Thirty-One Schools Pilot Wiley and Blackboard Digital Learning Integration

Washington — April 17

Thirty-one institutions are evaluating a new integration for using digital learning content from John Wiley & Sons Inc. with Blackboard Inc.'s learning management system (LMS).

The field trial gives students and faculty access to Wiley's collection of learning content and tools directly within their online course environment.

The field trial involves students, faculty and campus administrators across 42 courses at two and four-year higher education institutions in the U.S. and Canada. More than 50 instructors and 2,900 students have been providing ongoing feedback on their experience with the integration that seeks to enhance the use of Wiley's content within the Blackboard Learn platform.

Instructors have expressed great satisfaction with the integration, the company said, which lets them easily add digital content to their courses in Blackboard Learn and synchronize grades and other data from Wiley's research-based, online teaching-and-learning-environment, WileyPLUS.

Students using the solution have indicated they can now spend their time more effectively by having one place to do their studying and testing.

Expected to be fully available globally in summer 2012, the service would rely on the open education standard IMS Basic Learning Tools Interoperability (Basic LTI) and is built on the Blackboard Learn 9.1 platform.

Nearly 2,000 institutions have adopted Blackboard Learn, Release 9.1, Blackboard's flagship learning management platform to take advantage of its tools, which seek to drive student engagement and digital content integrations and greater workflow efficiencies for instructors and administrators.

WileyPLUS is a research-based, online environment for effective teaching and learning that is offered with over 300 Wiley titles and is used in more than 20 countries.

Source: Blackboard Inc.