Company

Every day, an estimated 160,000 children miss school due to fear of attack or intimidation by other students– an alarming, disheartening statistic. The good news is that the vast majority of students already have a bullying prevention tool in their pocket. We just need to give them a way to use it.

That’s why Blackboard is proud to announce today that we are offering TipTxt, a two-way anti-bullying service for students to confidentially notify school officials of bullying or school safety issues, to every K-12 school in the U.S. for free. All schools need is a dedicated phone line, and Blackboard will absorb all other costs. We’ve never done something on this scale, and no company has made such an offer. To add even greater visibility to this effort, we are thrilled to be partnering with the National PTA.

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

 

One of the highest levels of education achievement is receiving your doctorate. As we are all aware, Doctors are experts in their field of study. They are often called on for expert reviews and feedback on questions related to their field. Believe it or not, even Blackboard has “Doctors” available to provide you with their expertise on one subject: Blackboard.

Ask The Doctors (formerly Ask Dr. C for the fans out there) is a discussion forum for any and all technical and pedagogical questions relating to Blackboard Learn and now Blackboard Collaborate. Your questions are reviewed and carefully answered by a team of “Doctors” with over 115 years of combined hands-on experience working with these Blackboard products. This hand selected group of seven experts is chock-full of knowledge from their professional experiences as Instructional Technologists, System Administrators, and Directors of Instructional Design.

Next time you have a question about Blackboard Learn or Blackboard Collaborate, search the wealth of knowledge on Ask The Doctors or just post your question on to the forum. The “Doctors” are listening.

Visit our website to meet the Doctors for Blackboard Learn and our two new Doctors for Blackboard Collaborate. Or head straight to the forum at discussions.blackboard.com

As part of our ongoing efforts to keep our clients informed about important updates related to the security of the Blackboard Learn™ platform, I’d like to update all of you in our client community with a quick snapshot of some meaningful security enhancements recently released and coming in early Q1.

I encourage clients not already on Service Pack 8 or higher to make plans to upgrade so you can take advantage of strengthened security safeguards and patches. Our Managed Hosting team implements Security Best Practices as part of the standard procedures. If you are a Self Hosted client and have any questions about Security Best Practices for your Blackboard Learn system, please feel free to contact Client Support for assistance.

Congratulations to Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) for winning a $50,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), which it will run on CourseSites, a free, cloud-based online learning platform that provides the latest and greatest Blackboard technology. Cuyahoga Community College, a Blackboard Learn^TM client, will use the grant money to create an open course on developmental math.

“We’re very excited to utilize Blackboard’s CourseSites for our MOOC. We have a longstanding relationship with Blackboard and appreciated the opportunity to work on an emerging new educational delivery format (MOOC) application to support one of the College’s core learning needs: developmental education. The use of a MOOC to enhance success with students in developmental education is an excellent opportunity to support innovation with core learning initiatives,” said Christina Royal, associate vice president of eLearning and innovation at Tri-C.

Tri-C is joining a growing list of institutions that are using CourseSites to run MOOCs for reasons including familiarity with the Blackboard system, the breadth of features and functionality, and the ability to create courses based on their own vision instead of adapting to a vendor’s model.