Ray Henderson/Michael Chasen Keynote

Is it bad that I listed Ray Henderson first in the title of this post? I think Ray is a breath of fresh air in the Blackboard organization… a “green shoot” if you will (to borrow the current economic phrase). I hope he sticks around.

“You can’t over-communicate with your clients” – Ray Henderson

I love this quote. It’s so true. Even if your product sucks, or your support is awful, some of that… a lot of it… can be mitigated by open, honest communication. If I know that you know that you have issues and that you are working on them, I’ll be much more forgiving of your flaws. If you try to hide them or make excuses, I’ll likely hold a grudge for a long time.

Michael Chasen started it off by describing Blackboard’s long term strategy as having three main components:

1) Universal access to education – Ray mentioned that the Obama administration allocated funds to develop free online educational materials. Blackboard is committed to helping educators share resources with each other.

2) Measurable educational results – This is one of the holy grails of education. The ability to demonstrate, with empirical data, the level of success that your institution achieves in the process of educating students would be a tremendous benefit. This data could be used to monitor changes made to the academic process and clearly indicate what is working, and what is not. It could also be used to justify funding, both public and private, and to encourage healthy competition between institutions. Unfortunately, human beings being unique and infinitely variable, this idea is probably more of a vision to aim for, rather than a goal that can be achieved.

3) Expanding on mobile and social technologies (iPhone, Facebook, etc) – So much effort is being put into allowing students the ability to access educational materials on their mobile phones (particularly iPhones) and Facebook. I suppose the idea is to go where the students are, but I’m not sure if students really want to be reminded of school everywhere they go. Maybe I’m just old, but do students really center their academic life around Facebook? Do we know that students want this? I can’t help but wonder about the opportunity cost of this endeavor… what other things could be accomplished with the equivalent dollars and manpower that might have greater benefit to teaching and learning?

Michael then continued with a laundry list of more practical items (presumably all in BB 9.1):

• The Learning Environment Connector now works with Angel, allowing former Angel customers an easy path to “upgrade” to BB Learn, by participating in “co-production”. I remember when that process used to be called “migrating” from one LMS to another by running “two systems at the same time”… how times have changed. (OK, granted that the co-production setup *does* offer some ease of use that would not be present by running two standalone systems, but really this process is an “upgrade” in the same sense that you could buy a Mac and then “upgrade” it to Windows)
• New partnerships with Wimba, Echo360, and NBC Learn. Blackboard Learn customers now get a license for the Wimba Pronto Basic IM client, a 25 seat license for Echo360 lecture capture, and access to licensed NBC video archives. Cool stuff.
• The ability to transfer content to a Kindle. This is great… if you have a Kindle. Again, I’m not sure how useful this will be to the majority of students, but it does have a certain “wow” factor.
• Specific K-12 features: a parent dashboard, and a way to link content and activities to state standards. I wonder if these features are customizable enough to be of some use to higher ed as well. I know there’s been some talk of a “parent portal” at Chico, to allow parents (with the student’s permission, of course) to see financial aid information, schedule information, and grade information. Visibility right into the LMS might be a nice addition to that, at least for some students. As far as state standards go, I wonder if a college or department could enter their own standards and then tie their content and activities to them?
• CE/Vista features: Blackboard Learn 9.1 will have CE/Vista style learning modules (including a much better importing of learning modules from CE/Vista sections), as well as a course files area that works like the course files in CE and Vista (not requiring the Content System).

As always, the demo system running from Michael’s laptop’s harddrive worked smoothly, especially the parts that were really just screenshot image maps with clickable hotspots for navigation. Amazing how snappy BB9 is when you take out the pesky web server and database overhead.

And then it was Ray Henderson’s turn. He talked about openness, partnerships with clients, commitment to standards, and the importance of support; these are all things that he has mentioned in detail on his blog (http://www.rayhblog.com) . It all sounds great… let’s hope they deliver. He said that he’ll be back next year to go over his “report card” and be held accountable for how they’ve delivered. Given Blackboard’s tendency to burn through high level executives, I couldn’t help but wonder if he’ll still be around in 12 months.

He did announce a new policy for opening the database, which is something that Angel did. This is a big deal, not only because it will help all of us in our pursuits to use the product to the fullest, but because it’s a tacit acknowledgement that the data inside the database belongs to us, not to them. Opening the database, and sharing how it’s designed, brings us one step closer to being able to retain our data in a system-agnostic way. Kudos to Blackboard for making this move. It will take things like this to win our trust back. Ray was talking about the BB9 database, of course, but the Twittersphere was also buzzing with rumors that it would be extended to the CE/Vista database as well. Keeping my fingers crossed.

The final big announcement was that Blackboard has purchased the company TerriblyClever. More on that in another post; it deserves a post of it’s own.