Microsoft-Blackboard partnership stirs debate

The partnership between Blackboard, Inc., the mainstay of the University's online learning program, and Microsoft Corporation has aroused suspicion that the software giant may be trying to reduce the software options available to colleges and universities.

In April, Blackboard announced that new versions of its software will provide additional features available only to those running the program on Microsoft NT servers, according to the Blackboard website. Microsoft is one of the financial backers of Blackboard.

Many institutions are worried that Blackboard may eventually offer programs only for Microsoft network operating systems, forcing them to choose between losing Blackboard and switching to Microsoft O.S., according to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

"That has caused us a bit of worry," said Serge Goldstein, director of academic services for the University's Office of Information Technology. Although he said it is unlikely, Goldstein acknowledged, "There may come a day when Blackboard will say such-and-such a release is only available for [Microsoft Windows] NT. Many of our faculty are used to Blackboard. If we have no choice, we would move to NT."

The University runs Blackboard with Sun servers on the UNIX platform. "[Blackboard's] UNIX support has always been good," said Goldstein, adding that the relationship between the University and Blackboard is strong. "We worked with them very closely to implement Blackboard 5 Level 3 over the summer. They assigned a team to work with us."

But along with its use of Blackboard the University also supports the development of an alternative to its current program.

The University participates in the Open Knowledge Initiative, a project begun at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The goal of OKI is to create an "open-source" web-learning program, free to institutions, which would allow for course information to easily be transferred between schools.

The University chose Blackboard in the spring of 1999 as the program with which to build and maintain course websites. According to David Herrington of OIT academic services, Blackboard beat out such competitors as Web CT and Web Course in a Box.

In order to evaluate the program choices, members of then-CIT instructed graduate students to in building course websites using the different systems.

Faculty then judged the sites to come up with their own recommendations. According to the newsgroup for the faculty panel, Blackboard was "by far the easiest to use," and seemed to be "the most complete solution." According to Goldstein, 300-400 University courses actively use Blackboard for class support, although OIT establishes a template site for every course. About 150 more have independent web sites maintained by faculty. The most common uses of Blackboard are the eReserves and the digital dropbox features.

Since the introduction of Blackboard, faculty and staff have begun to look forward to even greater courseware possibilities.

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"What everyone is excited about is going beyond [those features], with better multimedia capabilities and better integrative capabilities where you have textual, video and audio media tied together," he said. "Courseware needs to evolve before we can do that."