Impact's mission is to help modernize institutions and to improve their efficiency by getting the most out of their technology investments. Here's how:
1. Provide In-app “Tier Zero” Support
Solution
Impact presents all LMS help articles on-screen, as well as any additional knowledge-base articles.
When the Support Center is initiated, role, page, and content-specific articles are shown automatically to the appropriate user.
Escalation options are on-screen, robust, and allow for routing to any destination desired, whether that be email, phone, or an institution’s own chat plugin. These routing options can be based on time of the request, user role, course, etc.
All escalated support requests include important user information such as the user's course ID, role, OS, browser, time, page visited, article triggers, and more.
Figure 1: The Impact Support Center in the Blackboard Learn Ultra Experience
Outcomes
Offer automation for entry-level support while offering substantial cost savings for the institution’s support services. Increased use of in-LMS features, attention to quality, and data-filled escalations with direct correlation to lowering resolution times.
2. Increase Quality of Online Course Offerings
Solution
Use the Impact Tool Adoption Reports to isolate courses where learning objective components are not present. For example: find all courses where teaching assistants' information has not been loaded, locate where content has not been loaded, or isolate online course discussion boards that have not yet been established.
Send in-application messages targeted to instructors and/or teaching assistants in courses where key learning objective drivers are not complete (i.e. “non-active users”) in order to drive usage.
Send in-application messages to remind all or specific students, of course, aspects to be completed via links, videos, GIFs, text, or images, at any point during the semester/school year.
Figure 2: A systray message with a checklist for first year students
Additionally, you can offer each instructor with their own course reports to see individual student engagement for key course tools (virtual rooms within Blackboard Collaborate Original Experience, discussion boards, grade center, etc.)
Outcomes
Save time and energy to ensure course learning objective components are implemented and continuously used. Use rich LMS usage data to target in-application messaging to those stakeholders or courses that display a gap between user behavior and desired learning objective components. Improve the quality of online courses and lower overhead administrative costs.
3. Impact and Value Assessment with Impact
Solution
Impact's adoption and usage reports present 'apples to apples' usage insights for 3rd party applications. This enables universities to have an idea of the usage of potentially overlapping technologies and use cases when deciding which tools to extend, purchase, or remove. Imagine an institution is running four video platforms – Impact would be able to show and compare usage of all those tools.
Adoption increases are often derived from teaching, learning or faculty development sessions. Impact embeds internal or external events into adoption reports to gauge the impact within a course, campus, or institution.
Figure 3: An Impact Tool Adoption report comparing tool usage during a migration from Blackboard Learn Original Experience to Blackboard Learn Ultra Experience
Outcomes
Impact allows institutions to have a better understanding of the usage of tools to include in budget utilization conversions. Institutional events can be included to measure the efficacy of training or teaching and learning sessions upon tool usage and adoption.
Impact reports offer 'apples to apples' usage metrics to justify additional investments in pilots and 3rd party tool renewals or the potential re-purposing of budgets away from under-utilized solutions.
