Blackboard

CourseInfo LLC

CourseInfo was founded in late 1996 as a software provider founded by Cornell University students Stephen Gilfus and Daniel Cane. Gilfus wrote the business plan for CourseInfo and its Interactive Learning Network product while an undergraduate at Cornell. CourseInfo (a dorm room start-up) with Gilfus as the business lead and Cane as the lead developer had developed an innovative new platform for internet and networked learning called a "Course Management System" by Gilfus. Gilfus as a product strategist and Cane as lead tech guru had already identified a market fit and defined a category, as well as built a portfolio of 15 institutional clients including Cornell University, University of Pittsburgh and Yale Medical School. The product was sold to schools on an annual FTE licensing model―a full school deployment enterprise model.

Blackboard LLC

Blackboard LLC. was founded on January 21, 1997 by Michael Chasen and Matthew Pittinsky and began as a consulting firm contracting to the non-profit IMS Global Learning Consortium to develop a prototype for online learning and thinking through online learning standardization. Chasen and Pittinsky started Blackboard after leaving KPMG Consulting where they both had worked as part of the company's higher education practice.

Blackboard Inc.

In 1998, after Cane met Chasen at a conference on adaptive learning, Gilfus and Cane decided to merge CourseInfo LLC. with Chasen and Pittinky's Blackboard LLC. company in order to raise money and scale the business. The combined company became a corporation known as Blackboard Inc. They renamed the CourseInfo platform built by the Cornell team to Blackboard's CourseInfo; the CourseInfo brand was dropped in 2000. As an extension of CourseInfo's original two weeks for free courses, the company provided a hosted version "CourseSites" for teachers to try out for free. After having raised its seed round, the new company made a profit in its first year, and its sales in 1998 approached US$1 million. Other early products included Blackboard Classroom and Blackboard Campus both derivatives of the original platform.

In 2000, Blackboard acquired iCollege/College Enterprises Inc.'s campus card, introducing commerce capability to Blackboard's portfolio.

By 2006, the firm's learning platform software was used in more than 40% of U.S. college campuses and the company had gained a significant worldwide market share. This expansion was initially funded through venture capital from a number of investors, including Pearson PLC, Dell, AOL, The Carlyle Group and Novak Biddle Venture Partners. At this time the company renamed its "Course Management System" product category into the "Learning Management Systems" category in order to sell to the corporate space.

Overseas expansion began in the early 2000s, growing to include Asia, Australia and Europe. Blackboard had its initial public offering (IPO) in June 2004 under the stock market ticker BBBB. Sale of shares in the initial public offering raised an estimated $70 million for the company, making it the second-most successful technology IPO of that year.

Company expansion and buyout

In 2006, Blackboard completed the acquisition of its largest competitor, WebCT Inc, enlarging its share of the higher education market to between 65 and 75 percent. Over the next five years, the company invested in a series of new products and acquisitions, including Blackboard Xythos, Blackboard Connect, Blackboard Mobile, Blackboard Collaborate, and Blackboard Analytics, thus expanding beyond the learning management system market.

By 2011, the firm's products were used by over half of colleges and universities in the US. On July 1, 2011, Blackboard agreed to a $1.64 billion buyout by an investor group led by Providence Equity Partners, completed on October 4, 2011. Following the sale, Providence Equity Partners merged Edline, its K-12 learning system, with Blackboard. Edline was later renamed Blackboard Engage.

Operations

Though previously a public company, following its 2011 buyout by Providence Equity Partners Blackboard now operates as a private company. The company's headquarters are in Washington, D.C., and it has offices in Asia, Australia, Europe and in several locations in North America.

Products and services

Blackboard

The initial product to be offered by the company was its course management software, first available in 1998. The latest version, Blackboard Learn 9.1, was released in April 2010. This is a learning management system that provides a learning system for course delivery and management for institutions; a community and portal system for communication; a content management system for centralized control over course content; and a system to record and analyze student assessment results.

Though the software is proprietary, developers are able to extend the functionality of the system, and create customized course management and delivery by developing software and applications known as Building Blocks, created by Gilfus and Pittinsky,

which allows third-party developers to create customizations and extensions for Blackboard Learn through open APIs and web services. In 2011, the firm re-launched the original CourseSites offering, a free version of its Blackboard Learn and Collaborate software, for which it provides hosting and support.

Blackboard has used the acquisition of other companies as a strategy to both limit competitors and enter new markets. Between 2006 and 2012, the company spent more than $500 million on acquisitions.

Competing learning management platforms that were acquired by Blackboard in order to absorb their users and reduce competition include: George Washington University's course management software, Prometheus, in 2002; and WebCT Inc., its largest rival in the education software industry, in 2005. According to market research company Eduventures, the merger with WebCT increased the firm's share of the higher-education market to between 65 and 75 percent. In 2009, the acquisition of ANGEL Learning, an education software developer, increased Blackboard's client base to nearly 6,000 educational institutions, companies and government agencies.

The company has also made acquisitions in order to expand its product base with other education-related services and software. Such acquisitions include: NTI Group in 2008, which became the basis for Blackboard Connect; providers of online and mobile collaboration tools Wimba, Inc. and Elluminate, Inc. in 2010 to form Blackboard Collaborate; iStrategy in December 2010, which led to the creation of Blackboard Analytics; and Presidium Inc. in 2011, which developed into Blackboard Student Services. Following the company's merger with Edline in 2011, Edline was later renamed Blackboard Engage. In March 2012, Blackboard acquired Moodlerooms Inc. (a Moodle hosting provider) and NetSpot of Adelaide, Australia, which then became the basis of Blackboard's Open Source Services division.

As of June 30, 2018, Blackboard (which had been trading as "Moodlerooms" since 2012) was no longer a Certified Moodle Partner and can no longer use the Moodlerooms name or the Moodle trademarks that had been licensed to them to advertise their Moodle-related services.

Legal matters

The United States Patent and Trademark Office granted the company U.S. Patent 6,988,138 for "Internet-based education support system and methods" in January 2006. The patent established Blackboard's claims to the concept of connecting together web-based tools to create an interconnected university-wide course management system. The firm announced the patent on July 26, 2006, and on the same day it filed a patent infringement lawsuit against rival education software company Desire2Learn Inc. According to news reports, the awarding of the patent and the lawsuit against Desire2Learn led to concerns about patentability in the electronic learning community.

The website BoycottBlackboard.org was set up by Chris Hambly on August 2, 2006, calling for a boycott of the company's products and offering an online petition to be signed by those who opposed the patent. In addition, some critics of the patent and lawsuit created a Wikipedia article for the history of virtual learning environments to document existing examples of course management software. The Software Freedom Law Center filed a request with the U.S. Patent Office to re-examine Blackboard's patent in November 2006, and in January 2007, the request was approved on the basis of prior art, cited by the center, raising "substantial" questions. To address the concerns raised within the education software and academic communities, in February 2007, the firm announced that it had made a pledge to not assert its patent rights against open-source and non-profit software developers.

In February 2008, a federal jury in Texas ruled in favor of Blackboard in its patent infringement suit against Desire2Learn, finding the rival company liable for infringing on its patent. One month later, in March 2008, the U.S. Patent Office issued a preliminary decision following its re-examination of Blackboard's patent application, which rejected the 44 claims made by the company. The Patent Office stated that it would give a final decision following a review of the patent.

Following the ruling by the federal jury in February 2008, later that year Desire2Learn lodged an appeal with the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. A ruling was made by the Court of Appeals on July 27, 2009, that the 38 patent claims made by Blackboard in its suit against Desire2Learn were invalid. The dispute was resolved, when Blackboard and Desire2Learn announced on December 15, 2009, that each company was settling all ongoing litigation between them and had made a cross-licensing agreement. In April 2010, the firm abandoned patent 6,988,138, and in November that year the company's legal counsel announced the patent's "official termination" and stated that Blackboard had ended its appeals.