Blackboard (News - Alert), a provider of enterprise technology and solutions to improve students and learners’ experience, announced that mobile apps deployed by the company have reached nearly 3 million downloads.
The company is seeing a significant surge in usage during the back-to-school season. More than 1,100 higher education institutions and school districts worldwide use Blackboard Mobile native applications for courses and for student life and services.
Students, faculty, staff, alumni and others have accessed the Blackboard Mobile native applications in 127 countries, company officials said.
“The ability for an institution to immediately reach its community and provide direct access to course content and campus life services through mobile devices is critical to improving the overall campus experience,” said Kayvon Beykpour, vice president and general manager of Blackboard Mobile.
The back-to-school season is the time critical for Blackboard. During the first three weeks of the fall 2011 semester, students accessed Blackboard Mobile Learn more than 3 million times.
More than 20 institutions and districts – including Towson University and Cuyahoga Community College District – launched Blackboard Mobile Central applications for their communities to support the back-to-school season.
“We built our app, Tri-C Mobile, for the start of the fall 2011 semester and it has already begun to reinvent the way our campus community engages with the college,” said Christina Royal, associate vice president for eLearning and innovation at Cuyahoga Community College, in a statement.
“We wanted to offer the best in technology and access, and that meant making our services and information available on a wide range of mobile devices and platforms. We are hopeful an increase in student interaction and engagement will lead to a growth in student achievement,” Royal added.
Recently, Blackboard announced its partnership with McGraw-Hill Higher Education, a unit of The McGraw-Hill Companies to offer an integrated solution that provides a single point of access for online courses.
Rajani Baburajan is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Rajani's articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Jennifer Russell