West Virginia Network offers Web-based training products and facilities from Bb that are available to state public higher education institutions who wish to participate. WVNET has a statewide license which provides for unlimited use of Bb by faculty, students, and administrators at participating institutions.
Bb is a facility that helps non-technical instructors to create sophisticated World Wide Web-based educational environments. Bb can be used to create entire on-line courses, or to simply publish materials that supplement existing courses. Bb uses the familar interface of a Web browser for both course design and delivery.
Bb facilitates the organization of online course material, and provides a wide variety of tools and features that can be added to these courses, including a conferencing system, on-line chat, student progress tracking, group project organization, student self-evaluation, grade maintenance and distribution, access control, navigation tools, auto-marked quizzes, electronic mail, automatic index generation, course calendar, student homepages, course content searches and much more.
Bb can also be used to deliver courses authored by third party vendors. Several publishers are also providing ready-made Bb content to supplement their textbooks. To find more information about publisher supplements made for Bb courses, visit Bb's Content Showcase at http://www.blackboard.com/content/.
Bb has been successfully implemented across many West Virginia campuses, where it continues to be used as a valuable part of the curriculum. To date, Bb is being used at many higher education institutions across the state, in over 2000 classes and is also being utilized by state agencies for training purposes.
Higher education institutions today face tremendous challenges. The Internet and other technologies have opened up innovative new ways to teach and learn, and to communicate and collaborate across boundaries. Institutions began by putting courses online, now they strive to create a Networked Learning Environment on campus. At the same time, institutions face many challenges: increasing efficiency by doing more with less, addressing the needs of non-traditional students and finding more effective ways to measure student learning outcomes.
The Blackboard Academic Suite provides powerful capabilities that enable higher education institutions to improve student outcomes and enhance teaching and learning. This world-class software suite has become a mission-critical application at educational institutions around the world. They’re relying on Blackboard to help their constituents learn and connect with others in the community while sharing the best educational content.
For additional information about Blackboard, visit the company Web site: http://www.blackboard.com.
