Come learn about Blackboard's latest addition to our academic platforms, Blackboard xpLor. Discover how xpLor can extend your existing LMS environment to promote utilization of standardized curricula, sharing of learning objects across your institution, and collaboration with users across LMS platforms.

This presentation will explain the development of a VLE Threshold Standard and describe how this was implemented at a UK HEI in 2012, by utilising the flexibility of Blackboard Building Blocks to develop a consistent scalable method of displaying content to students on a single page that previously existed in multiple IT systems.

At Anglia Ruskin University, our trainee teachers typically struggle with their placement /academic work balance and rush their research project at the end, and have reported disappointment with their grades. A mobile phone pilot 'texting' students study tips indicated that all students own their own mobile phones of varying sophistication. Student feedback indicates they are keen to use mobiles for studying, and they want guidance from their teachers to help them close the work/study gap. (Bradley & Holley, 2010). This presentation will focus on the design, implementation and evaluation of our project, which used SMS messages to support the students' academic work. The project ran at a time of considerable stress when the students were teaching in schools; studying for their qualification and needed to make the most of the limited time they had available for study.

Light microscopy labs in the Utrecht Medical School and Biomedical Science undergraduate curricula are being replaced by virtual microscopy labs using tissue sections that are digitized at high resolution. In our endocrinology course 'Hormones and Homeostasis' we have taken this a step further, by replacing the traditional lab manual with Blackboard Assessments to guide students through their microscopy assignments. These Assessments allow a smooth integration with the Digital SlideBox (Leica) software and, because of their interactive nature, afford many opportunities for aiding in the learning process. By adding additional teaching material and reviewing and quizzing prior knowledge from lectures and tutorials, a better integration is made between the theoretical background and the histology of the specimen (linking form to function). In this session, examples will be shown of the Blackboard-guided virtual microscopy labs of several endocrine glands.

Quality management is a very important part of every eLearning system. In this presentation we will describe eleven standards that were developed at Zagreb School of Economics and Management (ZSEM) for the purpose of evaluating the quality of eLearning courses. The standards were divided into three groups: static, dynamic, and administrational. We'll analyze all components of eLearning system in individual courses, but the special attention is given to dynamic standards as online quizzes and discussions. We will analyze the results of the evaluation for courses developed in the period of the past five years. Institutional awareness of the importance of ICT implementation ZSEM who currently has about 1,400 students and approximately 150 advanced courses on Blackboard, has made ZSEM a leader in eLearning in Croatia and in the region.

Wiley has been a valued source of information and understanding for over 200 years in the areas of scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly research; professional and personal development; and education. Through WileyPLUS, a research-based online environment for effective teaching and learning, Wiley offers content and digital learning resources across multiple disciplines. By integrating all course materials into Blackboard Learn, faculty can pick and choose the content they need to create a more effective and efficient course, while students can enjoy a learning experience that builds confidence and success.

Join us for a look inside this exciting integration. See how WileyPLUS and Blackboard Learn are simplifying and improving the user experience for your faculty and students, and how WileyPLUS can improve student grades.

Liverpool John Moores University's strapline for our students is Dream, Plan, Achieve. During this interactive workshop, we intend to share our experiences of how we successfully deployed Blackboard Mobile Learn across the institution through 'dream', 'plan' and 'achieve' stages of implementation. We will cover our:

• Pre-implementation drivers (dream)
• P'Soft', rapid but meticulous launch (plan)
• PPost-implementation evaluation and responses to promote adoption (achieve)

Throughout the presentation, we will invite participants to share their views or experiences from their particular perspectives, as existing users or those contemplating Blackboard Mobile Learn implementation. These will be captured and shared back to the room using the Socrative app. We hope that everyone who attends will find the workshop worthwhile and that it will promote further discussion after the session.

A case study showing how over a period of two years a virtual exchange has been created between two European universities. Seven hundred students learning each other's languages connect for both formal and informal learning opportunities and develop their language and intercultural understanding.

In 2011 the University of Salford decided it wanted to elevate its use of Blackboard and Turnitin to another level. The University resolved to standardise all Blackboard modules and the eassessment process. Project Elevate was established to capitalise on a Blackboard upgrade driving widespread technological adoption, the standardisation of modules and eassessment, whilst also improving digital content. This provided a powerful opportunity to enhance the student experience and impact on internal and national satisfaction surveys. 84% of academic staff were trained in just five weeks using a range of best practices.

The project used a range of techniques to evaluate its success: a benchmarking survey; an online declaration and a Student Audit. The audit involved students "marking" Blackboard modules against the University standards.

At Cardiff University one of our current goals is to leverage on the investment that we have made in our core learning technologies, principally Blackboard. Much work has been undertaken to try and understand the use of our system by both students and staff, this work has previously involved undertaking complete audits of all courses to see which tools have been used. The problem with this work has been although we can see what content is there we are unable to establish who is accessing the content and with what frequency across the organisation. EesyAnalytics would seem to resolve this problem and permits us to view exactly what our users are accessing by Institution Role. We in Cardiff University intend to utilise this information now provided by EesyAnalytics and other tools to improve our Student Experience through the ability to identify areas of poor (and good) engagement within our institution which will then facilitate targeted promotion, development and support to teaching staff in the use of the VLE thereby improving the quality of our Blackboard provision. It will also help us in our drive to produce new institution strategies and to successfully implement them.

Over the years Blackboard has developed into a dynamic environment with lots of possibilities for interaction, assessments, grade administration and much more. Our instructors often only use those Blackboard features that were available when they first started using Blackboard. Meanwhile the policies of the universities put high demands on instructors. Instructors do usually not realize that Blackboard can offer them solutions for the educational challenges they face in keeping up with the university 's policy. This is why we organized workshops in which we showed instructors how to find solutions within Blackboard. For this workshop we used the Care Pack, a package developed by Cultivate. The Care Pack is no longer available, while the method is still valuable. That is why a few institutions in the Netherlands jointly took the effort to update the Care Pack materials and make them available. We also added some features for molding your Blackboard to meet your institution's demands.

In light of the increase in UK student fees - it was time to put the VLE under the microscope. Before any judgment was made we conducted an institution-wide Blackboard Audit.

The conclusion was to stick with what we had - our something old. However, to address the institutional response we were going to have to improve the service dramatically.

By the start of the academic session 2012/13 we had Moved to Managed Hosting; Developed in conjunction with Blackboard, a Mobile App. that housed Blackboard Mobile Learn; Written our first VLE policy; and Designed a threshold standard. All of this was our something new and to make it happen relied heavily on an interdisciplinary team; our something borrowed was their time and good will.

This presentation will summarise the student-experience-driven approach the University of Leicester adopted for a large-scale VLE development and will share the lessons learnt and user feedback we have received to date, to answer the question - Are we blue?

Are you feeding your Blackboard system the right information? BB's SIS integration tool is a very powerful mechanism for importing data from external sources, but how do you ensure data you are sending is the best possible information? We explore the concepts of designing the correct diet for your system drawing on our recent experiences of implementing BB9 and share thoughts on how careful planning can help produce an interface that provides clean, consistent data.

We will look at techniques for identifying data sources and stakeholders, and provide ideas on the best ways of categorising and mapping these into sets of information that can be used to populate BB to ensure it's receiving its 'five a day'. We look at how to turn disparate sets of records and objects into the entity types BB demands, and how to best rationalise your data so that only relevant and useful items are included.

The workshop will allow you to explore these issues with practical hands-on exercises. This session will be greatly enhanced if you bring your own laptop/tablet to join in this interactive workshop.

Finally, we will look at the technicalities of setting up SIS jobs within BB, and consider how the nature of your data and institutional demands can determine the 'how' and 'when' of running your interface.

Learning from incidents during professional activities is often hampered simply because people forget (details of) incidents over time and/or proper incident registration. We developed the Mobile Reflection App (MRA). MRA allows to very easily create notes, photos, audio or video in any situation. As soon there is WIFI connection, the files are synced to a cloud of choice. We use the Blackboard Content System (My Content) as the cloud, because the user may set differentiated access rights for peers and supervisors in order to evaluate incidents at the appropriate time. In a first experiment with physicians it appeared that 65% of the participants find it useful to use the MRA, 69% indicated that the use of the app on the work floor was accepted by colleagues, and 81% appreciated its user-friendliness. We will demo the app during the presentation/workshop.

Higher education institutions are under increasing pressure to ensure that students stay on-track with their educational career goals. These institutions are faced with the challenges of identifying students at-risk of falling behind, effectively utilizing their investments in educational technology, delivering better education to their students.

We are all part of a highly visible and forward-looking trend of applying learning analytics to solve these challenges facing higher education today. Specifically, we are trying to get faster access to higher-quality information to support our decision-making process.

Blackboard Analytics for Learn acts as the key behind these efforts, to help universities like ours to create a two-part strategy towards student performance management:

• Prove that student activity (in Blackboard Learn) is a valid indicator for overall student performance.
• Apply learning analytics to positively influence academic outcomes (effective course design, student performance, and LMS usage trends).

This session will explore how Blackboard Analytics for Learn can help. We will explore the relationship between Blackboard Learn use on student performance; the tools we can provide students & educators to discover (and improve upon) their own levels of engagement; and how to grow student engagement in an online learning environment using timely, actionable information.

Blue is native ENTERPRISE FEEDBACK MANAGEMENT (EFM) software that provides a complete set of automated tools for authoring, testing, and distributing feedback forms, as well as collating and analyzing responses, and reporting the results in an organized way.

Blue software supports 3.7 million users in locations around the world, including the University of Pennsylvania, Boston College, RMIT University, the University of Toronto, the University of Louisville, Ursinus College, and Rio Salado College.

In this session, eXplorance demonstrates Blue software for advanced automation of surveys and course evaluations. Key demonstration highlights include:

• Creation of surveys and course evaluation projects and reports
• Management of ongoing surveys and course evaluation projects and reports
• Illustration of Blue’s instructor and student experience
• Description of value-add functionality with focus on LMS and portal integration

Technology and digital resources continue to enhance the educational experience for students and instructors every day. The need to make the digital teaching and learning experience simpler is apparent, including access, results management, and high-quality options in content. Join us for a user-focused discussion on how you can drive increased retention and engagement, and implement simple and effective assessment with use of the McGraw-Hill Education Blackboard Building Block.

Are you ready to move your online courses to the next level? Using the Blackboard Exemplary Course Program rubric as a guide, this workshop prepares participants to develop quality online courses and evaluate current online courses. At the end of the workshop participants will possess the knowledge to evaluate their own courses and a model framework for use with future course development. Please bring your laptop/iPad to this session, if possible.

In this workshop Blackboard Learn users can activate and try out the Kaltura Video Blackboard Building Block™ to experience Kaltura's full range of advanced video and rich-media capabilities for both desktop and mobile devices, without leaving their existing Blackboard® environment.

The Kaltura Video Building Block opens up a new set of engaging teaching possibilities from integration of lecture capture and video materials to enabling video assignments and sharing of student and faculty contributed video content. It adds a layer of rich media functionality that works across the Blackboard Learn™ platform, so faculty and students can use media easily. MediaSpace enables community, collaboration and social activities by leveraging the power of online video. Until now single administrators or small teams within the organisation would publish to a large audience; MediaSpace revolutionises this process to enable true collaboration with many contributors, moderators and viewers in a multitude of channels, projects and communities.

You will learn how to simplify workflows for teaching and learning, Campus Community, Library and non-course specific content. You will see the value of video incorporated into homework assignments and cataloging.

During this 90 minute workshop, you will also learn how other educational institutions use this platform with live European Use Cases. Note: Attendees will benefit from bringing their own laptops to this session whilst following a walk-through demonstration.

The results of the National Student Survey (NSS) and internal surveys are indicating increasing student confusion in the way that some Blackboard sites have been structured - leading to problems finding content. Following a period of consultation, The University of Northampton introduced a common structure in 2012 and will use this session to reflect on the process of agreeing the template and then subsequent site audits which checked for the existence of minimum content. Discussions are now underway to look at higher levels of quality within Blackboard sites. Students are now reflecting on the value of the structures and staff are making requests for changes to the structure for the 2013/14 cohort.

The presentation is an overview of how the University of Manchester delivers a self-service administration system linked to the institution's Student Record System. The institution has c3700 academic staff delivering 5000 course units annually to over 36,000 UG and PGT students.

The administration system enables academic staff to self-manage the activation and roll forward of their courses through our University portal; controlling availability to students, course content, and use of templates.

The presentation will:

• Give a non-technical overview of the principles of the integration between Blackboard and the Student Records System
• Demonstrate the activation / roll forward process
• Discuss the benefits of this system in terms of, academic ownership of course delivery, support for institutional requirements and use of templates, efficient and effective eLearning support, and automatic availability of courses to students
• How we have overcome the limitations of the integration

How to translate your graduation paper Workflow into the Blackboard Learn environment, using the Learning Module.

In 2009 the University of Bristol commenced an ambitious three-year TEL project whose primary purpose was to foster more widespread and innovative use of technology to support learning and teaching. Three specific project outcomes were identified: to provide an improved online toolset to support learning and teaching, to improve student access to learning resources and to achieve cost efficiencies.

Underpinning both the aim and outcomes was a desire to improve both the student and staff experience of technology-enhanced learning. The presentation will:

• Summarise the institutional and national drivers behind the project
• Review key project outcomes
• Offer recommendations for institutional initiatives, which aim to deliver large-scale improvements to operational systems, or encourage change in educational practices.

The presentation will conclude by summarising how the project has informed the current major TEL initiative at the University of Bristol.

This session will showcase how at the University of Sheffield we have developed a tool, which allows academic staff to easily create engaging, accessible and student-friendly content pages.

The presentation will describe how and why we developed the tool (called 'MOPE - My Online Page Editor), how it has been adopted and how it adds greater functionality to online materials.

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.