Developers+

Of the dozens of e-Learning events, conferences and user group meetings I travel to each year, one conference I really look forward to is the annual Sakai Conference.  Surprised?

You shouldn’t be – many Sakai members and conference attendees use Blackboard products and services.

When I’m with clients at the Sakai conference, we talk about how their institutions want to share data and content between their respective mission-critical Blackboard implementations and their pilot Sakai instances.  Blackboard clients want this integration, and this is why we decided to develop it.

A couple of weeks ago at the Sakai conference in Paris, John Fontaine and I talked with many of our clients about John’s recent blog post on the Learning Environment Connector.  The Learning Environment Connector is a new technology in the process of being developed by Blackboard and a team from Syracuse University to enable connections between the Blackboard Academic Suite and other course management systems.

Our clients were eager to learn about this development.  And where better to discuss new ideas, open technology and Blackboard’s expanded Next Generation APIs than at the Sakai Conference  . . . while sitting outside on a Parisian sidewalk and eating fresh crepes?  (It was a tough job but someone had to do it.)

After John’s and my return home, as news of the plans for this new CMS connector spread, John talked to Inside Higher Ed about the Blackboard Learning Environment Connector for Sakai.  At Blackboard we published an official announcement about the Connector.  And more people began to comment about it, including Michael Korcuska, Sakai Foundation executive director, and Chuck Severance, developer network coordinator at IMS Global Learning Consortium and former Sakai Foundation executive director.

The Blackboard team and the Syracuse group still have work yet to complete on the Connector, but we’re excited about this project, and we’ll be sure to keep the community up to date on our progress.  Perhaps we’ll even have more to tell you at the next Sakai regional conference at Virginia Tech in November? 

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