Blackboard Partners with McGraw-Hill to Provide Combined Course Education Solution

Blackboard (News - Alert) Inc. has teamed up with McGraw-Hill Higher Education, a unit of The McGraw-Hill Companies to offer an integrated solution that provides a single point of access for online courses.

Blackboard Learn Release 9.1 the combined solution utilizes McGraw-Hill's cutting-edge platforms, Connect and Create. Support for Release 8.0 is planned for later in the year. The solution significantly improves faculty and student workflow with single sign-on and automatic synchronization of all grades for McGraw-Hill assignments with the Blackboard Learn gradebook by offering all course resources in a single environment. More than 5,000 students at 20 different colleges and universities have already participated in a live pilot for the solution.

“This work is the most innovative and pleasing re-mix of publisher content and LMS I've witnessed in the industry," said Ray Henderson, President of Blackboard Learn. "And I'm proud that our work produced a first commercial scale implementation of an open education standard. This is the type of work that's defining what's different at Blackboard.”

The product of a major partnership announced last year that has been extended to include institutions and educators worldwide, the solution represents the deepest integration of an education publisher's content and tools in a learning platform. With the latest capabilities of Blackboard's online teaching and learning platform, Blackboard Learn, the solution combines McGraw-Hill's media rich content, assessment engines and industry leading adaptive learning tools, the company stated in a press release.

In 2009, The Blackboard Connect platform from Blackboard Inc from April 27 to May 4 was used to send around 9.79 million messages direct to users in support of school and government outreach efforts. It is estimated that approximately 40 percent of the 9.79 million messages dealt with the flu outbreak. Officials communicated a wide range of information through email, voicemail and text messages to parents, staff and residents.