Washington, D.C.-based Blackboard Inc. said this week it has come to Flint to test drive its latest learning technology at Kettering University.
The company launched the Beta program for Blackboard's Release 9.0 on Oct. 29, making Kettering one of only about 50 institutions with an advanced look at what’s new for the industry.
“This is more than just cutting-edge,” said Donna Wicks, system
administrator for Blackboard at Kettering. “Kettering was one of the first institutions to upgrade to Blackboard’s Release 8.0. Our campus community is already exploring new ideas and opportunities with Release 8.0, and we look forward to continuing that exploration with Blackboard Release 9.0."
Jessica Finnefrock, senior vice president of product development at Blackboard, said Project NG and its releases are being driven by the community as much as they are being driven by Blackboard.
“Hundreds of educators, instructors, students and technologists are helping us to conceptualize and pursue this effort,” Finnefrock said. “Most importantly, we are fully engaging both users and developers in this initiative."
Wicks agreed: “Project NG has been a major part of our effort to support our faculty and students with the best available learning technology. Kettering has been in the Blackboard Beta program since 2004. This will be our sixth beta test for the company.”
Wicks said her favorite part of the new version is the way it “is taking advantage of the Web 2.0 technology and will allow users to personalize their experience with the Blackboard system. Faculty and students will have the information they want at their fingertips or their mouse clicks."
Members of the Beta program are evaluating and providing feedback on elements of Release 9.0, the next step in the company's multi-year, multi-release effort to deliver a next generation teaching and learning platform, which began with Release 8.0 of the Blackboard Academic Suite in January of this year. Release 9.0 is also undergoing more than 40,000 hours of performance engineering and testing as part of Blackboard's product development process.
The beta program will include the participation of colleges, universities, and K-12 schools and districts in the United States and around the world. Wicks said the institutions selected for the “test drive” is an exclusive list that includes: Princeton, Seton Hall, Syracuse, Wayne State and international universities at the University of Melbourne in Australia, the Universit of Nottingham in England and ROC Miden Nederland.
The effort represents the latest step taken by Blackboard to engage its global community of practice-including users and developers-in efforts to develop the vision for Project NG.
With Project NG, Blackboard aims to create a more open and flexible platform that combines the best of Blackboard and WebCT systems with new innovations, including new capabilities to engage students, leverage the power of social learning communities and drive success in institutional assessment. In addition, Blackboard is working to provide new levels of freedom and choice for institutions by partnering with leading universities to develop integrations with the open source Sakai and Moodle course management systems.
The beta program for Release 9.0 extends Blackboard's intensive approach to evaluating and strengthening its technology in concert with its user and developer communities. Previously, Blackboard initiated work with developers and partners to enable more than 150 free and open source extensions to the Blackboard platform to be integrated with new capabilities within Project NG.
Blackboard has also led and co-chaired collaborative effort with members of the IMS Learning Technology Interoperability Working Group to ensure that technology developed under Project NG is supportive of industry-wide standards for sharing learning tools. In addition, Blackboard has conducted an Accessibility Evaluation Program to test the usability and accessibility of the user interface, including accessibility for learners with cognitive or physical disabilities.
The announcement was made at the Educause 2008 annual conference in Orlando, Fla., where several thousand members of the higher education community gathered at the industry's premier information technology event.
More at www.blackboard.com or www.kettering.edu.
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