Blackboard Collaborate Customers and Partners,

I write today to acknowledge that over the past several weeks your Blackboard Collaborate web conferencing experience may have been below the high standard you expect from us.  I speak for the entire Collaborate organization when I say that we are deeply sorry for this, and we are totally committed to returning our service to the expected levels.  We thank you for your patience as we work to return this important service to the high level of performance you’ve come to enjoy.

Let me start with an executive summary of what’s occurring.  Collaborate has been subjected to a series of distributed denial-of-service attempts, or DDoS.  During these events a large number of connections flood our systems, draining resources and causing unpredictable behavior for end users.  Given the synchronous nature of our solutions, the impact to our service is much more noticeable and impactful.

It’s important to note that at no time have our systems been compromised nor has the Collaborate application failed.  Rather, network congestion caused by the DDoS attempts has prevented our community from enjoying typical levels of performance.

We have now researched and tested a path to resolution.  We have already taken steps to shorten the duration of the disruptions and are implementing a plan to prevent them altogether. It requires that we filter all traffic, and sort out the bad DDoS requests from the good client traffic.  As we implement these changes, there may be some temporary and relatively minor performance degradation, but we expect it to be a small inconvenience that allows us to confidently restore consistent and reliable service by early March.

We’ve emailed details regarding upcoming changes to Collaborate administrators earlier today.  Click here for details.

I want to extend our sincere apologies to not only our customers, but also to the impacted teachers and the students for the resultant service disruptions that these DDoS attempts have caused.  Every student deserves the best educational experience each and every day, and we take our responsibility to facilitate that experience seriously.

If you have questions or want to provide feedback directly related to this topic, please contact us at collaborateconfidently@blackboard.com.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Sincerely,

Maurice Heiblum

President, Blackboard Collaborate

 

For those of you who weren’t able to get to New Orleans for the Connections Summit, I wanted to briefly share with you some of what we talked about earlier today in my keynote address, and that’s debunking the myths about online learning.

I’m sure that it’s a conversation that you’ve all had with colleagues who fear that online learning is not sufficiently engaging for students. The fear that online learners will be isolated, miss out on non-verbal communication with their instructors and their fellow students, and not have access to the help they need. That their motivation will be low, which translates into poor outcomes. And then there is the fear that the technology that makes online learning more engaging isn’t quite there yet.

Working backwards, I can assure you that the technology is there.  As you’ll see in Blackboard Collaborate 12, pretty much everything we do is aimed at making the online learning experience as fully engaging as that of the physical classroom, especially when coupled with your institution’s LMS.

And given how wired in today’s students are, we’re getting to the point where it can be argued that bringing real-time collaboration technology into both the physical and virtual classroom mix is becoming the only way to guarantee full engagement.  (I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s seen a couple of kids sitting in the same room texting each other.)

I’m going to make a bold statement here: if you’re using an LMS, you should be using Blackboard Collaborate. Asynchronous courses can be personalized with instructor comments via voice authoring. Students can get the help they need from their classmates and instructors with instant messaging.

Whether a course is delivered asynchronously, live online, or in a physical classroom, project collaboration using web conferencing is an excellent way to engage students and help them build their networks. And for today’s students, who are seldom if ever without their iPhones and iPads, being able to participate in class and meetings with a mobile device is rapidly becoming an expectation.

I’ll end by saying that we’re looking forward to showing off Blackboard Collaborate 12 , and debunking all those myths about online learning.

Summer has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere, and that means academic technology leaders are busy preparing for the start of the 2012-2013 term. One of the first places that K12 technology leaders gather is ISTE, which I just came back from. It was a great conference to connect up with long-time customers and hear their experiences with our products.

As I talked to our customers, it was clear that the whole concept of the “Active Learner” – today’s students who don’t just want to be spoon fed information but want to actively engage in their quest for knowledge – is really the right path. These students have been at the forefront of our minds as we’ve been developing our newest products. As we gave a few customers sneak previews of our latest technology, I was overjoyed to see the positive response. I can hardly wait to see all our biggest customers at BbWorld and Connections Summit and share the innovations we’re about to roll out, including mobile capabilities.

See you in New Orleans!

We know how important the Blackboard Collaborate™ platform is for our clients to deliver core educational services. In the last year, our customers have held over 1 billion minutes of Web conferencing for class instruction, office hours, administrative meetings and more. That is why we strive to deliver top-notch service with high availability and reliability to our customers. Yesterday, we were not able to deliver that dependable service, which our customers expect and deserve and I wanted to address this issue head on.

June, 2011 Hi everyone, Summer is almost here and there’s a lot to be excited about. We are about to release Collaborate 11–an incredible milestone for the team and our community, as we combine the Wimba and Elluminate platforms.   As we also gear up for our first combined user conference, the Blackboard Connections Summit, here’s a quick progress report: