C-Level View :: January 24, 2007
Worth Noting
Educause and Internet2 Announce Continued Support for Internet Freedom Preservation Act
The two organizations have announced their continuing support for the “Internet Freedom Preservation Act,” a bi-partisan effort designed to prevent phone and cable companies from purposefully limiting Internet performance for selected (legal) users or application types, in order to gain an advantage for their own services.
The legislation, originally introduced in 2006, is based on the concepts of “
Net Neutrality ,” and has been re-introduced in 2007 by Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Senator Byron Dorgan (DND) and cosponsored by Senators Barbara Boxer (DCA), John Kerry (DMA), Tom Harkin (DIA), Patrick Leahy (DVT), Hillary Rodham Clinton (DNY) and Barack Obama (DIL).
Blackboard Launches Outcomes System
This month, Blackboard launched the Outcomes System, its first product release since the merger with WebCT.
The Outcomes System is designed as a flexible platform to gauge institutional effectiveness across an entire institution and promote streamlined assessment and evidence-based decision making at multiple levels, from the classroom to the president’s office. Building on higher education’s prior history of assessment and business intelligence strategies, the soup-to-nuts approach sports a long list of capabilities, from student assessment, to course assessment, program assessment, administrative unit assessment, academic unit assessment, institutional assessment, and many others. As outlined in the
Outcomes System brochure, key functionality includes: “Define, share, and use student learning outcomes, rubrics, and curriculum maps; Collect and evaluate artifacts of student learning; Run online course evaluations and attitudinal surveys; and Understand outcomes with analytical reporting.”