From: Fred Beshears (fmb@socrates.berkeley.edu)
Date: Mon Apr 15 2002 - 08:18:52 PDT
Blackboard Learning Management System
Product Demonstration
9:30am - 11:00am
Thursday, April 18
Dwinelle Room 117
(or Room 127) check door for note
Presenters:
Jim McDaniels - Western Region Sales Manager
Jan Posten-Day - head of the Building Blocks program
Ken Roy - Director North American Sales
For this presentation, we've asked Blackboard to demonstrate the enterprise
version of their current Learning Management System, and to describe and
demonstrate the new features of their upcoming release: Blackboard 6.0
Also, we've asked Blackboard to describe the benefits of upgrading from
their low-end Level I system to the enterprise version of their system.
Educational Technology Services currently supports the low-end versions of
Blackboard and WebCT. We are working with the Educational Technology
Committee to determine if the campus should acquire an enterprise Learning
Management System. And, if so, if we should acquire the enterprise version
of one of the two systems we currently support.
Additional details on Blackboard's website and current product line are
appended below.
Feel free to pass this invitation on to other interested parties.
Fred Beshears
Educational Technology Services
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See Blackboard's Corporate Website: http://blackboard.com/
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Information on Blackboard's Current Product Line
Blackboard Announces Industry’s
First Comprehensive e-Education Suite of Enterprise Systems
October 30, 2001, Washington, D.C. - Blackboard Inc., the leading software
infrastructure company for e-Education, today announced a series of product
packaging and branding enhancements. The changes are designed to unify
Blackboard’s leading stand-alone software products already deployed at more
than 2,200 academic institutions in more than 140 countries. The
announcement was made to an audience of more than one hundred college and
university technology managers who gathered for a special Blackboard
corporate presentation at the EDUCAUSE 2001 conference.
At the center of the Company’s announcement is the launch of the academic
industry’s first comprehensive suite of enterprise software applications
that support teaching, learning, student and faculty groups, campus
commerce and other critical Web services. At a time when most institutions
face the daunting challenge of licensing discrete applications from
multiple vendors, Blackboard offers academic institutions an integrated
product line of systems that support e-Education initiatives on campus and
beyond.
“Blackboard’s decision to offer our enterprise software applications as an
integrated suite is in direct response to the needs and demands of our
clients,” stated Matthew Pittinsky, Blackboard’s Chairman. “Our strategy is
to ensure that our product line spans learning, portal and commerce systems
- giving clients a single source for their e-Education requirements, while
at the same time providing choice for institutions to install the specific
components that meet their needs.”
The Blackboard e-Education Enterprise Suite
Beginning November 2001, academic institutions can choose between complete
or independent licensing of the three primary systems that form the
Blackboard e-Education enterprise suite:
• Blackboard 5: Learning System
• Blackboard 5: Community Portal System
• Blackboard: Transaction System
Blackboard 5: Learning System The latest release of Blackboard’s industry
leading course management system. The Blackboard 5: Learning System is the
second generation release of Blackboard’s enterprise code base supporting a
wide range of teaching and learning applications online. For the first
time, the Blackboard 5: Learning System is available with full enterprise
capabilities independent of Blackboard’s community portal feature set.
Blackboard 5: Community Portal System The latest release of Blackboard’s
enterprise information portal, available for the first time independent of
the Blackboard enterprise course management system. The Blackboard 5:
Community Portal System enables academic organizations to provide their
various constituencies students, faculty, alumni, administrators and
others with a personalized, single log-in portal for accessing all of the
academic and administrative Web services the institution has put in place.
Blackboard: Transaction System The latest release of the re-branded Optim
and Envision commerce and access solutions for student debit account
transactions. The Blackboard: Transaction System offers clients a full
range of commerce and access modules, including e-Debit processing, Web
deposits, and more.
By unifying all three systems into a common suite, clients of each solution
can easily expand, leveraging common points of integration with back-office
systems and a common user interface.
“Much as the administrative systems market moved from separate providers of
human resource, finance and student records systems into a common suite, we
see the e-Education segment of the higher educations technology market
converging into suites as well,” stated Adam Newman, Director, Research
Group at Eduventures. “By taking a suite approach, Blackboard is helping to
define the emerging paradigm for deploying Web services that touch the
daily student experience, such as Web course environments, community
portals, and online commerce.”
Packaging and Branding Changes
Most significant for current Blackboard clients, the Blackboard e-Education
Enterprise Suite separates the Blackboard 5 course and portal feature sets
into two distinct enterprise systems which clients may now license
independently. This separation enables choice and flexibility for
institutions. In addition, the suite combines the company’s Optim and
Envision commerce and access systems under a new common brand.
Building Blocks Extensions
All three systems that comprise the Blackboard suite will be extensible
through the Blackboard Building BlocksSM program. Building Blocks enables
any client, vendor, or partner to integrate external applications, tools,
content, and services into Blackboard e-Education platform. Through the
development of system extensions based on Blackboard’s open APIs,
developers can extend the features and functionality of Blackboard in areas
ranging from teaching and learning, to student services, to e-Debit
commerce transactions.
For academic institutions, the Building Blocks program addresses an
oft-repeated request by clients who wish to extend Blackboard teaching,
learning and commerce systems to meet the specific needs of their faculty,
student and administrators. Building Blocks’ free Software Developers Kit
(SDK) provides faculty and students the ability to build innovative
customized applications (e.g. assessment engines, collaboration tools,
simulations, and other technologies) that integrate into the Blackboard
platform, as if they were part of Blackboard natively.
Thu
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