suite providing all faculty, staff and students with the ability to create their own "ATSU sponsored" blog.  My hope is that a handful of ATSU blogs will help generate community discussions around two of the major themes identified as part of ATSU's new strategic plan: Innovation and Learning Centered education.  With this blog I will try to do my part at generating interesting topics and ideas related to technology, health and education.   I encourage you to leave your comments and thoughts so that we can all begin to use technology for "Byte Size Learning".