by Klaire Marino
Simply Better Software. By You. For You.
Right now educators are back in the swing of school, whether it is the Fall or Spring semester in higher education or the beginning of 2012-2013 school year in K12. Around the world teachers are busy teaching with Blackboard Learn™ as a vital tool.
At Blackboard we are also busy working with institutions on testing and improving our software. I have blogged in previous posts about Blackboard’s beta programs in which clients have the ability to try out the software and provide Blackboard valuable feedback before it hits the market. We have so many exciting initiatives going on at Blackboard – our upcoming release of Blackboard Learn has already hit test servers across the world and is planned to be available for clients to use as early as their next academic term. Eighty-five client institutions are involved in testing the release through the beta program. This also includes our amazing Blackboard developers and partners who are testing their building blocks to ensure everything works smoothly when clients put it into production.
We are also in active development on a game-changing learning object repository that we have come to fondly call Blackboard xpLor™, which was announced by Ray Henderson on stage at BbWorld 2012. We are currently running a very large and exciting beta program which involves not only Blackboard Learn institutions but also ANGEL, joule, Sakai and Moodle users. xpLor is planned to be a cross-platform repository and authoring environment that breaks down the boundaries of the many LMS systems in the market today. Over 200 educators and academic technologists are testing Blackboard xpLor from 54 institutions. This beta is a much ‘earlier’ stage beta as Blackboard xpLor isn’t planned for release until mid-2013, which means that the beta participants’ valuable feedback is going to significantly impact the development of the software by the time it is available.
I will be working with some of our beta participants to share their experiences with the new software via this blog and their own school blogs so please stay tuned. And of course if you are interested in future programs tell us how you want to be more involved with Blackboard by visiting this site. If you are not aware of how our client’s impact our software check out the Client Impact Report which we will be updating with data for our newest release. Thank you to the institutions and individuals who work with us on these programs. I know I enjoy our daily interactions. I hope you do. @KlaireMarino
Statements regarding our product development initiatives, including new products and future product upgrades, updates or enhancements represent our current intentions, but may be modified, delayed or abandoned without prior notice and there is no assurance that such offering, upgrades, updates or functionality will become available unless and until they have been made generally available to our customers
