SaaS Deployment Of Blackboard Learn Continues To Gain Momentum Around The World

More than 115 clients are also leveraging the advantages of the Ultra experience

Blackboard Inc. announced that 500 institutions and organizations around the world are now delivering online courses and trainings via its Software as a Service (SaaS) deployment of Blackboard Learn, its flagship Learning Management System (LMS). Over the last five months, the number of institutions that have transitioned to the new SaaS deployment has grown by more than 25 percent, driven also by the increased availability of Blackboard’s SaaS solutions in regions like China and South Korea.

In addition to continuous delivery of new features, zero-downtime updates and quicker delivery of fixes, the SaaS delivery method enables clients to deploy the Ultra experience, the next-generation user interface of Blackboard Learn. More than 115 clients are now using Ultra, which features a modern and easy-to-use design and empowers students and teachers with streamlined workflows and immediate access to personalized information and actionable insights right on their screens.

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“We are thrilled that so many of our clients are now reaping the benefits of our robust cloud-based LMS solution, in many cases building on the benefits they already get from our other SaaS solutions, and we’re seeing growing interest in the SaaS deployment as clients recognize that they can seamlessly make the transition without causing disruption to students or teachers,” said Blackboard Chairman, CEO and President Bill Ballhaus. “We have also nearly doubled the number of clients who are implementing the new Ultra experience, a clear example of the growing momentum Ultra is having around the world, thanks to an increasing number of functionalities and unmatched flexibility that allow institutions to further adapt the LMS to their specific needs.”

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Key new features enabled recently for the Ultra experience include:

• Learning Modules: A valuable way to organize and present content, Learning Modules let content creators require students to access learning materials in a specified order, walking learners through a guided path.
• Question Analysis: The next evolution of Item Analysis, Question Analysis allows instructors to review the quality of assessment questions and improve them from one term to the next.
• Batch Edit of Due Dates: To save instructors time, they can now Batch Edit to update common settings across all content, such as visibility and due dates.
• Groups for All Course Activity: Instructors can create groups and group sets at the course level, including of assessments and discussions. Group sets help identify students who are paired together based on specific attributes or purposes.

In 2019 and beyond, Blackboard will continue to focus its resources and investments on the company’s edtech platform, further enhancing its integrated portfolio of solutions, which also include open-source-based LMS fully on SaaS and cloud-based solutions for collaborative learning, content accessibility, plagiarism detection and data analytics.

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