WASHINGTON, June 29, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Blackboard Inc.
(NASDAQ: BBBB) today announced Service Pack 6 for Blackboard
Learn™ 9.1, a significant update for its flagship software that
brings a range of feature enhancements and improvements that
produce a simpler, more effective workflow for instructors and
administrators.
More than 1,400 institutions have adopted Blackboard's next
generation platform, and hundreds more are upgrading this summer to
take advantage of its improved stability and integration of social
learning tools. Clients have also responded positively to
Blackboard's service pack model, which has delivered more iterative
updates that have substantially improved product quality and
refinement and produced more subtle feature enhancements without
the disruption of major version releases.
The newest version helps instructors streamline time-consuming
tasks like grading and assessment and gives system administrators
enhanced tools for efficient system management. The updates also go
beyond course management to improve the platform's capabilities for
content management, community and group coordination, and
institutional assessment.
"The advantages of the Blackboard Learn 9.1 platform along with
improvement in how we deploy changes have produced our strongest
uptake of a new version, ever," said Ray
Henderson, President of Blackboard Learn. "This more
iterative release strategy allows us to showcase our improved
responsiveness as a company to issues of quality, and it's reducing
the time it takes to get client-driven tuning of our features into
the community of practice."
Faculty grading workflows are a major focus in the new version,
which includes a series of improvements developed with client input
that bring greater efficiency to managing ungraded items. Rubrics –
assessment tools first introduced in 2010 – were significantly
improved with client feedback from a year of field use, and are now
simpler to use during grading and instructors can more easily
communicate with students about when and how they will be used. The
new release also improves support for institutional assessment
efforts with increased ability to collect student artifacts for
assessment activities.
"We looked at other platforms and found the most important
features to us were simply better and more robust in Release 9.1,"
said Mary Lou Watson, Director of
Technology Enhanced Learning and Education Instructor at
Lewis and Clark Community College, and
a member of the Product Development Partnership, a group of clients
working with Blackboard developers on the design and delivery of
new features. "Blackboard's investment in making continued
improvements really sets them apart where it counts – on stability,
features and functionality."
The new release also brings substantial improvements in
organizing information for system administrators, who can now
access and manage information about software updates, Blackboard
Building Blocks™ and other alerts in a central area. Blackboard
Learn 9.1 also enables more flexible deployment across larger, more
complex institutions, and the company has raised its service level
agreements for Blackboard Managed Hosting clients to include
increased system speed and improved response times for support
resolution.
As part of Blackboard's partnership with McGraw-Hill Higher
Education, instructors and students can get seamless access to
McGraw-Hill's Connect® and Create™, which offer media rich content,
assessment engines, customization and industry leading adaptive
learning tools directly within Blackboard Learn with Service Pack
6. The integration was previously released as a Blackboard Building
Block.
The release also extends Blackboard's leadership in open
education standards with support for Learning Information Services
(LIS) 2.0, which helps clients integrate the Blackboard Learn
platform with other institutional data systems more easily and
reliably, and an upgraded, highly-rated SCORM (Shareable Content
Object Reference Model) engine from Rustici Software. Blackboard
Learn already announced support for Basic Learning Tools
Interoperability (LTI) and the latest version of Common Cartridge,
version 1.1, for import and export of learning content.
Service Pack 6 for Blackboard Learn 9.1 is available today.
Current Blackboard clients can upgrade to the new release at no
extra charge. The release can be enabled for interactive mobile
learning opportunities with Blackboard Mobile™ Learn,
and can be used in integration with the Blackboard
Collaborate™ and Blackboard Connect™ platforms.
CourseSites, a free cloud-based learning management solution for
instructors – which has also been piloted by institutions
considering a move to Release 9.1 – will be updated to the latest
version this summer.
For more information about Blackboard Learn, please visit
http://blackboardlearn.com.
About Blackboard Inc.
Blackboard Inc. (Nasdaq: BBBB) is a global leader in enterprise
technology and innovative solutions that improve the experience of
millions of students and learners around the world every day.
Blackboard's solutions allow thousands of higher education, K-12,
professional, corporate, and government organizations to extend
teaching and learning online, facilitate campus commerce and
security, and communicate more effectively with their communities.
Founded in 1997, Blackboard is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with offices in North America, Europe, Asia
and Australia.
Any statements in this press release about future
expectations, plans and prospects for Blackboard and other
statements containing the words "believes," "anticipates," "plans,"
"expects," "will," and similar expressions, constitute
forward-looking statements within the meaning of The Private
Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ
materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements
as a result of various important factors, including the factors
discussed in the "Risk Factors" section of our Form 10-K filed
on February 18, 2011 and Form 10-Q
filed on May 9, 2011 with the SEC. In
addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press
release represent the Company's views as of June 29, 2011. The Company anticipates that
subsequent events and developments will cause the Company's views
to change. However, while the Company may elect to update these
forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company
specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These
forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as
representing the Company's views as of any date subsequent to
June 29, 2011.
SOURCE Blackboard Inc.