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Guest post by Gerry Praysman, Buzz Marketer, Brainshark, Inc. Brainshark, a Blackboard Signature Partner™, won two of ELearning! Media Group’s Annual Readers’ Choice Awards for product innovation and customer satisfaction. After the announcement, Gerry Praysman, Brainshark’s social outreach expert, sat down with their Learning & Development team to answer the question: What are we doing right? Here are the “Best Practices” Brainshark wanted to share with their peers in the eLearning community. We here at Brainshark are incredibly proud of our recent wins at the Best of ELearning! Awards. Although we’ve been having a blast with this, we figured this would be a good time to take a short break from our celebrating and share a few tidbits of wisdom we’ve picked up over the years. Here are five tips that are sure to improve your eLearning and training programs:

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.

Building on the momentum following this year’s EDUCAUSE I thought it would be nice to give some love to our developer community, so I am proud to announce the availability of our new Blackboard plug-in for the Eclipse development platform. This will dramatically reduce the amount of time developers spend on setting up their development environment to build Blackboard Building Blocks. If you’re a web application developer, chances are that you’ve heard of Eclipse. For the uninitiated, Eclipse is an open source software development environment that can be used to develop Blackboard Building Blocks.

I had the pleasure of meeting Steve Kaufman of Ashland University for the first time this past July at BbWorld in Las Vegas.  It was an exciting conference with a positive vibe and many great announcements from Blackboard executives.  As I continued to communicate with Steve and get feedback from him on some of the tools and resources we are building for ANGEL clients, I asked if he’d be willing to share his thoughts with the larger community.  So, I’m happy to be able to post today Steve’s perspective on what’s happening at Blackboard.  Please share your thoughts as well! Guest post by Steve Kaufman, Associate Director of Learning Management, Ashland University It’s been an interesting two years since the acquisition of ANGEL Learning by Blackboard. I attended the ANGEL User Conference in Chicago where Blackboard announced the purchase and I’ll be honest, I was surprised, a bit angry and fearful for what this would mean for my institution. Like many other universities out there, we wanted to bring in a learning management system that really covered all the bases. We needed amazing assessment tools; grading options, flexibility in course design, standards and objectives tracking, course automation, and most of all, a system that was easy to use. ANGEL has all of these things, and so our logical choice was to go with them. It is important to mention that we performed due diligence when making our decision. We looked at Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai, and ANGEL, and we compared features side-by-side. ANGEL is where we wound up. So, when I heard about Blackboard purchasing ANGEL, I thought my world was going to get much more complicated and difficult.

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: