Ensure Faculty-Adopted Digital Content Is Available Within Blackboard Learn

Have you Installed and Activated the Building Blocks Most Requested by Faculty?

There’s still time to install the Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and WileyPLUS Building Blocks so that your faculty can access rich digital content within Blackboard Learn, regardless of the textbook they have chosen to teach with this semester.


Why download these Building Blocks?
•    Simplify workflows for your faculty and students
•    Save faculty time with less administrative hassle through single sign on and gradebook sync and transfer. 
•    Give your students access to all coursework in one place – Blackboard Learn.


Already downloaded and installed the publisher Building Blocks?  Check out these instructor resources or sign up for a Digital Content Cohort. 

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Summer Internships Fill Up Fast - Help Students Get Ahead of the Curve

At Blackboard, we believe that System Administrators are the key to implementing new technologies at their institutions.  You are on the forefront of adopting tools to extend the Blackboard Learn platform and make the lives of instructors easier.  Did you know you can impact students' learning beyond the classroom by giving them easier access to internships?

Give your students access to more internship opportunities this year.

It’s no secret that students are concerned now more than ever about finding a job after graduation. Despite the challenging economic environment facing student job seekers, a new internships survey reveals that 69% of companies with 100 or more employees offered full-time jobs to their interns – a positive and powerful reminder of the importance of an internship experience – especially as students prepare for the 2013 summer internships season.

But finding an internship that is the right fit for a student can be a struggle in itself. Blackboard System Administrators can help connect students to internships within their Blackboard Learn environment.

Internships.com, the largest marketplace for internships, part-time jobs and entry-level positions is available within Blackboard Learn.  Additionally Internships.com was selected by Forbes as the one of the 10 Best Websites for Your Career.  The partnership allows students to access Internships.com’s vast inventory of internships – currently over 60,000 active positions – all which have been vetted and verified by the Internships.com team.  The partnership complements and adds value to existing career-focused efforts and provides one more resource for students as they are looking for internships.

The time to act is now.  Help students succeed beyond the classroom.

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The Coyote Point Challenge: The Virtual Blackboard

Blackboard Signature Partner™ Coyote Point provides application delivery services, enabling IT managers to optimize the performance and ensure 100% availability of Blackboard Learn.  Check out this video in which Christine, a Director of IT from a large public university, solves her challenge of expanding Blackboard Learn to 28,000 users using Coyote Point System solutions. Christine needs complete control of her virtual server environment, as well as the ability to turn virtual servers and physical hardware on and off based on demand volumes. See how the Coyote Point Equalizer E650GX ADC meets her needs and comes in 40% under her allocated budget.

Coyote Point Challenge: The Virtual Blackboard

Tech Tip: Blackboard Code Quality Initiative

The Blackboard Code Quality Initiative is a joint effort between the Blackboard Product Development and Business Development team to assist Blackboard Building Block developers with the creation of high quality integrations. 

You can learn more about this initiative on EduGarage.com. The program currently focuses on performance.  Today, you can learn about Sonar, an open source third-party application, which covers seven axes of code quality including:

• Architecture & Design
• Duplications
• Unit Tests
• Complexity
• Potential Bugs
• Coding Rules
  
• Comments

Blackboard Product Development’s Performance Engineering team uses Sonar to ensure code quality in the Blackboard Learn platform.

We encourage you to visit the Sonar website where you will be able to learn more about Sonar and how to download it.  You will also have access to custom rules developed by Blackboard to test your Building Block code against the very same rules Blackboard uses on our own Building Blocks.

The EduGarage webpage is a work-in-progress and we will continue to publish tips, tricks and guidelines for building quality integrations.  Other topics we plan to address in this space are User Experience and Security.

Please contact the Blackboard Partnerships Team if there are any other topics you would like to see covered - we would be happy to add it to the topic list.

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