This blog was originally posted by Emily Wilson on The Mobile Garage blog. Over 1,100 schools around the world are utilizing a Blackboard Mobile Solution. Four-year private colleges, state universities, community college districts and K-12 districts are all finding that mobile is a necessity to reinforce their brand as well as attract and retain students. See why and how Jacksonville State University, St. Hilda’s School, South Orange County Community College District, Loyola Marymount University, University of Rochester, and Central Washington University all decided to go mobile with Blackboard. And, a blogger from TMCNet who previously used Blackboard Learn on campus writes about how she wishes she had been able to access her courses and campus resources from her mobile phone.

Mike Straus, Senior Product Manager, talks about one of the most exciting product launches of the year, Blackboard Drive.  Blackboard Drive is a new desktop application which makes accessing, managing and editing files in the Blackboard Learn Content Collection as easy as working with files on your local computer.  Check out his presentation from EDUCAUSE 2011:

Guest Post by Brian Nielsen, Northwestern University It’s really exciting when you see students pitching in together to work on a class project. They’re excited, their conversation is animated, there’s joy in the sharing of the knowledge they are soaking up, and often there’s pride.  Class projects don’t always go this way, and, for the instructor, sometimes they’re risky.  If motivation wanes, if one or two students in the group don’t pull their own weight, a project can fall flat, leaving the teacher to pick up the pieces with a shrug, or maybe an extra test.  But when it works, it’s wonderful. Here at Northwestern University we’ve seen some of those great projects, and, we think, have had a hand in making them happen through our development of a new Blackboard Building Block that we’ve called Bboogle.  We chose Bboogle as a concatenation of “Blackboard” and “Google,” a rather obvious play on the “Bb” Blackboad logo and Google Apps for Education, a service very quickly growing in popularity across the country.  We use the pronunciation “ba-boogle” to signal to others the double-B, making sure that people recognize the significance of Blackboard as a partner in bringing this software into being.  “Ba-boogle” does sound a bit funny, but the humor is meant to signify something too: the joy of helping foster collaborative learning experiences for our students.

In an earlier blog post, we shared with you materials from California State University – Chico’s LMS evaluation, which are now housed in the Evaluation Resource Center. In December 2010 – following an extensive review of LMS options, including Blackboard Learn, 9.1 and Moodle 1.9, they chose Blackboard for its superior features and functionality. Now, we’d like to share more of their story through a video and podcast interview with Scott Kodai, about how they ranked their LMS options as well as the considerations they made for the development effort, course migration support, and roadmap planning. You can watch the CSU – Chico story:

Guest post by Cali Morrison, Manager of Major Grants, WCET A few weeks ago, WCET (WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies) joined with the U.S. News and World Report team to host a webcast about their upcoming ranking of online education programs. Many of our members, through both our discussion board and Twitter, raised questions regarding the ranking, survey procedure, and ranking methodology.  We proposed a collaborative webcast to Bob Morse, the Director of Data Research at U.S. News and his team to help answer our member’s questions and provide feedback to their team working on this new project.