Blackboard Learn’s president, Ray Henderson, announced today a new openness initive at Blackboard Learn.  Included in this initive was a promise to support common cartridge throughout the Blackboard product line.  In Henderson’s time at ANGEL, he pushed his former company to support the common cartridge format.  About the common cartridge format Henderson wrote, “I’m excited to share that we are committing to fully support both the import and export of this format, striking the same level of activism in support of the standard as ANGEL Learning had previously.”  Ray also reaffirmed blackboard’s support for Learning Tools Interoperability, SCORM, Learning Information Services and School Interoperability Framework (SIF).

If this line holds true, it looks as though Blackboard may be working to meet some people’s tests for change in blackboard (http://mfeldstein.com/three-tests-for-the-new-blackboard/).   The one thing that concerned me a bit was that there was no announcement about product openness, something that was a very under estimated value of the ANGEL system.  The entire announcement revolved particularly around standards support.  While this is a great first step, I would love to see some more information from Blackboard about actually opening up the application itself.

Let me know what you think of this move.  You can read the full letter here on Ray’s blog here – http://www.rayhblog.com/blog/openness-and-standards-at-blackboard.html