Education Policy, Business and Technology

Getting 100 Percent LMS Buy-in from Faculty

Campus Technology: When the University of Arkansas System entered into a contract with Blackboard last year, any system institution that wanted to participate could do so to leverage its buying power. More importantly, however, for one year any of the universities and colleges in the system could access the full range of products from the company and get help with training, deployment and consulting.

This was an opportunity 6,600-student U Arkansas Fort Smith (UAFS) didn't want to miss. Newly appointed Associate Provost for Academic Affairs Margaret Tanner was assigned the job of exploiting the new agreement. Particular interests: Blackboard's Outcomes Assessment, Analytics for Learn and Collaborate, "things we never had before," she said. To make those tools "operational to the full extent" for the campus as a whole, however, required every class to have its data in Blackboard. Thus was born the "100 percent" faculty buy-in assignment.

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