The focus of this workshop is twofold: to convey the lessons learned from past Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) built on CourseSites and to contribute best practices to the those interested in developing their own MOOC . CourseSites by Blackboard is a fully hosted online learning platform offered free to individual educators and institutions to support their MOOC initiatives. The CourseSites team developed several MOOCs with the objective to explore how a learning management system environment could be utilized and scaled to meet the needs of an open course framework while exploring pedagogical frameworks to foster a quality learning experience for students. The design, development, and implementation phases of CourseSite's past MOOCs will be discussed in terms of how the design changed in response to the formative and summative feedback received by the MOOC participants. In addition you will learn basic facts and recommendations about using CourseSites as your MOOC platform.

In this session, you will learn about the key features and capabilities of the Blackboard Collaborate platform including Webconferencing, Enterprise Instant Messaging and Voice authoring. The session is specifically tailored for you as a learning technologist, academic or trainers who want to share best practices and increase usage of these technologies within your institution more efficiently. You will also get a sneak peek at the 2013 product roadmap.

We will demonstrate the deep integration of Blackboard Collaborate with the Blackboard Learn Learning Management System for increasing student engagement including the benefits of the integration at a user and institute level. For our hands-on part, you will have a chance to experience Blackboard Collaborate mobile for yourself. Be sure to bring your mobile device.

We're delighted to have our Blackboard Collaborate client presenting during the session, sharing their experience of using this technology within their institute.

Building on research presented at a previous Blackboard Conference combined with ongoing teaching and implementation, this interactive session will introduce you to the concept of Sticky Content for your VLE.

Employing proven strategies from business, the idea of 'Sticky Content' explores ways to make your course VLE a place that students will want to come back to.

This practical session will explain how Sticky Content has been used at The University of Northampton to enhance student engagement with Blackboard VLEs. You will learn how to create professional course-level site banners, magazine style content and visually appealing reading lists that link directly to on-line libraries and booksellers.

Furthermore, we will share the lessons we have learned when disseminating this training to the student-facing teaching staff.

Building a course which is both mobile-friendly and suitable for the desktop can be a challenge. Many existing Blackboard courses containing rich, complex digital content are unlikely to translate well to the mobile platform or use case. There are a number of steps you can take to ensure your content is widely accessible.

Aim to follow best-practices when developing content for your course which will be consumed on a mobile device. If you're not familiar with mobile learning, it can be hard to know what these best practices should be. The majority of these though apply to both desktop and mobile, so by engineering your content for one platform, you are automatically including the other. This workshop will examine these best-practices and will raise awareness of the tools supported by Mobile Learn which can be harnessed in order to adapt existing content for mobile compatibility.

We will:

• Divide into groups to modify content in a Blackboard course to optimise it for mobile learning. This may involve thinking of suitable and sometimes unusual ways to present content to users which would not normally display correctly on mobile devices when added using the more common approaches.
• Examine common stumbling blocks for mobile content and investigate ways of getting round these.
• Take away an increased awareness of Mobile Learn and methods of adapting their rich course content to ensure it can be accessed on as many devices as possible.