New Orleans — July 11
Blackboard customers will soon have a new option for delivering e-textbooks on their campuses.
Blackboard Inc. and Ingram’s Vital Source Technologies Inc. announced an agreement to give students and faculty one-click access to Vital Source’s e-textbook platform directly within Blackboard Learn, Blackboard’s leading learning management (LMS) system. The planned integration would be available for users both online and for mobile devices.
The announcement was made at BbWorld 2012, an annual event hosted by Blackboard this week in New Orleans.
With the planned offering, instructors would be able to preview and select textbooks, as well as pieces of content or learning objects and add them to assignments and activities directly in their courses in Blackboard Learn. In addition, faculty and administrators would be able to track e-book usage through analytics reports.
Vital Source’s e-content platform currently includes more than 80,000 titles from publishers. Student and faculty users can access their books — online and offline — on a variety of device types, including Mac, Windows, iPad and Android. Users can make notes, highlights and annotations in their e-textbooks, all of which automatically sync across devices. Students can even share and subscribe to notes and highlights from their peers. The planned integration would also support viewing e-book content through Blackboard’s mobile learning app.
The work with Vital Source is part of Blackboard’s ongoing effort to make it easier for teachers and students to find, use and share digital content and tools.
Source: Blackboard Inc.
