Washington, D.C. – August 20, 2003 – Blackboard Inc., a leading enterprise software company for e-Education, announced today plans to launch an education-specific learning content management and e-Portfolio system – the Blackboard Content System™.   Slated for general release in the fourth quarter of this year, the Blackboard Content System will benefit students, faculty and campus IT administrators by lowering the costs and increasing the simplicity of managing learning content, digital assets and e-Portfolios in an enterprise learning environment.  A “sneak preview” of the product is available on Blackboard’s Web site at http://contentsystem.blackboard.com.

Blackboard’s entry into the enterprise content management market addresses a critical new need among colleges, universities and schools. As the use of enterprise-wide course management systems have grown, instructors and administrators have seen explosive growth in the number, sophistication and size of learning content assets.  To tap the full pedagogical value of these materials, while managing costs, content systems provide critical application functionality such as the storing and tracking of learning objects for institution-wide re-use; managing of student and faculty scholarship in electronic portfolios; and the integration of informal content assets with existing library system catalogues.

Six academic institutions – representing four-year universities, community colleges, and K-12 school districts, are working with Blackboard over the next six months to implement the Blackboard Content System and fine-tune the technology, including:

Georgetown University
Fairfax County Public Schools
University of Cincinnati
Dallas County Community College District
National Defense University
Seneca College (Canada)
 

“We are delighted to participate at the formative stages of a product that will leverage our information technology investments into a powerful education environment,” explained Fred Siff, CIO at the University of Cincinnati.  “We expect the Blackboard Content System to quickly become a critical piece of our technology infrastructure to meet a number of pressing needs such as e-Portfolios for students and file storage for faculty.”

The Blackboard Content System incorporates application capabilities in four key areas:

Learning Content Management – easily and effectively share and reuse large volumes of individual content assets across courses, organizations and institutions in a cost-effective manner.
e-Portfolio Management – assemble, present and share information within online portfolios for student and/or faculty to use in academic growth documentation, career evaluation and course preparation.
Virtual Hard Drive Management – cost-effectively accommodate the virtual storage needs of today’s digital education environment.
Library Digital Asset Management – create an interactive environment for faculty to search, access and incorporate digital library resources for use in course preparation.
 

For example, the Blackboard Content System will enable students and faculty to have granular control over which content items they share and who they share them with.  From a single file space, an individual piece of content can be shared with the entire class or just one user.  Permissions on the content such as read, write, and manage privileges can be assigned to other instructors or even groups of instructors.  A teaching assistant can use the workflow functionality to send a version of course materials to the faculty member for editing and approval before it is published in the course. The faculty member can use one-click WebDAV access to access the content on the remote server and edit it directly.  The system can manage multiple versions of a piece of content and track its editing history.  Users can also tag each piece of their content with metadata that follows common standards for easier searching and reuse.

“Enterprise management of digital assets is about more than just their use within course management systems,” explained Matthew Pittinsky, Chairman of Blackboard.  “We believe it is time for an entirely new class of content management application designed to meet the specific integrated needs of academe.  We are thrilled to work with such great academic partners, along with the key portfolio and content management standards projects such as the e-Portfolio Consortium and IMS.”

Blackboard and its product development partners will showcase the Blackboard Content System this November at EDUCAUSE 2003 in Anaheim, California.  Pricing and licensing information will be announced closer to the general launch.

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