long-term goals - from government and clients they're hearing that universal access to education is critical to future. True sharing of courses or entire programs. Ability to measure long-term growth or learning outcomes. Need to be able to justify investments and rationalize new investment in education. Look at what is happening and find better ways.
Student market is driving the look at mobile technologies. Need to highly customize and personalize learning.
Product demo. Nice integrations of YouTube and NBC video content. No HTML or cut/paste needed. Vanderbilt university iTunesU integration.
New relationship with Echo360 that includes 25 licenses (computer or podium) for Echo360 product for all Bb clients. New tool to select any content in a Bb course and send it to their Amazon Kindle. Also relationship with Wimba to provide instant messenger functionality built specifically for education that is course specific (pre-populated user lists). Built in wiki technology that will be tracked by course statistics.
K-12 feature - parent dashboard (enhanced observer role) and new lesson-plan functionality. Wizard driven to set objectives and then assign tasks. Providing administrator functionality to look at standards being used and how those standards have changed from year to year.
Talking about learning modules as a way to make content valuable over time. Frustrating that there is still no talk yet about making Bb actually understand semesters, different sections of the same course, etc. Fundamental miss in terms of making Bb useful long-term and provide more value to the institution.
Admin function to look at required texts (based on higher-ed act) to audit the books to look at total cost of course. New partnership with Acxiom to use public data (same mechanism as financial institutions) to verify that the person taking an exam is actually the person they say they are. License included for clients.
Ray Henderson: 58 days with Bb so far. Has spent most of life in or around education. Support response times have improved greatly. Great emphasis on striving to overcommunicate and provide as much transparency as possible. Philosophy is that if Bb doesn't speak about what's important to them or problems they've had, then others will fill those in for them. Bb needs to move from participation in openness to leadership. Taking first steps to opening up the database in NG
Plea to community to engage and communicate around obstacles and challenges.
Bb NG schema is now openly published and available to developers.
Michael Chasen: announcing an acquisition of a company of a group of students from Stanford; MobilEdu. Huge new committment to mobile development for Bb. Create product that aggregates and optimizes (for mobile) university maps, course environment, course catalog, peoplesoft enrollment, people directories, bill payment, sports schedules, iTunesU, YouTube, etc. Also, with new iPhone 3.0 API, can use push notification to communicate info from Bb to iPhone devices.
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