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Pilot rounds of Suggestion Squads for Course Delivery, Community Management, and Xythos just concluded voting a few weeks ago.  Now, we are in the middle of recruiting for Blackboard Learn, Release 9.1 Service Pack 8 Product Development Partnerships (PDPs).  We also just announced two new programs for ANGEL clients, a Content Conversion PDP and a new Office Hours Cohort program; we are making plans to kickoff another Bug Squad,  we have a SCORM Beta program in progress, as well as the Accessibility Grant program.  And, we have installation and integration testing opportunities coming soon along with the ongoing user experience testing and product surveys that we conduct.

Hi all, It’s been 3 months since I last blogged and a little over 6 months since the merger – I can’t believe it.  Time has flown by!  In that time we have been busy merging two competitors into Blackboard and executing on the priorities I outlined after the merger:

• Customer experience – Ensuring that our customers continue to have the exceptional client experience that Elluminate and Wimba have always provided.
• United team – Bringing Elluminate, Wimba and Blackboard teams together into a single, cohesive unit so we can carry that high standard of client care forward.
• Product Roadmap – Creating a vision for how our collective solutions come together to help you better engage students to improve outcomes and save time while trimming cost.

Let me share a few recent developments:

Let’s go on a virtual field trip to two very different places. We’ll start with a kindergarten classroom. Open the door and picture it in your mind. What decorates the walls? What kind of furniture is there? Is the room divided into different areas? What are they? If you didn’t know it was a kindergarten classroom before you had opened the door, what would make its purpose obvious to you when you did look inside?

I am Carrie Singer from Blackboard’s Product Marketing group. I’ve had the pleasure of working for Blackboard for eight years now but my favorite role to date is the one I have now managing the Upgrade Cohort program. I’ve heard from clients that making the transition to Release 9.1 sometimes feels like a daunting task and a complex undertaking. It requires careful planning, preparation, training and timing, the right equipment, the right resources and most of the all, the right kind of support. That’s why we encourage clients who are in the midst of planning their upgrade to join our Release 9.1 Upgrade Cohort program.

This is part 2 of a 3 part series on Open Standards for Newbies. Who’s old enough to remember the embarrassment of only having a handful of movies to show during a sleepover because you had a Beta?  When choosing between a VHS and a Betamax back in the eighties, my dad chose the Beta.  Sure, it was (arguably) superior technology, but this decision severely limited our family movie choices.  In addition to living on an army base in Germany at the time, where U.S. movie rentals already arrived a year late, the majority of the movies available would only play on a VHS.