Florida State College at Jacksonville Selects Blackboard Following Faculty-Wide Vote

WASHINGTON, July 29, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Following a faculty-wide vote between two leading learning management systems (LMS), Florida State College at Jacksonville chose Blackboard Learn^™ as its platform for online and blended learning, the company announced today. Blackboard's robust features, quality of service and product development were key reasons for the decision.

Beginning in spring 2012, faculty and students participated in a formal pilot of a competing platform from a leading LMS vendor and compared it to Blackboard Learn. During the pilot, instructors reported that Blackboard Learn had more robust assessment capabilities, instructional tools and customization options than the alternative. College officials also found Blackboard had remarkably better customer service and system uptime.

Following the pilot, the college conducted a vote of all full-time and adjunct faculty, and Blackboard Learn was chosen as the college's LMS across all physical and online campuses. Blackboard's digital content integrations, innovative roadmap, and instructor-friendly features were cited as reasons for their decision.

"A high quality experience for faculty and students is our highest priority," said Dr. Robert Rennie, CIO and vice president, technology, at FSCJ. "Blackboard is meeting our need to deliver students an exceptional experience. From a business perspective, the evaluation confirmed for us that Blackboard has the ability to deliver at scale to best meet our requirements."

The college plans to use Blackboard Learn for blended learning across its four physical campuses, and to facilitate fully online courses through its virtual campus. The platform's online collaboration and communication features will allow campus organizations and committees to stay connected, and for faculty who work in different campuses to collaborate with one another.

Thousands of institutions have adopted the latest version of the Blackboard Learn platform to take advantage of its improved stability and digital content integrations, social learning tools to drive student engagement and greater workflow efficiencies for instructors and administrators.

For more information about Blackboard Learn, please visit http://www.blackboard.com/Platforms/Learn/Overview.aspx or follow @Blackboard on Twitter.

About Blackboard Inc.
Blackboard Inc. is a global leader in enterprise technology and innovative solutions that improve the experience of millions of students and learners around the world every day. Blackboard's solutions allow thousands of higher education, K-12, professional, corporate, and government organizations to extend teaching and learning online, facilitate campus commerce and security, and communicate more effectively with their communities. Founded in 1997, Blackboard is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with offices in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Any statements in this press release about future expectations, plans and prospects for Blackboard represent the Company's views as of the date of this press release. Actual results may differ materially as a result of various important factors. The Company anticipates that subsequent events and developments will cause the Company's views to change. However, while the Company may elect to update these statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so.

SOURCE Blackboard Inc.