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Desire2Learn's commitment to education and ongoing investment into research and development have defined them as the leading provider of technology and services for the delivery of online and blended learning programs. Learn how innovation in analytics, online assessment and course development technologies can be used to drive student engagement, retention and overall success.

Learning enterprises in the United States need better tools to address several key challenges: 1) building the capacity of graduates to use their knowledge to achieve their career goals, thereby raising national productivity and competitiveness; 2) discovering the best course of action for learning enterprises in current circumstances and in changing conditions; and 3) stepping up to new challenges such as the foundation targets of significantly improving Americans graduating with high-value degrees, certificates or credentials.  In the 21st Century marketplace, institutions will need to embrace the role of becoming “success makers.”

To highlight key issues, we present a five-stage model of the evolution of learning and competence
building technologies. This is grounded in examples of current practice and future possibility. It describes how leading-edge institutions and learning enterprises are using “expeditionary change” to evolve, innovate more nimbly and establish competitive advantage as they transform. Such changes will be essential to American higher education addressing affordability and establishing financial sustainability.

The five-stage model highlights how to use the organizational capacities developed to enable online
learning as an instrument for transforming higher education. Until now, many leaders have failed to grasp the potential of orchestrating those capacities to systemically realign learning to the needs of the 21st Century knowledge economy and to adapt to new patterns of knowledge sharing. However, today’s social networking, Web 2.0 and learning technologies are facilitating and accelerating transformations: in the production functions for learning, embedded analytics to increase success, roles of faculty and mentors, business models, patterns and cadences of interactivity, use of open resources and the roles of independent, “free-range” learners. They are also empowering disruptive competitors and enabling closer links between learning, work, and competence.

Transformed online learning will be critical to achieving higher levels of performance, enhancing productivity, and providing greater value.

The session will conclude with a description of the stages of readiness and capacity to use analytics to improve student learning, persistence and graduation.

Epsilen recognizes external pressures are forcing educators and educational institutions to re-evaluate students. Amidst national attainment demands for student completion, swelling enrollments, high attrition that challenges retention efforts, and shifting student expectations about the educational experience one thing is clear: it is more important than ever to educators to keep students engaged in the process and experience of learning. From a student perspective, the pressures are similarly acute. Success, no matter how you define it – be it course completion, program completion, transition from one educational stage to another, or securing of employment post-education – is something that requires collaboration on many levels.

We will detail the ways which Epsilen supports Student Engagement by coupling traditional LMS functions with collaboration tools that empower students and educators to participate in learning communities. These powerful tools work together to promote individual achievement of learning outcomes. Additionally, we will touch on our use of predictive analytics to support student outcomes.

Just like "Octane" itself is an additive to fuel to make it more efficient and higher performance, Octane in this context represents an injection of applications, processes, tools, or functionality into existing content in such a way that the implication is the publisher doesn't have to make any changes to their content, yet, can still introduce a host of value-added features and services to their content customers.

The presentation will discuss the work being undertaken by the JISC-funded ceLTIc (Creating Environments for Learning using Tightly Integrated Components) project.  This project is using four
applications (tool producers) as case studies:
   - WebPA
   - Elgg
   - PebblePad
   - Campus Pack
For each application, the project seeks to identify the types of integration which are most important to its users, and then demonstrate the implementation of these integrations using LTI in a teaching
environment.

The main focus will be on the issues arising when adapting tool producers to provide support for LTI, including the development of a PHP version of a generic class to encapsulate the LTI connections with tool consumers.

The 2011 Horizon Report lists learning analytics in the 4-5 year adoption horizon, but the rapid rise of analytics tools combined with the increasing demand for data-driven decision making is pushing this horizon closer. Analytics dashboards and alerts are already being used to increase student engagement, improve pedagogical practices, and raise retention and success rates, particularly for at-risk students. The 21st-century knowledge economy demands not only effective, innovative learning tools, but also analytic insights into the complex challenges of appropriate, timely intervention, self-aware learning, learner progression, and ultimately learner success.

The rapid proliferation of mobile devices has many schools wondering how to incorporate them into their educational strategy. This session will explore the different definitions of "mobile," the existing device and reader landscape, and tangible use cases of how these technologies are utilized. Mobile solutions for both eTexts and LMS platforms will be discussed.

Please join David McCarthy for a presentation about NOOK Study and our development efforts in creating both a BLTI Tool and Blackboard Learn Building Block to allow for seamless integration of NOOK Study eTextbooks into course content. During the presentation, David will briefly introduce the story behind our development of NOOK Study, Barnes & Noble’s free eTextbook desktop application. Then he will review the main features of NOOK Study and how they fit into the larger context of interoperable pieces of the education ecosystem. He will then demonstrate the NOOK Study BLTI Tool and show its use with an LTI-compliant learning management system.

Presentation

Many companies in Korea are fast phasing in advanced smart devices in their work. In order to facilitate smart working, their employees are given smart phones as their office device and asked to use in their work experiences. As they get in using their smart devices, they also felt necessity for studying through smart devices. As their needs of mobile learning are getting increased, applications of learning are introduced at the app store or android market enormously. However, at the view of instructions and UX design, it cannot be sure if they are optimized in mobile environment. This session will discuss the design and technological optimizations undertaken by the smart devices and their functions considering accessibility, instructional effect, and motivational design and so on.

Tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices provide new and exciting opportunities for formal and informal learning with Pearson leading the way by offering applications for students, teachers that are accessible on a variety of mobile devices.

Let's imagine a highly connected multi-device world where you can teach, learn, collaborate, and communicate from almost anywhere anytime. Starting from Pearson's current mobile capabilities for mobile browsers, iPhone, iPad and Android devices, what lies ahead as learning becomes an ongoing personalized activity?

Mobile is not just radically expanding student access to learning; it is making powerful new learning experiences possible. Digital content on mobile is fast evolving into an ecosystem of connected learning applications. The emerging result is a far more individualized, collaborative and active learning experience.

Join McGraw-Hill to learn how these innovative mobile applications are being used on campus. Get reports and results from the field about how mobile is changing the student learning experience - with a focus on next-generation content, faculty-generated content, assessment, and student productivity applications.

While most schools aspire to deliver 1:1, mobile computing to their students, not all schools have the money and resources to meet that aspiration today. Windows MultiPoint Server uses the power of today’s PC hardware to deliver the latest Windows experiences to multiple students running off the same PC. Each student has their own monitor, keyboard and mouse and are able to work independently. With WMS 2011 we are adding tools to give teachers visibility and control over the activity in the classroom or lab. www.microsoft.com/multipoint

Currently the IMS QTI working group is under way to finalize the QTI 2.1 specification. This new version of the wide-used QTI specification provides enhanced support for long-term maintenance of assessment content. Against this background the talk concentrates on practical experiences with the implementation of QTI 2.1 based assessments in universities and publishing companies. The speaker, Jens Schwendel, is CEO of a mid-sized German elearning company and co-chair of the IMS QTI working group.

Participants will learn about some of the innovative assessment tools and services available to meet various aspects of balanced assessment. This session will provide an overview of matching the right technology solution to usage goals and considerations when using student response technology to facilitate balanced assessment. We will also explore several case studies of k12 schools that have used TurningTechnologies student response systems to meet the challenges of implementing balanced assessment.

Is it more effective to improve student learning with analytics by focusing on formative or summative assessment; to focus on staff interventions, faculty interventions, or student self-help; to focus on intrusive intervention or a “light tap on the shoulder”. The answer to all those is: “yes”. We’ll discuss how using analytics in a 360-degree way can help improve student outcomes.

The APIP Standard: A Tool for Interoperable and Accessible Test Item Content
The APIP Item Content Standard builds and expands on QTI, Access for All, and Common Cartridge to provide an integrated solution for highly accessible and interoperable test items. This session provides an overview of the APIP Project and the conceptual framework that guided the development of APIP. The session also describes in detail the APIP personal preference and item content models and discusses the implications that APIP has for item content development and test delivery systems.

- More efficient, individualized learning for students.
- Measurable insight into student learning to guide continuous improvement for faculty and institutions.
With the capability to track engagement and assess learning, assessment technologies has had the potential of revolutionizing teaching and learning. Reality is rapidly catching up with the promise.

What is driving today's rapid adoption of assessment technologies might surprise you. Learn about how McGraw-Hill is helping individualized learning and data-driven instruction happen on campus by making assessment simpler and more accessible, as well as more active and adaptive

We can change education. When we ask the right questions, measure with the right tools, visualize for the right stakeholders, and act appropriately, we can make a tremendously positive impact on teaching and learning. This impact can be seen and felt across crucial, mission critical factors to the institution such as, but not limited to: at-risk students, individualized / personalized learning, professional development, faculty hiring models, accreditation retention reports, budgeting, and many more. Using only the best business intelligence tools, Pearson LearningStudio has been leading the way with data collection and analysis in a cloud model (read: millions of user data elements) for over 15 years. This presentation will illustrate philosophical underpinnings that span far beyond simple clicks and grades as well as showcase tools that can truly change teaching and learning on any campus. Participants will leave with a “success index” that should help them begin to think about data differently on their own campus.

Is your institution interested in adopting breakthrough learning technologies that are scalable, interoperable, and create innovative learning environments? If so, attend this presentation and learn how the IMS Campus Program provides guidance to K-20 to support these adoption objectives. The IMS Campus Program includes an open network of institutions who are interested in working together to share implementation strategies and best practices to broaden the adoption of IMS compliant learning technologies. This presentation will also provide an overview of the various benefits to participating in the IMS Campus Program and will set the stage for IMS Campus members to discuss related case studies during this program track. Live demonstrations will highlight the distribution of interoperable learning content, using IMS' Common Cartridge, to various learning platforms including Blackboard, Moodle, Desire2Learn, and Angel. Attend this presentation and you will learn how to engage with a community that fosters guidance, collaboration and commitment to IMS specifications.

The University of Michigan (U-M) is leveraging IMS Global Learning Consortium standards to incorporate tools developed at the U-M and by commercial partners that would otherwise not be available as part of the core collaborative learning environment. These include locally-developed systems developed prior to or outside of the Sakai architecture for: large lecture interactive collaboration and study aides, database web content management, and discipline-specific assessment. Commercial applications that now operate in the U-M Sakai environment include an eTextbook pilot and a system for multimedia collaboration and delivery. The LIS standard is the basis for a partnership with Oracle to support a new enterprise directory project.

This presentation will profile ten years of the Tennessee Board of Regents (sixth largest higher education system in the nation) implementation of eLearning and online programs “with and without “ a strategic plan for advocating and adopting common IT related standards and the partnership with IMS Global Solutions for leadership and support in this area. Highlights will include the challenges and lessons learned implementing eLearning and online programs without common standards and the benefits of partnering with IMS to address those challenges that resulted in (a) enhanced learning environments, (b) third party integration of products and services into the course management system (D2L), (c) integration of publishers’ eBooks, virtual labs, and digital content; (d) significant cost savings, (e) reduction of time, effort, training, and staffing to adopt new technologies, and (f) most importantly, the ability to increase teaching and learning opportunities and resources to our faculty, staff, and students.

In Louisiana, we were faced with many challenges.  Our workforce was declining and our people were challenged by an economy further weakened by hurricanes and the lingering impact of the BP oil spill on fisheries and deep water drilling.  People were returning to education to enhance their skills on their own terms. To accommodate increasing demand and rapid enrollment growth in a new economic reality of declining resources, Louisiana Community and Technical College System Online program, LCTCSOnline, made the strategic decision in 2010 to explore alternatives to traditional approaches to delivering learning and began developing the mechanisms to offer open-entry, individualized learning.  The need for greater flexibility required us to adopt open-source tools, open content and common cartridge with Moodlerooms and Pearson Learning as strategic partners.  That decision launched us into uncharted territory participating as the newest members of a worldwide community of educators and innovators.  We needed guidance and turned to IMS for advice.  LCTCSOnline implemented new business models, staffing models, and technology solutions with the themes of openness that, thanks to IMS, have been given names like Interoperability and common cartridge.  This relationship set the stage for collaboration launching us on the path of rapid expansion and innovation to deliver LCTCSOnline programming anytime, anyplace, to any person, at any pace, on any path using any device. 

: The CSU’s MERLOT Open Education Services has transformed the Carnegie KEEP Toolkit into MERLOT’s Content Builder authoring tool, including the option to produce OER in a certified Common Cartridge format. MERLOT’s integration into SoftChalk which also produces OER in a Common Cartridge format is another example of how MERLOT is advocating the Common Cartridge. The role of authoring tools within the CSU’s Affordable Learning Solutions will be reviewed.

Florida Virtual School joined the IMS community several years ago when facing the challenges of delivery content to multiple LMSs and incorporating third-party products into its content. IMS is addressing these challenges common to publishers and other end users in the K-12 market through its k-12 Schools group. Join us to discuss FLVS challenges, lessons learned, and partnerships; and hear how IMS is helping us to address K-12 solutions.

SIRIUS-Academics is a unique entity, launched by Florida State College of Jacksonville, to build complete course materials packages to demonstrate that high quality and affordability can go hand in hand in the rapidly growing community college market. Emphasis is on the development of highly creative, interactive courses making use of the latest research in learning and motivation. In partnership with Follett Higher Education, and its CafeScribe digital textbook reader, Sirius is now distributing these courses to over 24 partner institutions through the Project Delta consortium. The panelists will describe their goals, their experiences in moving from an academic unit to an increasingly independent entity, and the value of partnership in making that transition.

Join us for a discussion that will explore the exciting possibilities of innovative models for instructional technology. As digital content, online teaching and learning tools, and the internet cloud converge, Cengage and other publishers are working to develop standards in web service interoperability to support the shift to digital content as a primary educational resource. Chris Vento, Executive VP of Technology and Development at Cengage Learning, will lead a session that will cover interoperability as it relates to choice in content and platform to promote optimal learning experiences.

The CSU’s Digital Marketplace project will show how a blend of technology and business innovations provides scalable pathways for using of Open Education Resources, eTextbooks, and digital library resources. In collaboration with Barnes and Noble, the CSU’s Open Education Resource Finder tool is embedded in the Nook Study Blackboard building block, which makes it both convenient and scalable to discover the OER associated with the content of a textbook. We will also show how the CSU transformed the Carnegie KEEP Toolkit into MERLOT’s open educational services Content Builder authoring tool, including the option to produce OER in a Common Cartridge format. MERLOT’s integration into SoftChalk which also produces OER in a Common Cartridge format will also be highlighted. Finally, we will present the results of our digital licensing pilot projects for eTextbooks which produced significant benefits for both students and faculty, discuss the implications for the broader marketplace and Learning Impact Community.

Athabasca University is an open and distance education institution. A critical component of moving to online from a print and ship delivery mode is the conversion of all courses to a standardised format. The creation of normalised course content will greatly rationalise the course development and publishing processes, enabling the course inventory to be managed through efficient workflows through the use of a content management system. It further provides a critical enabling condition for the adoption of meta-tagging standards, which will lead to the creation of a learning object repository. The presentation will review the project that AU undertook to achieve this objective.

Open Textbooks offer powerful benefits to students, helping level the playing field of student access to information. But what else can be done with this newfound power of OER? Flat World Knowledge believes the next step in the evolutionary path of OER lies in the ability to effectively cede full control of textbook content to the faculty. The new Flat World Knowledge "MIYO" ("Make It Your Own") dynamic publishing platform will be demonstrated, along with a discussion of the implications for course instruction. Flat World combines high quality / curated content, cutting edge technology, and a modern licensing model to provide the next generation textbook solution.

Colleges and universities are fast incorporating advanced electronic and information technology into all aspects of student experience – on campus and online. Examples include the Amazon Kindle DX ebook reader, the Barnes & Noble NookStudy system, wireless personal response “clickers,” online libraries, self-service kiosks, online classes and discussions, and social networking. This session will discuss the legal and technological initiatives being undertaken by the disability community to address these developments, the steps that educational institutions can take to ensure that disabled students have mainstream access to technology and the resources available to technology developers who wish to offer out of the box accessibility.

iLearnNYC, the NYC DOE’s online learning initiative enables students to take high-quality online and blended courses to supplement and enhance the learning opportunities available to them in their local school. The mission of iLearnNYC is to enable schools to personalize learning to the needs and motivations of individual students by expanding system-wide access to online and blended content and tools and developing schools’ capacity to use them. Key elements of this initiative include an online learning platform that supports online and blended learning for teachers and students and a catalog of high-quality courses and supplemental digital resources that are seamlessly integrated to enable informed content decisions to reduce barriers to adoption to schools.

Currently DOE schools struggle with the variety of learning management and e-portfolio systems and commercial online course and content providers used by NYC public schools. There is a lack of coordination in the purchasing and implementation of these systems and services that results in a loss of economies of scale both in the pricing of these systems and services and in the resources needed to implement them. Consequently, schools generally embrace one content provider and thus are restricted in the content choices that can be made available to their students. Schools do not have a uniform platform that contains robust virtual classroom tools that are available across the entire DOE system. The current disjointed nature of multiple learning management systems inhibits collaboration between teachers and students across schools. Lack of scalable business processes and enterprise systems to manage enrollment, user access, and license/content management, authoring workflow and reporting creates an unnecessary additional administrative burden on the schools and inhibits the use of virtual learning. In addition, not having data on which to judge the success and progress is a major barrier to the evaluation of programs and the move towards personalized mastery based instruction.

The iLearnNYC plans to overcome these barriers through a coordinated effort between its LMS provider and industry leading publishers and producers of online learning content leveraging best practices and standards. The NYC DOE is using its buying power to push the envelope in the adoption of content interoperability standards and more seamless management and distribution of content. The NYC DOE is also driving standardized data exports to implement the advanced analytics necessary for comparative evaluations and move towards personalized mastery learning.

iLearnNYC has learned a great deal about content interoperability and data standards through its pilot program. In the Fall 2011 the program will launch an industry leading LMS platform and content from many industry leading providers. The majority of the content will be integrated into the platform using standards such as IMS Common Cartridge and Basic LTI. Content providers needed for the program who are unable to conform to standards will be integrated using other methods but given two years to transition to standards based approaches. In addition, the DOE is investing in tools to enable streamlined approaches for enrollment, license management, identity management, and reporting / data aggregation across numerous platforms.

 

The Center for Teaching and Learning’s (CTL) Progressive Science Initiative (PSI) and Progressive Mathematics Initiative (PMI) are effective new approaches to student learning and teacher training. Interactive products from SMART Technologies enable the PSI/PMI pedagogy, which uses a combination of direct instruction and social constructivism, with formative assessment embedded into every lesson. Further, the PSI and PMI approach improves consistency and efficiency of lessons by utilizing “Smart Lesson Study” which promotes sharing and group improvement of lessons through online exchanges. This presentation will demonstrate the pedagogical benefits of PSI and PMI in the classroom and discuss how SMART products can facilitate effective implementation of PSI and PMI in schools around the world. These CTL programs use an open source approach, offering free on-line access to all the content used by its math and science courses, enabling any teacher to start using these curricula and methods within their own classroom; CTL's website (www.njctl.org) offers all the SMART Notebook software presentations, homework, and assessments needed to teach each course, and training on how to apply its approach to teaching and learning.

How can higher education institutions build from legacy SIS and LMS systems to fully leverage technology to enhance retention and student engagement? GoingOn’s Student Engagement Platform brings together the best of today’s social web technologies into an integrated, institution-wide collaboration network. In this talk, GoingOn CEO, Jon Corshen, will discuss the challenges he faces and solutions he has developed, covering topics including IMS standards, access controlled syndication, interest-based notifications, web-wide data-mining, LMS and SSO integration, syncing with Facebook and Twitter, and unified messaging architecture.

This presentation features comments from the K-12 sector and an Online University in conjunction with publishing and software industry experts. Libraries and librarians are viewed as crucial for best practices, yet in need of resurfacing within the world of online learning and the Common Cartridge. The most tradition element in Higher Education provides unparalleled capacities & economies for both advancing research and populating the online classroom. Libraries collaborated with vendors and publishers to pioneer automated databases and Internet use. University libraries were on the Web before educational programs and remain major “trusted” arenas—especially notable as founts for the digitization of primary sources. Equally important, such facilities provide student and faculty with their vital link to the Deep Web of licensed electronic monographs and refereed journals—the heart of advanced scholarly studies across the disciplines. As argued, such resources offer economical and pedagogically sound alternatives that remain strangely isolated from e-textbooks. Moreover, the field acts at the cutting-edge of digital preservation initiatives and the Semantic Web with its untold promise. And, librarians themselves bring unquestioned subject and Web expertise, as well as high-touch skills to the online learning environment.

Individuals with disabilities have pioneered many personalized learning innovations out of necessity, in order to participate in the educational system. Technologies have been developed to transform content in ways that make it accessible to someone with a visual, cognitive, or hearing impairment. These technologies are in fact examples of personalizing content to meet the needs of the individual. With the digital revolution in educational content and delivery, proponents of personalized learning have an opportunity to benefit from developments in assistive technology, as well as to ensure that new learning strategies are fully accessible to people with disabilities. This session will examine the key contributions assistive technology can make to personalizing learning, with examples drawn from the Alternative Media Access Center, one of the pioneering centers promoting accessibility in education.

Utah Valley University has delivered online instruction for years, but some online courses have not been engaging and have not produced competent learners. A research project in the Digital Media department at UVU is looking to change this through the deployment of the Learning Components software platform. The Learning Components software enables instructors to create instructional sequences that are interactive, engaging, and provide huge amounts of learner analytics data. The learner's performance is always monitored - both in real time and stored for assessment purposes. The LC software is helping UVU professors create online and blended courses that are learner-centric. Learners using the LC software have more feedback and help at their disposal because of a "facilitated learning network" than students who take traditional courses. This presentation will describe how the LC software is changing the way UVU professors teach - and how disruptive that can be to a traditional university

The Nisai Group received a 2010 Silver Learning Impact Award recipient for personalized learning in online environments, but the organisation still believes that there is a lot to learn and a lot of questions to ask.  If the logic of our education is reversed, so that the system conforms to the learners' needs, are we still able to maintain the benefits of group learning and collective activities?  How can technology help us to improve the personalising of learning without undermining the benefits of organised curricula?  What pedagogical model will facilitate a move towards peronsalised learning and how will the role of the teacher need to adapt. Is personalised learning cost effective in mainstream schools? The Nisai Group will give a presentation that highligts the benefits and the issues of the subject and considers how online environments may offer a supportive medium.

TBD

McGraw-Hill and Blackboard have partnered to integrate McGraw-Hill's market leading platforms, Connect(R) and Create(TM), within Blackboard Learn, Release 9.1. By offering all course resources in a single environment, the solution significantly improves faculty and student workflows and provides:

*Single sign-on and easy access within the Blackboard Learn platform to McGraw-Hill's Connect(R) and Create(TM) to manage course content, create assignments and track student performance.
*Automatic grade synchronization of all grades for McGraw-Hill assignments with the Blackboard Learn gradebook. *The conveniences of pre-built publisher content and tools without the inconveniences of leaving the system or importing and staging content common to other product models.
*Seamless access to best-in-class learning resources, making it simpler to get more done and deepening student engagement with their courses for improved performance and retention.
*Access to a range of popular tools in the Connect platform, including adaptive assessment to deliver customized learning content based on student strengths and weaknesses, and lecture capture to give students the ability to easily find key information from lectures to review at their own pace.
*Flexibility and choice, ensuring that instructors are not restricted to a single source for content and tools, allowing instructors to use resources from virtually any source.

Currently in a limited field trial and commercially available in summer 2011, the solution is the first to rely on the open education standard Basic Learning Tools Interoperability (Basic LTI); is fully compliant with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to ensure student privacy; and is built on the highly accessible Blackboard Learn, Release 9.1 platform - the first learning platform to earn Gold Star certification from the National Federation of the Blind.

Robbie Melton, Assoc Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Educational Technology, Tennessee Board of Regents, will describe TBR’s experience with integrating their LMS and their eREader via the BLTI standard

Presentation
SoftChalk ScoreCenter is a new, easy and reliable way to track student score data from SoftChalk content into the gradebook of an LMS. Developed using the BLTI (Basic Learning Tools Interoperability) standard, this presentation will demonstrate how SoftChalk has used the BLTI standard to support new content integration and grade tracking functionality, and tighter integration of content with the LMS than previously available through use of SCORM content standards. In addition, we will demonstrate SoftChalk's improved Common Cartridge packaging and QTI import/export features.

Blackboard and SunGard Higher Education have partnered to produce an LIS compliant SIS integration between SunGard Banner and Blackboard Learn. Developed on a SIS Integration support framework leveraging the Blackboard Learn Building Block APIs, this partnership is producing the future solution for SIS integration for Blackboard Learn and SunGard Higher Education Banner clients.