Every year, we highlight our amazing customers and the innovative work they are doing to promote their educational technology with Impact. We are proud to announce our nominees for the 2020-2021 academic year Impact Awards!
Best Newcomer
We have had so many customers join us this past year and invest in Impact from Day 1. These customers have exceeded expectations during their implementation of Impact and have started projects to help improve adoption of their institution’s technology.
John Tyler Community College: The team at JTCC has jumped right into using Impact since finishing their implementation. They used messaging to inform users of re-engagement protocols, accessibility in Canvas, and new course blueprints. Moving forward, they plan to use Impact Insights to inform higher education criteria they need to report to university administration.
Durham University: The team led by Malcolm Murray and Julie Mulvey
used Impact to successfully migrate their students and faculty from Blackboard Original to Blackboard Ultra. They used campaigns with both messages and support articles to help their users seamlessly integrate into their new LMS experience. They have also increased adoption of third-party tools like Zoom and Microsoft365 through campaigns promoting their own custom support articles.
University of Texas at San Antonio: The team at UTSA led by Jatin Bhavsar and Eric Silva hit the ground running with Impact to supplement their communication to students and faculty. Impact messaging has been used to welcome students and promote tools and functionality within Blackboard. However, the LMS team has also partnered successfully with the Registrar’s office to share important dates and deadlines. Impact messages have been well-received by end-users, especially students who are glad to have the proactive communication to help them navigate their online college experience.
Radical Recommender
We have many advocates in our Impact community who are willing to be recommenders, offer advice to other institutions, and engage with our online community offering product feedback as well as Universe examples. We applaud the following power users for their constant support of Impact!
Martha Wilson (Delaware State University): Martha is always excited to talk about Impact, whether that is as a presenter at BbWorld or offering to be a reference to other customers considering Impact. She has been a champion of using Impact at her university to help integrate new faculty and students to Delaware State.
Nadine Edwards (Prince George's Community College): Nadine was a powerful Impact user at her former university and advocated to bring Impact to PGCC. Now at PGCC, Nadine is leading her team through a migration and plans to utilize Impact to assist her users with that transition.
Eric Silva (University of Texas at San Antonio): Eric has been an Impact power user for many years and over two institutions. No matter where he is though, Eric remains a strong Impact advocate and adopter. He is always willing to share his knowledge with other Impacters and prospects as well as contribute ideas in the Impact Community and Advocates Slack.
Presentation Master
As we headed into another year of virtual conferences, we had so many customers present on Impact panels, webinars, and their own presentations. The following presenters helped others in the educational technology community see the benefits of Impact and demonstrated successful use cases at their institutions.
Elisa Taylor & Neal Legler (Utah State University): Both Elisa and Neal gave fantastic insights on using Impact during our webinar Measuring Impact: Elevate Your EdTech Investments. They explained how they used insights to measure faculty and student behavior around certain Canvas tools, like viewing the syllabus or creating an assignment.
Shannon Creighton (Greenville Technical College): Shannon presented on our Impact panel at BbWorld and brought fantastic energy! He explained how they use Impact to communicate directly to our students with pop-up messages as part of a campaign to have students apply for scholarships. The institution scholarship coordinator said it was the largest response they had ever seen in increased student applications! Shannon highlighted out-of-the-box thinking on how to use Impact to affect university goals outside of LMS use.
Tryggvi Már Gunnarsson (University of Iceland): Tryggvi also presented on our Measuring Impact: Elevate Your EdTech Investments webinar. He highlighted the importance of using user feedback about Impact usage. For example, they created a campaign about the need to publish courses in order to send announcements to address a common problem of instructors giving feedback on how communication to students prior to semester start was confusing. As he says, “Impact helps you communicate to the right people at the right time.”
Most Innovative Use of Impact
As more institutions use our solutions to measure LMS usage, drive tool adoption, and improve LMS support, we have seen lots of interesting and creative use cases appear. These are our top three outstanding examples of using Impact to the fullest.
Queensland University of Technology: The Student Success Group, which is part of the larger Teaching and Learning department at QUT, wanted to bridge what they called the “engagement gap.” They used Impact campaigns with messaging as a way to “nudge” students who were at risk to get on track and stay on track for success. Their messages included calls-to-action, and focused on helping students plan out their semester and normalized help-seeking behavior. They also used messages to check in with students’ health and well-being. The messages were extremely well-received by students who were glad to have the encouraging reminders and tips on where to get learning support.
Westfield State University:
Westfield State saw the potential for Impact to have an important guiding hand for non-traditional student populations. They used the Impact custom user groups feature to target students in their ACE-H program, a hybrid competency-based addiction counselor education program focused on non-traditional, adult learners. They were able to create specific messaging for the students in this program about their course evaluations and professional portfolios that enriched the certification experience.
DeSales University:
DeSales is an active user of Impact, focusing on improving the LMS experience for their faculty. In particular, they used QR codes in their messaging to offer a different channel for faculty to give feedback on their Center for Educational Resources and Technology Satisfaction survey. They allowed them to broaden the scope of who saw the survey, the ease of access, and the increase of responses.
Laredo College:
Hannah at Laredo College created a Virtual Orientation course for all new students. This wildly helpful course went through all of the basics of Canvas. Hannah used Impact to remind students about this course and to encourage completion of the course at the halfway point. Hannah also utilized Impact to reach out to Laredo students during virtual learning week, providing uplifting and even humorous messages to her users! These messages were welcomed and appreciated by students and Hannah received positive feedback from students.
Superstar Customer:
Our Superstar Customers are the quintessential Impact customers–they are focused on adoption, utilize data, and improve their institutional communications with our messaging. We are proud of the work these customers do to go above and beyond with their Impact use.
Howard Community College: Howard is an all-around superstar customer! Jamie Bourne, MOL, EdS, who leads the Impact initiative at Howard Community College, has utilized Impact to create branded and customized messaging for students and faculty. These messages are set to run for new students and new faculty members and give them a great overview of their new learning environment. In addition to timely, targeted, and customized messaging, Howard Community College has customized their support center to include specific Institution forms. The team also utilizes our Impact Insights by monitoring adoption, and has customized their reporting templates to gather the data insights they are looking for in one, simplified location!
Youngstown State University: This institution has truly taken a university-wide approach to their use of Impact. They have a team of individuals across several departments who have focused on digging deeper into their Impact Insights to find data that showcases faculty and student engagement. YSU are also using Impact heavily as they transition from Blackboard Original to Ultra to help guide users through the migration process. They are masters of messaging, creating campaigns on topics such as promoting professional development events, course checklists, grade center tips for efficiencies, and proctored testing tools.
Mercy College: The team at Mercy College is dedicated to improving educational technology adoption not just at their own campus, but for others within higher education. They have done presentations across multiple conferences about Impact’s influence on their campus and have offered their guidance to others hoping to achieve digital transformation within their edtech ecosystem.. They excelled at creating a seamless transition to the online environment using targeted inline messaging during COVID-19 changes to the academic year, while also staying focused on facilitating student success.
Cardiff University: Cardiff has been a strong Impact institution for years, but 2021 was an exceptional year for supporting users within Blackboard. They usually use messaging for VLE-related issues but this year, they started using messaging in a different and powerful way - to raise awareness of student support and counseling services during critical times during the academic year. In addition, they created a new Support Center, creating a highly customized support experience tailored especially for their students and faculty. Their revamped Support Center includes article categories like “Essentials”, “Known Issues”, and “Good Practice.”
University of Iceland: The university has gone above and beyond with their use of Impact, from messaging to insights to customizing their support center. They have built campaigns to customize messaging to decrease email fatigue and increase data around who is actually seeing their messages. This audience-centric approach has improved user knowledge of Canvas. Additionally, they have worked hard to add Icelandic translations of Canvas articles into their Impact support center to work toward a fully bilingual support center.
De La Salle University: Though DLSU has not been an Impact institution for very long, they have quickly made their mark with Impact. Led by Dr. Jasper Alontaga, the Instructional Services and Technology Team created a comprehensive communication plan using Impact messaging to improve overall adoption of their AnimoSpace Canvas environment as well as third-party tools. Their successful use of messaging meets users where they are, providing them with regular “quick tips” on how to use various Canvas tools. They have also successfully created their own knowledge base webpages which they have pulled into their Impact Support Center to support both students and faculty and proactively address FAQs.
The University of Newcastle: The Learning Technologies team at Newcastle have been so active with Impact, between migrating to a new LMS and utilizing messaging to improve university-wide initiatives. They have begun their move from Blackboard to Canvas and utilized our migration templates as well as university-specific exit messaging. Additionally, they created messaging targeted to students to complete the university’s Course Experience Survey. After posting about the survey through Impact messaging, they saw the largest response rate for a Semester 2 course survey ever recorded, with Jarrod Hiles, the Learning Technology Support Officer at the University of Newcastle, calling it a huge success!
To all the nominees, keep an eye on your mailbox over the next month. We will announce the winners to all customers in the March newsletter. We hope that their efforts will inspire you to take your LMS usage to the next level as well. To all of our customers, thank you for using Impact to its fullest and we hope you win next year! In the meantime, reach out to your CSM if you want to highlight your institution or campaigns in our Impact Community.
