D2L's Brightspace learning platform now features a variety of ways to organize and manage faculty and staff professional development. Bringing these capabilities into Brightspace eliminates the need to maintain a separate learning management system for faculty development, according to the company. "Instructors and staff can use the same learning system to develop their professional skills that their learners are using — which saves organizations money, resources, budget and time,” explained John Baker, president and C.E.O. of D2L, in a statement.
In an effort to provide a more inclusive learning environment for students, the Utah Education Network has partnered with Blackboard to roll out the company's Ally product at nine universities across the state. Ally integrates with an institution's learning management system and automatically checks course materials for common accessibility issues.
When asked what tools and technologies they would most like to adopt for their online programs, online education leaders cited adaptive learning and learning analytics as their most wanted tech, according to the latest Changing Landscape of Online Education report, a joint initiative of nonprofit Quality Matters and Eduventures Research.
Following a semester-long pilot of Blackboard's Ally solution for accessible course content, the University of California, Berkeley is expanding its use of the technology across campus. The rollout will begin this fall, and by the end of next year, the system will provide accessible course materials to more than 40,000 undergraduate and graduate students, according to a news release.
Shortly, colleges and universities that use the Blackboard Learn or Moodlerooms learning management systems will also be able to offer "day-one access" to digital curriculum for their students, through an agreement between Blackboard and VitalSource. Under the terms, faculty will be able to select content from VitalSource's catalog of digital textbooks and make them available to students on the company's digital textbook platform through their LMS from the first day of class.
Google today took the wraps off new security features for its education productivity suite, G Suite for Education, which includes Google Classroom, Docs, Sheets, Slides and a range of other tools.
Founded in 2014 by Colorado State University, Indiana University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Florida, Unizin is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to improving the learning experience with technology and creating a common, interoperable infrastructure for education.
Fifty-three percent of students in a recent survey said they prefer classes that use digital learning tools, according to a new report from McGraw-Hill Education.
Faculty and students vary widely in their impressions of technology's impact on campus, and their expectations are evolving rapidly, according to research presented last week at the 2017 Educause Annual Conference in Philadelphia.
North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have teamed up to launch a competency-based teacher education program they hope will help address a widening teacher shortage in the state.