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.
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