A new Blackboard tool lets campuses connect the company's course-management system to Google's free e-mail and document-sharing services.
The connecting tool, which was developed by Northwestern University, is now available to other campuses as a "Building Block" plug-in for Blackboard. It allows students to access Google Apps within the Blackboard platform, meaning they don't have to sign into the two platforms separately.
Hundreds of colleges have signed up for Google's free services and made the company's Gmail service the official student e-mail program on their campuses. Google's services include a series of online programs as well, including a word processor and a spreadsheet application, and some students are using them for their classwork.
About 1,000 students at Northwestern are using the new connecting program.
Making it easier to access the programs means students can work outside of the classroom more efficiently, said Wendy Woodward, director of technology support services at Northwestern. "We saw an opportunity to leverage the capabilities of two very important systems," she said.
Northwestern has been using Blackboard for more than eight years, and Google Apps for two years, she said.
Ray Henderson, a Blackboard official, said in a written statement that "there is tremendous demand in our user community for the new model of document creation and collaboration that Google has created."
Comments
1. garay - November 01, 2009 at 08:23 pm
For some time, now, we have seen the evolution of this fine (free) Blackboard App for Google Apps, developed by our colleagues at Northwestern. It also speaks volumes to the mature and open Blackboard APIs, and to what anyone can do with them.
The seamless integration between the Blackboard LMS and Google Apps will be welcomed by hundreds of thousands of students and instructors world-wide. Thank you.
--- Ed Garay, UIC
2. fisler - November 02, 2009 at 11:13 am
I am more critical towards the mass use of Google tools in the US. I think its wrong that a University has e.g. their mails managed through a commercial company like Google (or Apple or Microsoft or whoever...). Personally I think IT core services like email should be managed by the universities themselves, they should control spam filter, virus filters, abuse etc. within their own network and not have all their messages hosted and filtered by a commercial company... I'd never use such an app in higher education. But then again I wouldnt use a commercial LMS either but opt for an open source solution. First because I dont really trust these companies. And second because the public money (from taxpayers) that public universities receive should go back to the public and not to commercial companies. But thats my personal opinion and I know that - especially in the US - I would have a hard stand :-)
3. lindsayw - November 02, 2009 at 11:39 pm
In response to Fisler...
Universities who have moved their mail service into a cloud still haven't stopped "managing" them. In the case I'm familiar with, spam filtering, virus filtering and dealing with abuse, etc. are all handled in very much the same way as they were before the mail services were delivered out of the Google network. In this case, all mail comes through the same local filtering and processing infrastructure before being delivered off to Google for final delivery.
No doubt many other Universities using Google Apps would manage things in a similar way.