Keynote Session:  Step Change: Re-Engineering or Re-Invention?

Gordon Freedman, Vice President Education Strategy, Blackboard
 
The current economic downturn has created an unexpected outcome. Instead of simply looking at how to contain costs, institutions and governments are also looking at how education needs to evolve to fit into the information age. This dual focus of cost containment and future visioning is changing the technology discussion. As short as a year ago, technology?s benefits were still being debated. Today, with the necessity of meeting the needs of both students and society, it is understood that technology will play both a short-term and long-term role in creating modern education cultures. The idea that a step-change must occur in higher education is implicit, but how will it work? Three levels of change that include both re-engineering and re-invention process will be discussed based on conversations with education and government leadership in multiple countries.

Gordon Freedman, Blackboard's Vice President Education Strategy, is part of the launch of the Blackboard Institute, an effort by the company to provide a continual dialogue and emphasis on education change world-wide. Gordon has produced a series of white papers (see www.blackboard.com/research) and is currently working on expanding his Bb World talk into a major paper that will include collaborative input from education and government leadership in the United States and the EU.

Presentation held at Blackboard World Europe in 2009 about linking Blackboard software with administrative, library and educational tools, to form a central student portal.