The Blackboard Collaborate™ Hall of Fame for Excellence in Collaboration celebrates educators around the world who have shown exemplary innovation and creativity in their use of the Blackboard Collaborate platform.
This year Blackboard Collaborate recognizes two traditional 4-year universities in the U.S., two 4-year universities from abroad, one K-12 school district, and a community college.
Each year, Clay County School District serves 200+ students in their Hospital Homebound program. These students have traditionally been served one-on-one in their homes or hospitals with certified county teachers. Due to the increase in gas prices and the low teacher-student ratios, the district was forced to look at new and innovative ways to serve its students without sacrificing student achievement. With Blackboard Collaborate, the “Home Connections” program was able to serve its students virtually with only four teachers and little to no travel. The success of this program has led to the creation of Clay County’s 41st school, Clay Virtual Academy. The Academy will open its doors in the Fall of 2011 to students in grades K-12 and will be forever grateful to the students, teachers and Blackboard Collaborate, all of whom paved the way for future successes.
One of the leading universities in Canada, Dalhousie University boasts of hundreds of Blackboard Collaborate rooms and archives that are accessed daily by thousands of students, faculty, and staff for online instruction, office hours, or outside experts. In just one week in the 2010 fall term, 1,171 students and instructors participated in more than 260 hours of live online sessions. Both on-campus and distance students have come to expect classes to have a virtual component for instructor-to-student and student-to-student dialogue. While some academic institutions are just getting programs like these off the ground, this kind of use is business as usual for Dalhousie University.
Drexel University understands that the key to online and blended student retention is engaging students from the point of first contact through graduation and beyond. While Drexel has a true campus-wide implementation of Blackboard Collaborate—from nursing and computer science instruction to online office hours and professional development meetings—the university’s School of Education optimizes Blackboard Collaborate to bring its campus to globally dispersed students through innovative programming. The results of an April 2011 study of Drexel’s MS in Higher Education students supports the importance of engagement as it relates to satisfaction, learning, and alumni development, with 90% saying they were satisfied with the program and 95% saying they would recommend it.
At Ivy Tech Community College, enterprise instant messaging has become such a common part of its infrastructure that it is now nearly impossible to catalog all of the diverse uses of the tool, which include instant help desks, online office hours, and real-time library services. Ivy Tech already boasts more than 50,000 students and 2,000 faculty using Blackboard IM at its 26 campuses statewide. After setting the global standard for utilizing IM, the school also wanted to keep its competitive edge by using the Blackboard Collaborate platform to promote collaborative online learning among students, faculty, and staff located in geographically disbursed areas of the state. Today, Ivy Tech holds more than 100 statewide meetings annually, saving $300,000 or more.
Relying on Blackboard Collaborate web conferencing capability, NYU-Poly created an eMath Forum to provide conditionally-accepted, first-year General Studies students who did not meet the traditional admissions requirements with a highly interactive, challenging online summer math program. The online eMath Forum bridges the gap between students’ high school math skills and those needed to navigate through the rigor of a challenging STEM curriculum at the university level. The results speak for themselves, with 98% of the students successfully completing the eMath Forum. What's more, 97% who completed the program are currently enrolled at NYU-Poly.
Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia, created what it calls a Global English Corner, which enhances its students’ intercultural communication skills as well as the university’s international students’ proficiency in spoken English. Using Blackboard Collaborate, the university adapted a common learning event in China, English Corner, into an online environment to support the important societal and interactive aspects of language learning. From its campus in Melbourne, the university regularly interacts with groups at three universities in China. At the end of the project, 88% of students said that their confidence to speak English had improved after participating in the program, while 35% reported “much improvement” in their English communication skills.