BbWorld16 Wednesday 13th July 2016

These are my interest notes not full notes – I’ll try and clean them up after the conference and please feel free to share with me your comments and corrections.

General Session: Fueling success: learner-focused strategies

Interesting that Amazon are coming in to take over the running of Bb’s data centre, not Bb moving their data out to Amazon’s current Data Centres.

Update and reassurance for managed hosting customers and again a hit to move to saas.

Mention of looking at “Grit” and “Hope” levels when looking at evaluating applicants or retention risk levels.

Do not forget that student will typically have a wider skill set than only the skills required for the course they are on.  Each student has a different life history.

We need to teach academics how to use data to help them.  We need to show them the affordances offered by this data.

Showing academics data that shows their approach to teaching a subject just isn’t working will typically result in staff changing their approach.  Staff want the students to learn and achieve.

Cost of instruction – The University of Nebraska – Lincoln

Using analytics to look at business investment.

25K students, 9 colleges, 4 campuses

Not just bringing in Student data but also staff data inc payroll.

Used Bb Analytics 4.1

Allows institue look at cost effective and ineffective courses and increase efficiency.

Can calculate cost per student per programme or per credit hour.

Launched over two phases.  First brought in staff cost. Second will look at revenue.

Total cost for each department can then be seen.

Used reporting initially to identify anomalies in data.

Reporting on the above.  [see slides]

Aim is to help the faculty to look at how courses are taught by providing them with this data.

Meet the new Blackboard Analytics

Already seen a bit about this and discussed with Mike Sharkey and Timothy Harfield so will only note additional information.

This is to complement what the humans are already doing NOT replace.

Showed xray for providing insight into data behind the scenes.

Have considered gamification but not moved forward with anything yet.

Revisited Bb Predict – hammered home the message that you need to know the question and what you will do when you get an answer – whatever the answer.

This will not improve retention / attainment on its own. It is to help you to identify those students at risk / falling behind and for you to then act upon this data!!

The Key to 21st Century Leadership

Very impressive speaker.

Leaders need to understand that your world can change in a moment.  Walls will not protect you.  Bridges will give you the most security.

Cyber security is something that we need to be increasingly worried about.

Leadership and education are increasingly online / in the digital environment not in the bricks and mortar university.

Bridge = communication it goes both ways.

Facebook users map of the world:

Leaders fail but it’s what you do when that happens that sets you apart.

“A Leader is a dealer in hope”

“Blackboard ate my homework”

Gave some great demo’s of looking into the logs.  I’ve done a screencast showing some of these but as it’s with live data I can not publish here without redacting data. Sorry

Most of this is in the slides which will be shared later.

If you are unsure use a dummy student account.  Go in do the actions the user is reporting they did, find the logs against your activity then look for the same activity from user at time they reported their activity.

If you can not find the activity the user is reporting try widening the date range you are looking at.  Users lie / get confused.

This has been one of my favorite sessions showing how using the student identifier and course identifier you can track the users activity to a great level of detail.