May 14, 2008
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
Posted on Wednesday May 14, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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Wow. This is exciting stuff. I think this is the first time I have actually looked forward to logging into my Blackboard account. ASU is upgrading to Blackboard 8 tomorrow, so hopefully this will work with our accounts.
— Alan Bradford May 14, 07:25 PM #
Now if only blackboard would get there systems working with web browsers and jdk’s and stop throwing exceptions and crashing so often.
— a student May 14, 09:06 PM #
OK, so now we know what Bb is investing in instead of fixing its clumsy interface, or its buggy architecture. At the least I hope that the FaceBook application informs students that “Bb is down again”
— Charles Hofacker May 15, 06:51 AM #
I have major issues w/ this tool being available by default. Seems like they are pushing it on us (Bb Schools) and not allowing times for testing/support.
— mlong May 15, 08:18 AM #
Class rosters are FERPA protected in the US. Any US college giving away class rosters to Facebook will be in trouble with the FERPA office in Washington DC.
— Privacy concern May 15, 08:58 AM #
Desire2Learn needs to play in this open architecture space. I posted some thoughts on this yesterday.
— Jeff May 15, 10:42 AM #
No one will be in trouble with FERPA because it is a voluntary application. The school will not be supplying the roster. It is much like listing your courses on facebook…once you do that, the course name is clickable on your profile and you can see anyone else who has listed that same class. The roster will only be made up of those who add the blackboard application, so any “rosters” will be voluntary and most likely be incomplete.
— No privacy concern May 15, 11:28 AM #
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— Dan Alcide May 16, 01:59 PM #