Ray Henderson: Don't take your focus from the fundamentals. Client support (10% increase in overall client satisfaction [via 3rd party] and even 4% gain for Angel clients), transparency (blogs, press, and community/user groups). Highlighting Stephen Vickers for his work on LTI, and Lance Neumann for leadership of LTI working group. Blackboard will ship with native support for Common Cartridge and LTI by the end of the year. Openness - Blackboard OpenDB in 9.1 is the beginning of open database schema in Bb.
Quality: tripled the amount of resources available for fixing issues as they come up for new releases. Increasing frequency of service packs and updates to make product more agile.
Bb Collaborate is separate product line from Bb Learn, but Henderson is executive sponsor of new Bb Collaborate product line. Recognition that sharing information about presence ("is the instructor available to me now?") will become more important to learners than an email response some time in the next day.
Gives "improved" (not excellent) on each of their basic criteria; support, transparency, openness & quality). Bit better than improved on openness with Angel product, and the new open database in Bb 9.1.
Road ahead: social learning, product influence (webct & angel),
Accommodate multi-institution architecture. Custom skins for courses & access to wider variety of professional content. Partnership with McGraw-Hill giving access to all of their content via their Blackboard course. Provides link to purchase textbook, but also access to all content. Also partnerships with e-Follett and Barnes & Noble. Through Wimba and Elluminate acquisitions, enable real-time collaboration around pieces of publisher content. Providing capability to display online presence status via gradebook interface that would allow instructor to IM a student to ask clarifying questions as they are grading essay questions, etc.
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