Serendipity35

Blackboard recently announced that 15 more colleges have signed up to use its services to offer MOOCs this summer and fall. According to InformationWeek.com, schools that are currently licensing Blackboard Learn will have access to the MOOC platform at no additional cost.

Blackboard had been allowing partners to use their CourseSites to run free unlimited MOOCs. Non-partnering schools and instructors can use CourseSites to create and manage MOOCs, but individual instructors cannot offer more than five MOOCs to students at once.

Blackboard says that they found schools were offering MOOCs because 1) they wanted to make educational content accessible to global students  2) to test programs in a safe environment  3) to market their services by giving students a firsthand look at how classes were run.

Blackboard announced that it plans to release an updated version of its Blackboard Learn LMS to include some features important to massive courses social learning capabilities, student engagement functions, rule-based learner identification, last name searches to filter through large numbers of students and automatic group creation.