Checking Grades Predicts Student Success

How often students check their grades online is the best way to predict how well they will do in a class, according to a report from Blackboard. The educational technology firm found that students who accessed its gradebook function were the most successful in a class, while those who never accessed their grades were more likely to fail.

“This surprised me, given that other tools (like assessments) directly and tangibly influence a student’s grade,” John Whitmer, director of analytics and research at Blackboard, wrote in a blog post about the study. “This is an independent behavioral measure and yet is a very strong predictor.”

The data came from spring 2016 courses that were filtered by size of class, average course time, and use of the online gradebook. The filtered results provided information on more than 600,000 students.

The research found that students spent most of their time on the learning management system to look at content. Surprisingly, those who spent more than the average amount of time on course content earned lower grades.

“Students who have mastered course materials can quickly answer questions; those who ponder over questions are more likely to be students who are struggling with the material,” Whitmer wrote. “The relationship is stronger in assessment than assignments because assessments measure all time spent in the assessment, whereas assignments don’t measure the offline time spent creating the material. Regardless, this trend of average time spent as the most frequent behavior of successful students is consistent across both tools, and is a markedly different relationship than is found in other tools.”

Blackboard, Uber Team to Provide Rides

Finding a ride on campus just got a little easier for students. Blackboard, the learning management system used by many colleges and universities, has partnered with Uber Technologies to provide students with a way to schedule transportation using their campus-card account.

Students will be able to use the Uber smartphone application to arrange for cars and pay for the ride through Blackboard Transact, which provides cashless payment options. The program provides students with a dedicated “specific use” purse that can be established in the Blackboard Transact campus-card system which allows for deposits and payments.

“We believe this program provides students with reliable transportation options at any time—particularly when it may be unsafe for that student to get behind the wheel,” said David Marr, senior vice president for Blackboard Transact. “We hope this innovative partnership will encourage responsible transportation decisions by ensuring availability of funds and ease of access.”

Blackboard Opening Virtual Campus Store

Blackboard is branching out, testing a virtual bookstore within its learning management system that allows faculty to choose content and students to buy online. Content offered will run the gamut of new, used, rental, e-text, open source, and material faculty members produce themselves.

The store is designed to provide students with the required content for all their classes in a shopping cart ready for checkout. Blackboard is working with MBS Direct to provide the content.

The bookstore service is being tested on about a dozen campuses this spring and will expand in the summer, according to a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“We simply thought there was room for something different: A convenient, student-focused option designed specifically to support the educational experience,” Blackboard CEO Jay Bhatt told The Washington Post. “Students already use their learning platform to find out which materials they will need for their courses. It just makes sense that they should be able to buy or rent the materials in the same environment without having to go somewhere else or having to worry about whether they are getting the right items.”

Blackboard Getting Into MOOC Business

After 16 years of developing classroom software, Blackboard is getting into the massive open online course (MOOC) business. The company plans to provide free hosting for MOOCs that are offered by existing customers and expects to generate revenue by providing additional services to the institutions.

Blackboard said it wanted to take its time to understand the phenomenon of MOOCs. Its results showed colleges use MOOCs to offer educational material to the widest possible audience, to experiment with new forms of online teaching, and to attract students by featuring their top instructors.

“Institutions need more flexible options for experimenting with MOOCs and running online courses that meet their individual needs,” said Katie Blot, president of education services. “As schools better define how they want to experiment with MOOCs, it’s becoming clear that the best platform is usually the one they already have.”

The Blackboard plan allows institutions to connect their learning management systems and MOOC platforms in areas such as content and social learning. A mobile application through the Blackboard Learn platform also provides students and instructors access to MOOC content through iOS and Android devices.

Ottawa's Online Program Adding Video

Ottawa University, a 7,000-student institution in Ottawa, KS, is partnering with Blackboard on a new strategic initiative giving students 24/7 access to learning opportunities through tools offered by Blackboard, regardless of the student’s location.

A goal of the initiative, dubbed Project Virtuoso, is to provide instruction to both in-class and remote students through videoconferencing. Students will also be able to work with faculty and staff through virtual office hours and instant messaging.

“This partnership promises to be a real game-changer for us and potentially all of higher education,” President Kevin C. Eichner said in a university press release.

The program will begin with the Ottawa business school program in the spring and will eventually link students and faculty on the university’s campuses in Ottawa, Kansas City, Arizona, Indiana, and Wisconsin, according to a report in Campus Technology.

Blackboard has agreed to establish the Blackboard Center for Academic Innovation and house it in the Gangwish Gibson Library and Student Center, which will begin construction in May. Blackboard will also help fund the university’s Curriculum Design Studio, which is working on a media unit to support the online collaboration.

Education Tech Can't Leave Disabled Students Behind

The Department of Education estimates 11% of new college freshmen will arrive on campus with some sort of disability. That’s become a huge issue as institutions try to keep pace with technological changes while providing accessibility to all its students, whether they have vision or hearing problems to learning and cognitive disabilities.

State and federal legislators have stepped up with laws and regulations to provide equal access, and the industry is making progress. Blackboard claims its products meet industry standards and must gain approval from people with disabilities through partnerships with organizations such as the National Federation for the Blind before they ever reach the market.

But laws often have no teeth, according to Dianne Hengst, director of disability services at the University of Texas at San Antonio in a recent article that appeared at mysanantonio.com. Not only that, Hengst has also found students with disabilities do not always register with her office.

“(People with disabilities) don’t want to be segregated,” said Marti Hathorn, a blind graduate of UTSA and assistive technology supervisor at the San Antonio Lighthouse for the Blind. “We don’t want our own computer lab. I didn’t want to be left out of anything or cut corners. I wasn’t (in school) to get by, I wanted to do better than everyone else.”

Assistive technology could be as simple as curbs with handicap ramps and speech recognition software to more controversial ideas such as cochlear implants for children. For Hathorn, it included a screen magnifier, a closed-circuit television, and a scanner for her textbooks.

“When computer usage first took off, accessibility wasn’t even brought to the table,” she said. “Now it is starting to be a priority and is part of the discussion and more people with disabilities are speaking up.”

CourseSmart Integrates with BlackBoard

The Wall Street Journal reports that CourseSmart has developed a new integration platform to work seamlessly with Blackboard.  The single sign-on function allows students and faculty access to CourseSmart's digital course catalog by logging into the Blackboard Learn platform without having to sign into CourseSmart.  This means that faculty who are using Blackboard do not have to leave the platform and instead link required reading assignment, homework problems or other activities that exist in their digital course materials and share that information with their students.

The Blackboard Building Block for CourseSmart is free to higher education institutions, according to the article. Matthew Small, chief business officer at Blackboard says,  "The pilots we are currently running with CourseSmart as part of our signature partnership will continue to fuel this experience as they provide our clients with anytime, anywhere access to their digital course materials from any Web-enabled device, including mobile devices running on the iOS and Android(TM) OS platforms."

Blackboard Allows Sharing of Content

The Chronicle reports that Blackboard will add a “Share” button that will allow faculty to share course materials free and open to nonregistered students.  This is a big win for the Open Education Movement and for schools since they will  not be charged extra for additional viewing.  Blackboard’s “Share” initiative is partnering with Creative Commons where faculty will have the option to attach a Creative Commons license to the content.  Cable Green, director of global learning for Creative Commons, says his “goal is to have this kind of option in every commercial learning-management system and also open-source ones,” according to the article.

McGraw-Hill Digital Resource Platform

University Business has a new On-Demand web seminar (free if you sign up) on McGraw-Hill's new digital resource platform. According to the seminar, via the platform McGraw-Hill will give all professors full access to all curricular resources and tools, whether or not they use a McGraw-Hill textbook.

For professors, getting access to relevant and trusted online instructional resources and tools has been an ad-hoc, hit-or-miss process. This web seminar will demonstrate McGraw-Hill Campus, a new service that provides all faculty members across campus with one-click, unlimited access to McGraw-Hill's entire library of academic e-content and associated tools - directly from within the course management system. There is no fee for the platform, and instructors can use it regardless of whether or not they use a McGraw-Hill textbook.

This is the same platform which BlackBoard and McGraw-Hill have been piloting on different campuses this year. The McGraw-Hill tools include "an application to help faculty create digital course content and assignments and do automatic grading" and another which "lets faculty compile textbooks that use their own materials as well as content from the company's publishing portfolio." The integration of the tools with BlackBoard can allow students to buy the textbooks via a link on the course site.