6/5/2003 , Washington, DC - Blackboard Inc., a leading enterprise software company for e-Education, and Pearson Education, the global leader in educational publishing (NYSE: PSO), today announced that CourseCompass™ has reached more than 225,000 users worldwide on a single deployment of the Blackboard Learning System™. Originally announced in 1999 at a time when many commercial education providers were developing their own e-Learning platforms, the unique partnership between Blackboard and Pearson Education has served as a model for the industry.
CourseCompass is a dynamic, interactive online learning environment that combines educational content from award-winning Pearson Education textbooks and delivers it through a customized version of the Blackboard Learning System. The Blackboard Learning System is the industry's most popular teaching and learning environment, featuring a robust setting for content management and sharing, online assessments, student tracking, assignment and portfolio management, and virtual collaboration. Over the past three years, CourseCompass has grown to reach 15,800 instructors and 210,000 students, delivering more than 39,000 courses to more than a quarter of a million users.
Chris Le Baudour, M.S.Ed, professor at Santa Rosa Junior College commented: “Nothing has so positively transformed our traditional face-to-face programs as the addition of the CourseCompass online classroom to our curriculum. CourseCompass has been instrumental in developing and fostering a sense of community within each class. For example, through the online discussion boards I can post open-ended questions for students to answer and discuss – and the response has been terrific.”
“Our goal in creating CourseCompass was to make online courses more attractive for instructors and students by using high quality online materials and textbooks,” said Ray Henderson, Senior Vice President, Digital Media at Pearson Education. “Building on the Blackboard Learning System, we were able to achieve our goals and deliver a system that is incredibly flexible and user-friendly. In addition, we have found that professors are able to expand course offerings with ease as enrollments grow.”
“We are very pleased with how quickly CourseCompass has expanded to serve the needs of so many instructors and students, as well as meet Pearson’s business objectives,” said Matthew Pittinsky, Chairman of Blackboard Inc. “Blackboard is deeply committed to providing commercial education providers with a powerful course delivery platform and services that are customizable for maximum differentiation, yet built on our widely adopted technology for long term supportability and lower total cost of ownership.”
CourseCompass, originally launched in December 2000, is now in development for CourseCompass 4.0, based on Blackboard Learning System (Release 6). As part of the collaborative effort to develop CourseCompass, Blackboard Professional Services provided full customization and project management services to Pearson Education with the implementation of the Blackboard Learning System. Additionally, the Blackboard ASP group provides 24x7 hosting and security to ensure maximum uptime for students and faculty.
Delivering on the Promise of e-Education
Instructors and students experience many unique benefits of Pearson Education’s CourseCompass offering, including:
• Ability to easily upload all announcements, schedules, assignments, and articles with a unique customized workflow designed by Pearson professionals and implemented by Blackboard
• Simple assessment development by instructors by selecting questions from pools organized by chapter to have a complete online exam within minutes based on Pearson texts
• Improved grading and tracking of student quizzes; for example, once a test is posted for students to take, it automatically appears as a column in the online grade book and the students results are added automatically when they complete the exam
• Access to complete courses built on Pearson’s rich content that compliments Pearson’s textbooks
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