Blackboard Gets into School Bundling Business

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 07/16/14

During its annual conference, BbWorld 2014, taking place this week in Las Vegas, Blackboard has made several announcements regarding new forms of packaging and delivery for its multiple products. The company announced a software-as-a-service model for its flagship learning management system (LMS); it also is releasing "solution sets" of applications appropriate for a specific school need or environment; and it has bundled a set of products for Internet2 members.

The public cloud version of Blackboard Learn will be available later this summer to customers alongside an on-premises self-hosted edition and a Blackboard-hosted private cloud edition. The SaaS approach is intended to provide customers with automatic delivery of the environment's latest features.

The company's Open Education platform, which hosts massive open, online courses, is currently in beta testing through the SaaS approach.

"We are very excited to bring a broader cloud strategy to market that give schools a wide variety of reliable and sustainable deployment options," said Mark Strassman, Blackboard's senior vice president of product management.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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