The University of Southern Denmark Becomes First Scandinavian University To Go Mobile with Blackboard

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New App Brings the Academic Experience to Mobile Devices

AMSTERDAM - 7 February, 2011 - Blackboard Inc. (Nasdaq: BBBB) today announced that the University of Southern Denmark has signed an agreement for Blackboard MobileTM Learn, making it the first Scandinavian institution to partner with Blackboard to enable students to access course content on their smartphones and mobile devices.

With five campuses, students at the University of Southern Denmark spend a significant amount of time travelling between lectures. Students and teachers are using their mobile devices to interact online, get directions and find friends. To better leverage mobile support for the academic experience, the University decided to extend access to interactive teaching and learning to mobile devices, allowing users to comment on class discussions, view grades and documents, and access course information and materials.

"Using mobile applications for students to not only contact one another but carry out day-to-day academic experiences such as accessing and printing course materials is becoming increasingly common," said Ambrosia Hansen, Head of Department for Competence Development at the University of Southern Denmark. "Blackboard Mobile Learn is essential for our institution to deliver a first class learning and teaching experience. We aim to provide students with an innovative and technologically savvy learning environment that not only meets their needs but which facilitates successful learning. A recent study by Ericsson indicates that 80 percent of people who go online worldwide will be connected via a mobile device in 2015. It is highly probable that our students will increase their use of smartphones when working with learning activities in Blackboard within the next few years."

pTools Drives New Pensions Board Learning Content Management System

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pTools today announced the completion of a significant deployment of pTools Content Management Software (CMS) for the new Pensions Board online learning service. 

Available to pension scheme trustees (of which there are more than 200,000) and anyone working in the pension’s industry, the service provides training free of charge in an easy to use, self-managed environment. The new initiative was designed to respond to new legislation which, from 1st February, requires all pension scheme trustees to undertake training at least once every two years.

The system includes extensive user management and learning content management features driven by the core pTools content management engine.  pTools worked with The Pensions Board and pensions industry partners to deliver the technology behind the online learning solution that is easy to use, intuitive and capable of being updated to reflect a continuously evolving regulatory environment.

U.S. Falling Behind as Academics Goes Global

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Those that have read my blog know that I do get on my soapbox from time to time about the state of education in the United States.  I can't help but be concerned about the future for America's young adults.  Too many students are not opting to stay in school to continue their education. If U.S. students continue their lack of motivation in pursuing an education, I can't help but be gloomy on America's place in the 21st century as a world leader.

Taking a different viewpoint, BusinessWeek recently posted an article on academics in the United States stating that U.S. schools are not doing that bad.  The schools could be doing better, but they're not terrible.  The article uses the Two Million Minutes documentary as its backdrop.  The BusinessWeek author points out that academic performance doesn't always dictate the sucess a person may have in the world of business.

But things aren't as dire for U.S. students as they might appear in the documentary. As an academic, I have been researching engineering education and have taught many graduates of Indian, Chinese, and American universities. It can take longer for Indians and Chinese to develop crucial real-world skills that come more easily for some Americans. Yes, U.S. teens work part-time, socialize, and party. But the independence and social skills they develop give them a big advantage when they join the workforce. They learn to experiment, challenge norms, and take risks.

Find the open source survey, Save the doctor

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Here is your chance to help out the academic scholars figure out what open source is all about. Lara Thynne, a PhD candidate at Deakin University Australia, is running a survey to be used in examining the motivation of open source users when it comes to participating in open source projects and using open source software. Ms. Thynne's difficulty is that she is needing around 1500 completed surveys and hasn't quite connected with the open source communities to "get the job done".

I encourage anyone in the open source community to take some time and fill out the survey. Personally, I found the survey interesting by what questions she chose to ask in her survey and maybe more interesting which questions she may have left out of the survey. She claims the survey takes only 5 to 10 minutes, but to be honest it took me a full 15 minutes (maybe I'm just slow). I am not sure how much traffic the server can can handle, so if you can't make a connection right away you might want try again at a later time. The link to the survey is: https://dcarf.deakin.edu.au/surveys/oss/ .