Products & Services

Last week the K-12 marketing and sales teams delivered an Executive Symposium in partnership with the Cobb County School District, a strategic K-12 client for more than 11 years. The event featured 30+ clients and prospects and more than 30 members of Cobb County’s senior administrative staff. Blackboard organized symposia in the K-12 market have become a successful model for gathering district leaders together for a discussion of top challenges, models for accelerating online learning and how Blackboard’s host of solutions power K-12 educational opportunities. Blackboard officials learned the practical ways school systems use their platform and gathered feedback on what instructional and operational needs will need to be met in the foreseeable future. Representatives and educators engaged students from Allatoona High School Sept. 21, to gain a better understanding of how students perceive and use technology. To read the full recap of the event, please check out this great post on CobbCast.

September is National Preparedness Month and we have been highlighting the importance of preparedness in local communities and in K-12 schools and districts. Recently, we came across a story from the University of San Diego reminding us of the importance of being prepared, especially on college campuses. While nearly 5 million people across Southern California, Arizona and Northern Mexico were without electricity, students at USD only experienced a mere 30 seconds of power loss during the county-wide blackout that occurred earlier this month. How did the campus stay powered? Vice Provost and Chief Information Officer, Chris Wessells, credits the university’s excellent emergency planning program.

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.

In an earlier blog post, we shared with you materials from California State University – Chico’s LMS evaluation, which are now housed in the Evaluation Resource Center. In December 2010 – following an extensive review of LMS options, including Blackboard Learn, 9.1 and Moodle 1.9, they chose Blackboard for its superior features and functionality. Now, we’d like to share more of their story through a video and podcast interview with Scott Kodai, about how they ranked their LMS options as well as the considerations they made for the development effort, course migration support, and roadmap planning. You can watch the CSU – Chico story:

September is National Preparedness Month, and we’re marking the occasion at Blackboard Connect with a series of reflections on the ways that our clients are using mass notification to keep their communities safe and prepared. So far this year, we have seen  earthquakes, blackouts, hurricanes and tropical storms, demonstrating the importance of preparedness, especially for K-12 schools and districts.