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.
Through the use of Blackboard Collaborate, the school saw gains with at-risk students when they were required to attend online sessions. The AZVA staff has also been able to meet the needs of students better, host competitive clubs, increase communications with parents and staff, and streamline training.
For over a decade, Chico has used Blackboard Collaborate to increase the reach of its curriculum, serving students in an area the size of Ohio, while also enriching its curriculum offering by bringing instructors in from all over the world. The university was our first client to use video, create a rubric for measuring the success of online courses, as well as offer true hybrid classes in which students could login live online to classes simultaneously being taught in a face-to-face classroom.
Cobb County demonstrates how comprehensive and impactful Blackboard Collaborate can be for rich online instruction and meetings. In a given year, the county saves nearly $6,000 in mileage reimbursement costs and almost $18,000 in terms of lost productivity. That’s a total annual savings of $23,500.
As part of an organization-wide upgrade of computer systems, Housing NSW is using Blackboard Collaborate to replace traditional face-to-face training. Over 2500 staff across metropolitan and rural areas of New South Wales will take part in weekly virtual classroom sessions aimed at providing a continuous and effective learning experience.
Since the fall of 2008, every region and school district within Idaho has participated in hundreds of webinars and trainings, as well as webinars for students, all via Blackboard Collaborate. Through its survey data, IDLA estimates that in one year the state saved nearly $120,000 in mileage reimbursement costs. They also eliminated over 7,200 “out of office” hours and removed nearly 237,000 pounds of carbon dioxide.
Kamehameha Schools Distance Learning is using Blackboard Collaborate to save Hawaii’s indigenous language using Blackboard Collaborate voice authoring podcasts and recordings. They’re also using our enterprise instant messaging capabilities to teach 130 to 200 high school student, adult learners, and educators quarterly.
All Laurel Springs teachers have their own Blackboard Collaborate virtual classrooms. The school uses Blackboard Collaborate to host monthly virtual open houses, including one about socializing the virtual student by using games, sharing work, creating personal slides, forming student clubs, holding contests, and showcasing student projects. Students also collaborate on homework, review for exams, hear guest speakers, and share ideas.
Using Blackboard Collaborate as part of a consortium with Bloomsbury Colleges and the University of London, London Knowledge Lab focuses on research to uncover the underlying principles of web conferencing and how to build effective learner experiences based on sound pedagogical principles.
Blackboard Collaborate was the turn-key application chosen by Rock Island Elementary to extend the learning day, close the gap in student achievement, and meet the requirements of NCLB and Florida’s A+ Accountability Plan. As a result, the school has implemented its first state-of-the-art learning environment that enables instructors to replicate modeled lessons and sustain consistency for a rigorous curriculum.
At Thomas University, Blackboard Collaborate is used pervasively by faculty, staff, and students for academic programs, recorded seminar sessions, student tutorials, and much more. For example, use of Blackboard Collaborate by Library Services increased database use by 400%.
The University of Georgia has embraced Blackboard Collaborate for a broad range of uses, including offering engaging online courses for tens of thousands of students, as well as meetings for thousands of faculty and staff across the state. One annual assessment indicated a savings of more than $20,000 and the elimination of approximately 21 tons of carbon dioxide by meeting online.
Wright State has used Blackboard Collaborate to build a better sense of community and increase student completion rates for its distance education programs, as well as to facilitate faculty professional development. The virtual classroom accommodates those who can’t attend face-to-face classes during flu season or inclement weather. In one example, a history teacher credits Blackboard Collaborate with saving her job when she was unable to hold classes in person during chemotherapy treatment.