Ray Henderson

The Patent News, and Question of Balances

Newsflash:  Blackboard and Desire2Learn have ended their dispute. Here's the official press release. 

Now, this was a topic that I’ve been asked to comment on from the first day I arrived on the scene. I promised to review it carefully but knowing it was a complex topic, I warned it would take some time. I’ll share now that my investigation led me to weigh in with the perspective that it was time to bring this to a close and move on. I’m pleased we’ve now taken that step. A bit of perspective on how my view evolved:

As a longtime industry observer, assertion of intellectual property rights amongst commercial competitors didn’t surprise me. I have been a witness to numerous variations on themes and feature innovations that Blackboard brought to the market as it evolved. And, in my various executive roles in online learning companies, every firm I served considered software patents important expressions of their intellectual property.

Nor was I surprised by the reaction in the marketplace. The LMS software category is the result of many things, including plenty of community collaboration over a period of many years. Blackboard both contributed to and benefited from this history just as every other commercial software company or commercial open source services firm does today. While many others had patented specific innovations, the first case played out in public was bound to precipitate a great deal of concern both about the specific patent and the controversial area of software patents generally. 

I’ve now had the benefit of reviewing the overall IP portfolio. To my eyes there are unique contributions in what I’ve seen. And so we face an important question: what business conduct best balances our various obligations and aligns with the values of the client community we serve?

Pondering the balance in this case, I came to the view that it was best for us to bring the matter with Desire2Learn to a close. This dialog has distracted attention from the many positive contributions to the industry that Blackboard has made and can continue to make.  An example, one that I envied before arriving, is the ecosystem Blackboard built through its Blackboard Building Blocks program and Developer Network. While these programs aren’t perfect, and not without a profit motive for Blackboard, they have an operational and technological scale that have offered institutions and entrepreneurs alike the advantage of lower costs of entry for launching new products and even new companies. There are many examples of innovative products and services that now benefit educators that began life in this way.

So moving ahead, in addition to our own efforts to create, my focus will be on opening the lens on innovation-spurring programs like these across the community. I hope to bring more attention to a story about what our endorsement of key open standards like the IMS Common Cartridge means in the broader context of whether open educational standards can succeed. Finally, I hope that our cadence towards greater system openness will produce more headlines about our role in driving industry conventions that provide greater customer benefits.

Ray

Mobile Computing, in Context.

As we’ve jumped into the fray on the mobile computing front, I’ve been thinking on its fit into our notions of innovation, of quality, and the balancing of both.  A few thoughts in that regard:

A question of balances:  As my years leading product development organizations pile up, my appreciation of the questions of balance becomes subtler.  One of the most important is around the balance of product refinement and product quality.  You’ll find as many perspectives on this topic as there are leaders left standing.  A current vogue one hears is “ship early and ship often.”  However provocative these statements are, I tend to find their advice something short of fitting for the context that I’ve observed in enterprise online learning software. 

The imperative for our core products:  At Blackboard, for example, we have some products that are comparatively mature, such as our course delivery product.  Here there are significant concerns about change management and end user training that throttle enthusiasm for new innovations.  And too, the risk management context is mission critical application and it’s an imperative not to risk stability for new features enjoyed by few.  And thus, with respect to our core products, I’m focusing our team on refinement and polish.  Counter to the advice of the era, for our core products we need “ship when rock solid, and infrequently” to properly respond to the context of client need.

Disruptive forces:  But there are also times – and now is one – that disruptive forces arrive around us and they require a different approach.  Mobile devices have arrived on campus en masse, and they’re rapidly changing the way education consumers want to work and consume information from the institutions that serve them.   This represents a very different challenge for Blackboard.  To better serve our clients we need to swing for the fences in innovation, acquiring visionaries in mobile platform development and forcing a rapid evolution of a product platform that responds to this disruption on behalf of our clients.

What Chasen gets?  Now, this is an area that my boss Michael Chasen gets well.  He’s had a history of recognizing disruptive change and acting on it quickly.  On mobile, he provoked an internal response this past year and delivered a market first with our iPhone app in 2009.  And when he saw the student feedback about our first effort, he realized that we didn’t have the talent to capitalize on this opportunity in place.  And so he made a study of the market and found the best team he could.  And overnight an innovative band of Stanford students has become an auxiliary product development group at Blackboard, and are shaping our strategy for mobile devices.  To read more about what they’re up to, see Michael’s recent update.

Educause panel on Mobile:  The fun part about mobile is that because it’s so new, it’s open to contributions and interpretations from anyone.  We all get to offer ideas for what this field can be: students, institutions, developers, companies.  If you’re attending EDUCAUSE in Denver this week, join me for a special panel discussion (Thursday Nov. 5^th) where an interesting group will be doing just that.  Kayvon Beykpour, who co-founded the company that built our new mobile solutions and now leads the Blackboard Mobile team, will join the below campus leaders who have made great strides in mobile.  Their stories can inform the work many in the field are doing to investigate how institutions can better support the way people are consuming digital information and navigating the campus environment.

• Tom Black, Stanford’s Associate VP and Registrar whose vision for mobile created the opportunity for Kayvon’s team.  
• Andrew Yu, who pioneered and continues to build out MIT’s mobile presence, one of the best recognized and closely watched in the field.
• David Roberts, mobile guru from the University of Washington who has moved his campus along this line and blogs about his experiences at http://www.freshlymobile.com.

I’ll get the privilege of leading the discussion about what these visionaries have accomplished to date and where they’re going next.  I encourage you to join us for the session live or on Twitter (#blackboard and #educause09).  In the meantime, I invite your comments here on what you’re thinking, wondering and doing in mobile.  I’ve got my own set of questions for these mobile experts but I’d love to hear yours.

See you in Denver.

Cheers,

Ray

 

Hello Again

Hello, world. I’m back to keys after a hiatus of several weeks. Your encouragement to me to keep up my reporting whilst performing my other duties has been heard, and I’ve got a backlog to share (if you missed Joshua Kim’s encouragement it makes for interesting reading on Inside Higher Ed http://tinyurl.com/blogmoreray). 

Grading Ourselves, Revisited

I’ve shared previously my focus on the support function. I continue to make this a daily focus and an area where I am continually raising awareness of our results internally at Bb. And whenever I’m in front of an assembly of Blackboard personnel anywhere in the world my first activity is to provide an update on our report card in this critical area.  

To the positive, I’m happy to share that our results continue to improve. The year over year metrics for the Blackboard and WebCT support metrics are significantly better in resolution times. And I will tell you plainly that I believe in this support organization and that our results will only continue to improve. This team simply requires more resource, and as it arrives their analytical skills and commitment and creative problem solving skills are coming into relief. As I’m traveling the world and visiting our customers I continue to hear painful reminders of what under-investment in this area meant to you. But importantly there is growing awareness that the conditions are improving. Your kudos are great motivators as we continue our transformation in this area.

Now, one area that you wrote to me about – that my secret shopper experience playing customer with our support team lacked the annoying experience of having to repeat my ticket information when it was escalated from our Tier 1 support team to Tier 2. This doesn’t happen every time you traverse support levels, you’ve told me, but when it does it’s an irritating delay. So our support leader Craig Chanoff and his systems team undertook a mission to ferret this out. Good news to report. A problem was found that prevented case information from being immediately accessible to all of our support centers globally. Our company focus on improving the support experience did its work – our IT organization immediately prioritized this problem and a fix is being rolled out to our support escalation systems today. I won’t promise that it’ll never happen again, but the incidence should immediately change (if it doesn’t please drop me a note). 

H1N1 & Asynchronous Learning

In recent months I’ve had the opportunity to speak to many of our clients about the potential impact of H1N1 to their operations and the important role that our online learning products could play in their business continuity. I shared my confidence that our products could in fact be pressed into broader service quickly and with good effect. I recall having mused about the relative similarity between the H1N1 context with other motivations for planning asynchronous courses. How fitting, then, that I should be hit with the bug personally. And even better, I contracted the dreaded virus during a span where I was a guest lecturer in an online class. Perfect lab conditions!

My experience started with some good luck, admittedly. The instructor had agreed to interview me by phone and record it for students. And this happened early in the incubation period before the respiratory element of the flu had established its grasp on me. The students were asked to listen to my interview with their instructor online, and then interact with me via discussion boards afterwards (to those who teach online I’ll share this is a pattern I’ve repeated with minor variations several times now with good results).

My results? Well, I was able to avoid detection in a way I never could have in another medium. There were some gaps in time between my postings caused by flu rather than conferences, but I was able to respond to students when my energy level permitted. In the end I had quite an engaged interaction with this class from my convalescence. I was glad to keep this commitment but work when I felt like it. The contrast to my attempts at keeping my synchronous work underway by conference call was stark. The latter was much more taxing and likely extended my bout.

So my experience is not a perfect proxy for what educators need to plan for. I didn’t have the teaching loads that full time faculty would have had. But the benefits of asynchronous technology to assist those who are physically separate, when some number of them are afflicted, was demonstrated clearly for me.  But I can attest that the conditions did allow me to continue with my interaction in a way that I would have been utterly unable to in a synchronous context.

This is something my colleagues in other parts of the company are working on too, under this heading of education continuity (http://tinyurl.com/yksn6mw ) at the institutional level.

I’ll leave you with best wishes that you avoid this plague, but with encouragement that you include broader use of your asynchronous learning technologies as part of your strategy to combat it.

Grading Ourselves

In the spirit of the back to school season now underway in parts of the world, and given my general fondness for report cards, I’ve been thinking about our marks of late in various support areas.  Too early perhaps to hand out definitive grades but worth noting levels of progress. 

How well are we maintaining the ANGEL client experience?

Since the Blackboard/ANGEL union back in May, a lot has been said, written, blogged and Tweeted about the combination and what it might mean for clients and their experience.  Now we’re at a mile post, back to school, that I’ve been looking to as a good early barometer of how we’re doing. 

So far, the news is good.  Right now, ANGEL client support, service and product quality levels have sustained the high levels we have historically delivered (and religiously measured) prior to the merger with Blackboard.  It’s still early – both in the back to school season and our integration efforts – but these are encouraging signs in areas we’ll keep tracking and reporting on (Grade: Strong Progress).

What happens when I play the client?

At BbWorld, including in my first “listening” session, I heard two major themes from clients about our support process.  First, that support has made important strides in certain areas that we can build on.  Second, there remain significant areas of frustration that need our continued attention.  To better inform my own view, I made good on a promise made at BbWorld to walk a mile in client shoes: recently I anonymously filed tickets through the normal support process for both Blackboard and ANGEL. 

How’d it go?  In general I found the experience pretty positive and responsive on both fronts.  Some color on specific elements of my experience:

• Response time: I had return calls on both tickets within an hour (for tier 2 requests) along with helpful suggestions and reasonable requests for additional information that I hadn’t already filed online.
  

• Repetitive requests for information:  While it didn’t happen during my exercise, I understand that we can sometimes irritate clients with requests for the same information they’ve already submitted as tickets are escalated from tier 1 to tier 2.
  • Homework: we’ve already undertaken some coaching with our team about this to raise awareness of the inefficiency and reduce if not entirely eliminate the practice.
    

• Clarity of messages from Behind the Blackboard: Automated emails I received were okay but could have been more user-friendly and have inspired some close follow up.
  • Homework: we’ve identified a number of small changes that could have big impact: improved subject lines, body copy and greater use of time saving click-throughs.

I’ll do more of these to get a consistent view over time but an interesting first round that I’d generally give a Progressing grade.

Your grades

While I consider myself to be pretty self-critical, ultimately it’s the grades we earn from customers that I’m most concerned with.  In this business, we get graded early and often.  Positive and negative, your feedback helps, so keep it coming. In closing, I’d like to share a recent email I received from a client – one whose experience has led her to judge us harshly in the past.  I’ll excerpt here, in part:

Hi, Ray.

I imagine that you often receive complaints and criticisms.  The client listening sessions at BbWorld must have given you an earful.   ;-)

I wanted to let you know about three outstanding Blackboard employees who together have significantly improved my opinion of Blackboard as a company. I've actually been a Blackboard System Administrator since version 3 of the product, so I have a long history of dealing with Blackboard.

The writer goes on to detail some ups and downs and to commend the great work from several members of our support and management teams that have put her institution on solid ground.  She ends with this sentiment:

As you probably know well, we universities are facing very tight budgets, and we are under pressure to consider "less expensive" open-source options, in addition to or instead of the commercial products that we license.  Outstanding employees like these help develop something that is highly valuable but hard to achieve: customer loyalty.  The three of them have made a *huge* contribution to improving my overall experiences and attitudes about Blackboard Learn as a product and about the company in general.

To be sure, we don’t always hit our mark and we’ve got lots of work ahead to get to where we want to be.  But this client’s feedback represents a solid grade – the kind we’re shooting for every day.

More to come as we get more results to grade. 

Cheers,

Ray

Post-BbWorld Reflections

It’s been two weeks since BbWorld, and I’ve had a bit of reflective distance.  I’ll offer a bit of additional perspective.

Twitter broke the headlines, became notecards for bloggers and press: When I stepped onstage to deliver my keynote I was impressed by a large number of video and still cameras, of devices in hands as Tweets were keyed to the world. I’ve never been more streamed, captured, or quoted. I was awakened to the power of social media to capture both message and critical commentary – but this was without a doubt my most direct experience of it. 

So my analysis of your analysis? I remixed Lester Holt’s words for my lead in – Twitter definitely broke the headlines. And bloggers – several of whom didn’t attend the show in person – relied heavily on Tweets for their critical commentary. The combination of what was Tweeted and blogged was both authentic and authoritative. In aggregate I found that social media provided a great wide angle on the show and the sentiments of our community. Its wider sampling gives a better feel for the highs, lows and mid-tones than the reaction any single reporter could assimilate in more traditional press. Bravo, Tweeters.  You captured it well.

Two buzzworthy items: There have been two items that have dominated the discussions I’ve had with clients, industry contacts and media since the show. The first was our announcement of a new mobile product line – MobilEdu. There was major pent-up demand for mobile applications to support campus life and extend learning, and our announcement clearly hit the chord. Second, our follow up on openness – and sharing that we’re taking steps to open the database as part of Project NG – our development of a next generation e-Learning platform. This brought a wave of spontaneous applause during the show and it has only grown afterwards. This will be the focus of a dedicated blog post in a few weeks.

Listening sessions & client support: We continued the tradition of open-mic sessions at this year’s show and did one for the Bb community at large and another for ANGEL clients. Now, an open-mic session is a perfect recipe to draw out the negatives. They’re sure to bring out a litany of issues. I like them in the same way I like report cards – they’re great for humility. 

This year was no exception.  We definitely heard some of the tough stuff which has been noted in other forums and which I’m absorbing as part of the effort to set our top client experience priorities.  I was encouraged though by some positive client comments as well.  They can be rare in sessions of this sort because it takes some gumption to buck the natural trend and call out what’s working in a discussion of what needs fixing. So it was especially heartening to have multiple customers in the Bb sessions note improvement in our client support over the last year, even sharing some love with Craig Chanoff and his Client Success team for the good job they have been doing. 

Overall no doubt a real mix of feedback that tells me we’ve much ground to cover.  But some momentum building too. 

Similarly, in the ANGEL session, what was interesting was what was absent. There were no statements about major disruptions caused by ANGEL’s union with Bb.  There were no statements about a lack of attentiveness to quickly integrating ANGEL into the broader Bb community and advisory groups. There were no statements about support levels declining or our staff in Indy being less attentive to client needs. Now I know better than to declare victory – it’s still only nine weeks since the acquisition, and it’s the perspective at nine months that matters. But I took this as a sign that we’ve taken some important first steps towards creating an effective union of these communities.

In Closing: All that being said, it certainly was a great experience to see so much of the e-Learning community gathered together. The conference was certainly unique as it was the first time that the combined client base of Blackboard, WebCT and ANGEL were all under one e-Learning roof. And while I was a little surprised at the overall size of the conference, I was not surprised by the passion that everyone there was showing and it only reaffirmed my belief that we have some very special opportunities in front of us.

Cheers,

Ray

BbWorld So Far

Very, very full days so far.  Yesterday, the week got underway in earnest for clients with pre-con workshops and training.  For me, a highlight was sitting in on a stimulating and sometimes daunting discussion on improving K-20 student progression.  Called the Pipeline Matters Council, this exchange among 50 or so leaders who joined us from across education segments represented the jumping off point for the newly forming Blackboard Institute, a practices research group taking shape within the company.  The input from all these perspectives reminded me of what’s so challenging about tackling this kind of issue.  You always end up along the fault line of wanting to improve the existing world versus throwing out today’s models and going for more radical change.  In the end the group came up with some promising action steps on both fronts. Jon Mott blogged on the model part of the discussion and captured some of the progression of the thinking in the meeting. 

BbWorld officially got going this morning with a powerful keynote from Seth Godin who spoke persuasively on his theory of tribes and what they mean for the change each of us can (and should) make in education.  Provocative stuff to chew on. 

The biggest part of today for me has been taking the stage today with Michael to deliver the Blackboard keynote.  I sent a summary of what we covered to the client community this afternoon.  Some of the main points:

New Mobile Platform Announcement – We shared our news on the mobile strategy front with the acquisition of mobile application developer TerriblyClever Design, LLC., maker of the MobilEdu^TM (http://www.blackboard.com/Company/MobilEdu.aspx) suite of iPhone and mobile web applications for Education.  With students wanting to do close to everything on their mobile device these days, my mind’s already going to all the possibilities for learning from this new step.  More to come. 

Latest in Project NG – We also took a drive through Project NG.  There’s some powerful stuff in there.  And I’m struck by how many sources that stuff comes from - our Bb developers, client developers, partners.  Project NG really is in many hands going forward.  That’s the same idea behind my inclination to openness.  When many people can work off common frameworks, the more rapidly and deeply we can innovate. 

My in-person introduction and focus outline – I gave a quick intro on me.  After 60 days this was really my first opportunity to present myself to the community in person, share a bit about my background, and outline my hopes for the organization beyond what I covered in my introductory letter to the community last month. 

Another Step in Openness—the Open Database - On the platform openness front I covered the new step that we will open the database for NG, removing obstacles to direct access to the production database, just as we’ve done for the ANGEL community.  More to come on this in a separate communication in the coming weeks – but I’m very pleased about the reaction this received on announcement.

Those are some of the main points.  On to the rest of the week, lots of meetings, new faces and some client sessions I have my eye on.

Cheers,
Ray

Learning Lessons, Making Good

A lesson I’ve learned repeatedly in my career is that long-term success requires a careful focus on the experience clients have with your products and your business practices.  Customers will forgive mistakes if you acknowledge them openly and correct them.  They won’t forgive the hubris to fail to look or not share them openly when you find them.

As I’m spooling up in my new role I’ve been learning more about the WebCT community that’s now a part of Blackboard.  Having recently joined the Blackboard community via merger my circumstances naturally put me in a place to understand their situation.   For the benefit of setting a baseline I’ve recently shared some of my findings about the transition they’ve experienced in joining Blackboard with them (the full letters are linked here - 6/25 letter, 7/1 letter).   But I think there’s something instructive to share more broadly in digest form.

What Happened

We made some important mistakes in approaching the WebCT integration.  We merged Blackboard and WebCT support too quickly and rushed to change support processes.  The result was a disruption in support and service at just the time our clients needed us to be at our best.  At the same time, we encountered pretty serious issues with the WebCT products, in particular WebCT CE6 and Vista 4 which had undergone a significant re-write just before the merger. 

Not long after the merger more than 500 clients then went live on these new products, no doubt confident in doing so based on WebCT’s well earned reputation for stability.  With the system under load, we encountered a large number of bugs (over 2,000) and some critical architectural issues.  We kicked the fix effort into overdrive. But the damage had been done.  Support, already adjusting to the changes we were making, was overwhelmed with tickets on issues we couldn’t work through fast enough.  Not surprisingly the experience for WebCT clients, and plenty of legacy Blackboard clients, suffered greatly.

What should we have done instead?  Hindsight is 20-20.  WebCT’s past success influenced our thinking but in hindsight, these are decisions we wish we could make over again.  We should have worked harder to retain the talent that supported the product to help us through the transition and kept the support center in Vancouver at full strength.  And frankly we made a mistake in not battle testing the new releases ourselves after the closing of the merger.  We’ve learned from these with the ANGEL-Bb merger.  We’re working very hard to make sure the support and development organizations remain intact and engaged in careful QA on future releases of the products.  

Making Good with the WebCT Community

Things are much better today on the platform and support fronts thanks in no small part to the flexibility and patience of clients and a big effort from many on the team here.  Now it’s time to renew our focus on transition.  We need to continue the transition toward our new products where the benefits of the combined platforms will be realized, and where we’ll be able to produce the best experience for our clients.

To that end we’ve made some important adjustments to our plans:

•    Extend Support for CE8 and Vista 8 – First, we need to give this community more time to understand the new releases and to build plans for transition.  To that end we’re extended Full Support for CE8 and Vista 8 Licenses to January 2013. 

•    Offer Tailored Transition Services - Second, we need to acknowledge that the scope of change requires an even greater degree of support.  To this end we’ve created a new range of “Getting Started” services offerings for WebCT clients to assist those who need help planning or performing their transition to Project NG.  We understand the need for value in this tough budgetary climate – these new offerings include special pricing and even no cost options.

•    Make the Upgrade Process As Simple As Possible – Third, we need to make upgrade processes as simple as possible.  To this end we’ve made a careful study of client feedback about the process and how we can improve it. I’ve written our clients about improvements recently, and this will remain a key priority for us until the transition is complete. In addition we are working to make sure that from an end-user perspective the experience comes as close as possible to mirroring their existing environment.  You can get a sense of how the user view compares in Project NG in the overview document (PDF version, PowerPoint version) I shared with the WebCT community.

And so my new job continues to unfold. Another week, another set of lessons learned, another new direction driven by taking client input seriously.  There’s much yet to do to execute on these new directions.  But it’s beginning to feel like progress. 

Cheers,

Ray

The Input Train – Councils, Crowdsourcing and our Conference

Coming from a smaller organization that prized client input and our ability to act on it, I had some concerns about what I’d find when I arrived at Blackboard.  How does Blackboard take in feedback?  Can input still turn into action at this scale? It’s still early days for me, but I’m beginning to understand how this is done at Blackboard.  I’ll share a bit about two of the venues I’ve learned about so far and a third that I’ll investigate soon.

Client Strategy Council

My first glimpse at input channels came a few weeks back when I attended my first Blackboard Client Strategy Council meeting. This is a group of really knowledgeable, senior representatives from every education segment, from different sizes of institutions, and most continents where Blackboard operates.  It also has viewpoints from the WebCT, ANGEL and traditional Blackboard perspectives. 

Over the course of three days in DC we shared a series of new ideas with them.  This included our recently announced commitment to Common Cartridge, our approach to bringing NG to market, and other top secret, major initiatives.  I observed my new colleagues sharing ideas and asking questions that were fresh from our own whiteboards and conference room discussions.  I held a session with such energetic input that I made it only to slide 2 of 3 despite running an hour over.

I can describe the input as “direct.”  Our council members are both experienced and outspoken.  They’ve done a very good job of collecting and amplifying messages I’ve heard from elsewhere within the broader Bb community.  It’s a well informed microcosm, and I’m pleased to find it so well organized and populated.  I can see well that this representative group will be a strong source of input to decisions we’ll make in the coming months. 

Crowdsourcing

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years thinking about how to design a customer input process to drive software maintenance.  This is not glamorous new feature development.  But it’s an area that every software company (or open source project) must really get right if they’re to succeed over the long term and large scale.

I have to call out Jeff Longland of the University of Western Ontario here for smartly prodding us in this direction.  Jeff’s call to us: if clients want more visibility and input into the process for deciding what bugs to fix (which they do), why not create an online prioritization process that’s driven by direct customer votes on the issues that concern them most?   Jeff’s idea sparked the Vista SWAT team to trial this approach.  I’m pleased to share that we’ve recently begun to use this “crowdsourcing client input model” for project NG.  We have over 70 Bb clients participating already. (http://kb.blackboard.com/display/TBS/The+Bug+Squad). 

The simplicity of this idea appeals to me very much.  If it proves scalable, it could help us expand the way our clients exercise influence on product direction.  It could also make our decision making more transparent.  It’s not enough to declare yourself “open.”  You’ve got to invest in systems that will allow you to take advantage of the client wisdom you’ll receive if you really want to act the part. I’ve applauded this work as a creative step in the right direction for improving client experience.  I’ll also invite you to participate with us when you have the opportunity.

Bb World 2009

Whenever asked by clients about how they influence product or policy, I always include a request to seriously consider attending Bb World.  I’m a big believer in the value of the community meeting in person, and believe this is an area where an event can help our community achieve professional development regardless of their skill level.  

After years of waiting for news of what was announced at these shows I’m pleased to be present.  I’ll even be presenting – I’ll join Michael Chasen in a keynote where I’ll provide a more comprehensive perspective on Bb Learn and our priorities. Thereafter I’ll be attending sessions and hoping to meet many of you in the process.

Turnout is expected to be quite strong despite budgetary restrictions – to date nearly 1,400 clients are planning to attend.  There’ll be over 100 clients from ANGEL joining in with their perspectives.  I’ll invite you to come and join in the dialog.

Through July 3, you can take advantage of Early Bird registration rates.

Cheers,

Ray

More shoulder to the wheel

One of the things that’s most exciting for me about going from a small organization to a bigger one is that there are certain areas where scale can have a really big, really clear impact.  Standards, a topic I personally have a lot of passion for, is one of those areas.  So in joining Blackboard, I saw and hoped for a big opportunity to do more.  The fact is Blackboard’s long been involved on a number of standards fronts and has made some really important contributions.  But I think it’s fair to characterize our involvement to date as more about participation than about leadership.  I want to change that.

So, as I shared with our client community in a letter today, we’re going to ramp up our commitment to standards.  Starting with a specific commitment to a standard I helped author and care a lot about, IMS’s Common Cartridge.  Let me state it plainly here, we will fully support both the import and export of this format, working closely with Rob Abel, the IMS and its Board of Directors, of which I am a member. 

Why?  eLearning Systems like Blackboard are an important part of educational delivery.  But they’re a part, one that needs to easily interact with lots of other parts, including learning content, to provide their full benefit to educators. Publishers, institutions, instructional designers, faculty, all are creating great learning content, at no small investment in time and resource.  They want to create content once, have it be able to play anywhere, and preserve their investment by making sure it’s not “locked in” to a particular vendor’s system due to proprietary formats.  Common Cartridge emerged to address these goals.  I’m thrilled to have us get more involved, and also to get more personally connected with our ongoing support of other important standards like LTI, SCORM, LIS and SIF. 

Once standards like these get implemented, creators of learning content and tools will of course still need to have formal partnerships (for example in our case participating in the Blackboard Building Blocks™ program or the Blackboard Content Provider network) with platform providers like us in order to connect their standards-compliant tool or content to eLearning platforms through supported interfaces.  That’s the same as it is today and a key part of continuing to ensure stability and accountability once platforms are extended.  But the power of these standards will be knowing that you can build a piece of content or tool once, then leverage existing partner relationships you have with various eLearning platform providers to have that content or tool serve teachers and learners through multiple supported systems.

In closing, an invitation.  This is important work for teaching and learning.  Work that I hope more will join us in doing.  I know many have been taking a wait and see approach before fully diving in.  I think we need to change that.  Collective inaction is delaying important benefits to educators worldwide.  

So I invite our publishing partners, our technology partners, our competitors and our community to engage with us to drive adoption of open standards.  Specifically join us in working with the IMS Global education standards organization.  Michael Chasen, our CEO at Blackboard, and I have both committed to participate.  We’re going to bring some of our best technical minds to the dialog and hope to see you there.  Ultimately the proof will be in shipped software, I understand that.  But I hope you get a sense of the commitment you can expect from us in this important area for industry collaboration.