Blackboard World '06

I'm at the Blackboard World conference in San Diego and will be on a panel discussion today showcasing some of the California universities and colleges. We got the very last time slot in the conference (11:00 - 12:30) so I expect about 2 people in the audience. (Sorry about the quality of the picture - it's from my camera phone).

It's very interesting to see how far Blackboard has come. I first saw them in a tiny booth at the Educause conference in Seattle in 1998. There were about 5 people in the booth - none of them looking older than a recent college grad. They had a reception that night where they introduced their first "adult" (typical .com startup lingo) who was their new CEO. Walking into the San Diego Convention Center and seeing the dozens of companies that now contribute to helping Blackboard succeed was pretty amazing. It's indicative of how much higher education has changed recently - a change that is not going to stop, but just accelerate.

I went to several interesting panel discussions yesterday. One of them, "The Future of eLearning" can be seen on Ready2Net. A couple of statements stood out for me. One of the panelists said that he/she (don't remember which) was waiting for the time when we would just start calling it learning instead of eLearning. In other words the "e" is here to stay.

The second was a statement from the representative from the University of Phoenix. He recounted a conversation he had with a friend from the CSU system who told him that once we got our act together in the public sector of higher ed, we were going to eat his lunch. His response was: "Your faculty are our secret weapon". I think that was a very telling statement and a challenge to all of us in higher education. We need to bring our resources to bear - for the sake of our students - without compromising the quality of the education. I strongly believe technology is the way to do that, and all of us (faculty and administrators) need to keep focused on how students learn best in the new digital world.

We have a lot of plans forming at the South Orange County CCD along these lines and I'm excited about what is going to be happening (hopefully) soon. More to follow...