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Blackboard Founder and Innovative Software Designer to Bring Broader Experience and Capabilities to the Education Industry
[August 09, 2014]

Blackboard Founder and Innovative Software Designer to Bring Broader Experience and Capabilities to the Education Industry


(PR Web Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Washington, DC (PRWEB) August 08, 2014 Stephen Gilfus announced today that he will be leaving Blackboard Inc. at the beginning of the new Year in January 2008 to become an independent industry consultant and to form a new organization to bring innovation to the education industry.



"Over the last decade I have had the opportunity to serve thousands of institutions with their educational technology needs through my involvement with Blackboard", said Gilfus, "I am excited that I can now provide an independent perspective on many of the industries past developments while providing extended capabilities to academic institutions through agnostic decision making." Gilfus was a co-founder of the company and a key change agent in making Blackboard Inc. an industry leader in educational technology. Over the past decade Gilfus has spent time in various roles throughout the company.

As a company co-founder Gilfus is noted as being a primary author of the company's business plan as well as the companies first VP of Marketing Sales bringing in marquis clients like University of Pittsburgh, Cornell University and Yale Medical and several others circa 1997.


From 1997 to 2007, Mr. Gilfus held a variety of key leadership positions at Blackboard including head of Sales and Marketing, Corporate and Product Strategy, Product Management, Product Development, Strategic Development, and Blackboard Consulting as a facilitator and change agent leading many of the company's core initiatives.

He is recognized by many organizations as a key driver behind the growth of the eLearning industry and has presented at hundreds of academic institutions and industry conferences as the primary author the Educational Technology Framework a strategic roadmap to learning management system and technology adoptions within institutions.

Prior to his departure from Blackboard Inc., on January 4th of 2008, Mr. Gilfus led the companies higher education strategy and technology consulting practice where he guided a team of professionals, helping thousands of universities and leading educational publishers around the world plan, implement, and deploy eLearning technologies.

During his time at Blackboard he was a core designer of Blackboard's software products, a member of IMS working groups, and a lead executive for the design and implementation of several private labels and many Higher Education and K12 academic deployments.

"I am especially looking forward to bringing together a team of industry professionals to provide enhanced capabilities to educational institutions", said Mr. Gilfus , "Although Blackboard has been an exciting venture it has in many ways limited academic institutions from taking the next steps in innovation for their institution.", "Our educational environment and student expectations have changed to a point in which we need to discover new and/or combine existing technologies to provide greater capabilities to our academic institutions." The formation of the Gilfus Education Group is a key step in providing new capabilities to the industry, through an independent perspective.

For more information, visit http://www.gilfuseducationgroup.com/.

Education Innovation # # # Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/7/prweb567380.htm (c) 2014 PRWEB.COM Newswire

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