By Ted Hopper, Sr. Director, Business Development, Blackboard
Enhancing education through innovation is at the heart of everything we do at Blackboard. From our beginnings where we produced one of the first learning management systems (LMS) in higher education, we’ve expanded into K-12, adult learning and international markets while also broadening our product focus to include mobile learning, collaboration tools, analytics and more. As Blackboard Learn President, Ray Henderson, wrote about on his blog, Blackboard’s Next Act: Opening the Lens on Our Vision for Education, “we believe that to help build a better education experience we need to continue to expand our products and services in areas across the institution. There is a new form of innovation taking root in our organization as we rethink how we can better serve educators by considering new ways to tackle some of the biggest challenges they face.”
Key to this vision, Blackboard recognizes that innovation is not just invention from within, but also includes collaboration. One example of this in the company today is Blackboard Partnerships (TM), a program that enables content providers, media and technology companies, system integrators and more to integrate with some of our core Blackboard systems. The true value of our program lies in its members and our joint ability to enhance the latest educational technology and help deliver it to the broadest possible audience. For example, this past year we partnered with K12 Inc., the largest provider of online education for grades K-12, to deliver courses and instruction through the Blackboard Learn (TM) platform. Through this partnership, we’re creating a totally new solution for co-sourcing the developmental coursework that’s such a challenge to education.
This vision to enhance education is what motivates us to stay more involved with SIIA and become this year’s lead Innovation Incubator sponsor. As a three-time sponsor of the SIIA Ed-Tech Industry Summit we benefit greatly from each experience. We learn about interesting new technology coming down the pipeline, build relationships with other participating companies and even build partnerships with Innovation Incubator finalists.
We look forward to meeting all of this year’s Innovation Incubator finalists and are excited to welcome one innovative company to the Blackboard community as a member in our partnership program. We’re confident that together we can all continue to positively impact educators and learners worldwide.