Blackboard Announces Collaboration With Major Textbook Publishers

July 13, 2011, 6:54 pm

Four major textbook providers—Cengage, Macmillan, Pearson, and John Wiley & Sons—today announced that they will build tighter links between their advanced e-textbook platforms and Blackboard’s popular course-management system.

Blackboard announced a similar deal with McGraw-Hill last year. So the company now has partnerships with the five dominant textbook publishers.

For students, a major benefit will be the ability to get to the publishers’ e-textbooks and online assignments through the campus network without having to create new logins and passwords. For professors, the new links will make it easier to push students’ grades on online quizzes from the publishers’ e-textbook systems to the gradebook they use on the Blackboard system.

The deals do not turn Blackboard into a bookstore, however. Students must purchase access to the online-textbook systems through traditional retailers such as the college bookstore, said Matthew Small, chief business officer for Blackboard. “This isn’t about a storefront—this is about making these things more interoperable,” he added. “It’s a real challenge for the universities because they have to maintain all of these different passwords” to each textbook provider, he said. “Now 90-plus percent of all of the digital-learning platforms are going to be integrated into Blackboard.”

Mr. Small said most of the links will be finished in about a year.

Jim Behnke, chief learning officer at Pearson, said the deal will help the publishers focus on what they do best without trying to replicate all of the features of a course-management system like Blackboard. He described Blackboard’s course-management system as an “enterprise system” that helps professors do things like access course rosters and send official grades to the registrar. “Those are very important, but they’re not necessarily about the teaching and learning, and that’s our business distinction.”

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http://www.facebook.com/bootofthebeast Chris Harper

I doubt that many professors would describe Blackboard as “popular.”
shawnmehan

This is a defensive move that deserves admiration for its cunning, from both Bb and the publishers, to shield themselves from the disruptive forces that each camp faces. And Bb must have had it in the oven relaxing to announce after the buyout by equity to try to shift focus. More at http://shawnmehan.com/
maddie2515

BlackBoard CMS has added value to my teaching. No longer burdened with hardcopies of papers, and the ease of adding complete examinations and plagiarism capabilities, grading has become more ‘legitimate’. The system calculates (by weighting that I develop) grades and encourages more discussion between students. In the F2F (face to face) class, I do most of the speaking and the students don’t participate as much as I would like. The online system has given the students more voice and forces them to be active participants in their own learning. The feedback I have received over the last two years has been encouraging me to become more adept in its usage.

I would say that my university, it is taking the more veteran faculty longer to get on board with it. But once on, it would be hard to go back to overhead transparencies and spiralbound grade books.
rwejd

An easy way to continue to “put the hook” in to beleaguered college instructors – especially at the community college and small-to-midsized state and private schools. The more services instructors get hooked on, the more difficult it is to displace the vendors of those services. More and more the Big 5 publishers are cooperating in ways that comes very close to restraint of trade. It’s like the large used book companies that own college bookstores, using their campus contracts to keep innovative publishers off campus. For what? To protect their business profits, of course.

What we need are some new rules about all of this. McGraw Hill is a strong partner with Chegg, the book rental company. Why? Because allowing for inflation, book rentals do NOT reduce the overall cost of textbooks to students, and in fact permit untrammeled price increases by publishers. Run the numbers over a series of 3 year contracts, allowing for 14% per year textbook price increases. You’ll get the picture.

I don’t begrudge the textbook companies and bookstore companies making a profit; they all perform quality services, but those services cost too much. Rather than restructure to pass economies onto ever more financially challenged students, they create more internal and outsourced vertical integration to maintain control – putting off change and keeping upstart companies out of the mix. This is sad, and even tragic for those students who drop out solely due to cost constraints.

One more thing: instructors in American colleges really need to start figuring out what their choices are costing students. Anything less is just plain irresponsible – not to mention accelerating the death of the university as we know it from upstart competitors who are able to deliver more economies and efficiencies.
http://twitter.com/mswanepoel Marinus Swanepoel

Four major textbook providers—Cengage, Macmillan, Pearson, and John Wiley & Sons—today announced that they will build tighter links between their advanced e-textbook platforms and Blackboard’s popular course-management system.
ychumanities

Your options aren’t limited to Blackboard or “overhead transparencies and spiralbound grade books.” There are other CMS options that are not as clunky, not as buggy, and which do not enshrine a top-down organization of data and activities that emphasizes the instructor as the font of information and organizer of the course.
phikaw

How “popular” Blackboard is with students or professors is debatable. Most of my students hate it and except for very limited usefulness in content delivery, I have found BB to be more trouble than it’s worth.
11152886

I applaud these adjuncts and students. I think adjuncts are treated unfairly regarding pay and retention, in relation to the jobs they do, when they are comparable in teaching to those of full-time faculty. Research and service are important, but need to be put in proper perspective because many adjuncts provide service and they also carry out research. This whole area of adjuncts, many times with one course less than a full time/tenured faculty person, needs rectifying. Frankly, I think it is a disgrace in higher education, and an exploitation of persons in these so called part-time positions.