This summer marks Blackboard’s 9th annual Developers Conference in Las Vegas, on July 11-12, just before BbWorld. DevCon has come a long way since its roots as a developer workshop meetup at Georgetown University. DevCon has evolved through the years to meet the needs of all of Blackboard’s technical community. It is the premier professional development opportunity of the year to learn about the technical capabilities of the product and get your technical questions answered. Sessions this year focus on topics including:

• Performance, reliability, and security
• System administration, capacity planning, and back office integration
• Open Standards, interoperability, and change management
• Building learning tools that make course administration easier and facilitate evolving pedagogical models

Over the past year, Blackboard has seen much promise in the emerging area of learning analytics to positively impact education. Last year, we took the bold step of providing our clients with documentation of the Blackboard Learn database which can be used to determine where to focus training efforts or gain insight into how and to what extent the system is used. Earlier this year, we also announced the acquisition of iStrategy, now Blackboard Analytics, whose solution allows institutional leadership to use data warehousing to inform and improve decision-making.  Both of these complement the existing reporting capabilities of the Blackboard Outcomes Assessment solution.

Greetings Developers, Several weeks ago, John Fontaine and I had the opportunity to participate in JISC’s Developer Happiness Days. This event is a testament to the level of innovation that is taking place in both higher and further education in the UK. Hundreds of developers from institutions around the UK convened in London to learn from each other, prototype code, and pool resources to support projects of interest. Blackboard was a sponsor of the event and contributed some cool demos of our own – including a course imported into CourseSites from Open University UK using Blackboard’s new support for the IMS Common Cartridge format. (You may have learned about the importance of Common Cartridge in an earlier post written by Julie Kelleher.)

G’Day, Mates.

As we gear up for BbSummit Australasia, Blackboard is again excited to host – in partnership with James Cook University – a regional Developer Day event. This event is offered at no cost on Monday, 13th September. It’s an opportunity to get answers to your technical questions, updates on recent openness improvements, and guidance on the design of customisations or development projects that you may have in mind.

Having studied abroad at the University of Wollongong, I experienced firsthand the unique characteristics of Australian technical, further, and higher education. In Australia alone, there are over 100 Blackboard developers who have customised their Blackboard LMS in dozens of different ways to meet these unique needs.

While at the conference, explore some examples of what other institutions are doing. Queensland University of Technology is speaking about a Building Block they've developed to auto-provision course content across institutions. University of Santo Tomas will present on enhancements they've made via Building Blocks to enhance the mobile experience and essay marking. There's also a panel session, "Enhancing Blackboard to Work the Way that Your Institution Requires," that will provide multiple client perspectives on how best to develop and implement customisations.

If you are considering a customisation or development project for your Blackboard environment, please consider attending DevDay or speak with me or a fellow Blackboard expert while at the conference. We want to give you the drum on what you need for your project to come good.

Happy coding.

Over the past year, there has been a lot of invigorating conversation about what "openness" means to learning technology. Opinions on the matter are wide-ranging, and here at Blackboard we are focusing now more than ever on creating a learning platform that is easily extended and powerfully interoperable with a wide range of external systems. Whether you are interested in connecting to Web 2.0 sites or authentication and enrollment systems, this year's Blackboard Developers Conference again showcases the maturity and capability of the Blackboard Learn platform through examples from Blackboard's client community.

Topics featured in this year's sessions include open standards, developing mashups, virtualization, performance, CSS/themes, and advanced reporting. This program features 4 tracks, including a refined system administration & integration track, designed to meet the needs and expectations of a technical audience.