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May 14, 2008, 08:38 AM ET
Blackboard Unveils Application to Bring Course Updates to Facebook
Students eagerly spend hours on Facebook, where they socialize and communicate with friends. But they’re often far less excited about logging into Blackboard, the course-management system used at hundreds of colleges, where they participate in required class discussions and check when their next test is scheduled. So Blackboard has created a Facebook application for students that brings their academic information into the social-networking site.
For privacy and security reasons, the Facebook application does not actually pull academic data from Blackboard onto a user’s Facebook page, said Karen Gage, vice president for product strategy at Blackboard, in an interview on Tuesday. Instead, it pushes a notification to Facebook users when something is new on their course Web pages, such as when one of the user’s professors has posted grades. Then the student has to log into Blackboard to see the grade itself.
The application is part of the company’s new Blackboard Sync effort that’s designed, it seems, to make sure Blackboard doesn’t become irrelevant as students increasingly use new technologies to communicate, such as iPhones and social networks. So far Sync’s only tool is the Facebook application.
“Certainly Blackboard Sync could eventually be used to do similar integrations with other kinds of applications or mobile devices,” said Ms. Gage. “But we don’t have anything about that to announce right now.” In other words, stay tuned.
The company was careful to give campus administrators who might be worried about the security of Facebook applications the ability to disable the new application on their campuses. Administrators can change a setting in their Blackboard system to block information from being sent to Facebook. But the application will work with every college’s Blackboard system unless administrators flip that kill switch.
The most popular feature of the new application will probably be its social one: Students can click the “Rosters” tab of the application to see the faces and profiles of other students in each of their courses. —Jeffrey R. Young
Categories: Social-Networking, Teaching
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