Launching the package of Blackboard Developing its students into exceptional graduates is core to Northumbria’s Vision 2025, a vision that identifies the university as a “challenger institution” focusing on delivering world-class research, transformative partnerships and a global impact.
A central goal of Northumbria’s Vision 2025 plan focuses on enabling students to become exceptional graduates. To achieve this goal, the university needed a cutting-edge, modern, dynamic and intuitive virtual learning environment (VLE) that could foster learning, teaching and engagement.
“We needed a platform able to fulfil our vision and meet all the requirements our academics and students deem necessary to succeed—and we needed to implement it without disruption, effectively and with clarity of purpose,” shares Professor Peter Francis, Deputy Vice-Chancellor.
“More than anything, we needed to find a partner that shares our vision, that will advocate for us, and that challenges us—we believe Blackboard best fits this role.” says Harriet Walshaw, Project Manager.
Northumbria’s leadership selected Blackboard as the university’s corporate enterprise partner for two key reasons:
The VLE selection committee, sponsored by Professor Francis, decided that its ideal student experience would be delivered by the collective power of Learn Ultra, Collaborate Ultra and Ally, along with partner integrations which included Turnitin and Panopto. “Given the high expense of pursuing a degree, we need to demonstrate value to our students, as well as a strong return on investment (ROI),” explains Walshaw. “This combination of Blackboard products creates a powerful, tangible student learning environment that contributes to a positive student ROI.”
After only a few months of planning, Northumbria transitioned its Blackboard Learn environment to the Software as a Service (SaaS) deployment and enabled the Ultra Base Navigation. “Moving from Managed Hosting to SaaS was straightforward. Blackboard did all of the heavy lifting, ” says Walshaw. “In preparation for rolling out the Ultra Base Navigation, we communicated the update to our users through multiple engagement routes and activities. Not one helpdesk ticket was logged during this process—a sign that our communications approach was a success—and our users welcomed the cleaner, more modern feel.”
The team then shifted its focus to transitioning academic staff to using the Ultra Course View, first launching several new programmes and degree apprenticeships as pilots. Based on the success of these pilots, Northumbria’s Technology Learning and Development Team, comprises four learning technologists, was then able to roll out training to all 1,400 academic staff members on Ultra Course View.
A Complete Transition to Learn Ultra
Northumbria expects to have all courses running on Learn Ultra for the upcoming academic year, which would make Northumbria University one of the first higher education institutions in Europe with a full Learn Ultra deployment. “We aim to be the best at everything we do,” shares Professor Francis, “and our renewed partnership with Blackboard will help us continue to challenge today’s status quo by offering cutting-edge, innovative solutions to our students.”
