C-Level View :: March 8, 2006
Worth Noting
Blackboard Inc. Announced The Completion Of the Merger Of Two eLearning Giants
A DONE DEAL. At the BbWorld user conference in San
Diego this past week, Blackboard Inc. announced the completion of the
merger of two eLearning giants, Blackboard and WebCT, into one company.
CEO Michael Chasen and Chairman Matthew Pittinsky made the announcement
during their joint keynote address and unveiled the company’s “Blackboard
Beyond” initiative.
Chairman Pittinsky told CT, “The Blackboard Beyond initiative is really
about focusing on the next generation of eLearning [eLearning 2.0],
which we think won’t just be about institutions and their own courses;
it will be about how institutions cooperate and collaborate with each
other and how students and faculty across institutions work with each
other. So it’s about taking the resources of 3,700 clients around the
world and making them available to any one instructor or student at
any institution. It really is an effort to network our client base,
and do it around the four areas that we talked about [in this morning’s
keynote].
“One [area] is online communities—discipline-based communities; social
networking that’s organized by discipline. The second is learning objects
and a learning objects catalog so that people can discover and share
resources across institutions. The third is data collaboration—benchmarking,
allowing institutions to post data, and to take it down and benchmark
their activities with each other. And the fourth is lifelong learning;
ePortfolios for life… [That’s about] hosting ePortfolios so that people
can move across education segments and across institutions and not keep
their ePortfolio trapped with their original institution…[so they can]
manage it in a central location.
“…The greatest value we can offer today is not just the products; it’s
the community of practice. It’s the fact that no matter what kind of
institution you are or where you are in your development, odds are,
across our global community, someone or several institutions have done
it before. Collaboration is the nature of academe, and you see that
every day—through listservs, through meetings, and now through these
online services where any institution can tap the expertise of any other
institution through that community of practice. So it’s powerful.”