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CourseInfo LLC, one of the two companies forming
Blackboard Inc. Blackboard Inc. was an American educational technology company with corporate headquarters in Reston, VA. It was known for Blackboard Learn, a learning management system. It merged with Anthology in late 2021, with the future name of the combin ...
was founded in 1997 by
Daniel Cane Daniel Cane is a founder of Blackboard Inc. and CourseInfo LLC. He is currently the CEO and co-founder of Modernizing Medicine. Biography Cane grew up in Lake Worth, Florida United States, attended Lake Worth High School and graduated from ...
and Stephen Gilfus while at
Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
. They joined together to officially form the partnership known as CourseInfo and developed the company into a small course management software provider. The product at the time was called the Teachers Toolbox. In 1998, the CourseInfo team met two principals of Blackboard LLC while pursuing a grant for adaptive testing. Shortly after the two companies joined together to form what is now known as Blackboard Inc.


Company formation

CourseInfo was formed in late 1996- early 1997, via a partnership agreement between Cane and Gilfus. Early on Cane had begun developing web based scripts for professor Cindy van Es at Cornell for her statistics class. This activity was mostly driven by Dr. van Es's desire for bringing technology in the classroom and Cane's experience with new technologies. As one of the five supercomputer centers holding up
ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...
—the precursor underpinnings of the internet—Cornell was an early implementation of
email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
, web and technology usage. Cornell had been using computer based course technology such as
PLATO Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
since the early 1970s.


Product development

In 1996, Cane wrote simple automated scripts for websites for instructors using the
Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...
programming language and
Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was onc ...
2.0. In 1997, after the founding of CourseInfo, version 1.0 of the "Teachers Toolbox" was launched including a series of named "Generator" tools including the coursesite generator, announcement generator, quiz generator, survey generator and other tools. Gilfus designed the features and functions and web design of the product through personal experience and instructor feedback while Cane developed the core technology of the product. Gilfus also led sales, marketing and product management for the company. Much of the company's initial communication was on educational listservs and web boards. In mid-1997, the "Interactive Learning Network" ILN 1.5, was released and installed at several academic institutions including
Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
,
Yale Medical School The Yale School of Medicine is the graduate medical school at Yale University, a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was founded in 1810 as the Medical Institution of Yale College and formally opened in 1813. The primary te ...
and
University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the universit ...
. The ILN was the first e-learning system of its kind to leverage and install on top of a
relational database A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relatio ...
MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...
. Access control was added to provide security around course content. Guest access was provided for course shopping. In 1998, the CourseInfo product line (then the Interactive Learning Network or ILN) became the foundation for Blackboard's
e-learning Educational technology (commonly abbreviated as edutech, or edtech) is the combined use of computer hardware, software, and Education sciences, educational theory and practice to facilitate learning. When referred to with its abbreviation, edt ...
product line as Blackboard's CourseInfo. On April 29, 1998, the CourseInfo was among the first to implement emerging industry standards. On November 2, 1998, the company released CourseInfo 2.0, and on July 26, 1999, they released CourseInfo 3.0 CourseInfo 4.0. was released on October 26, 1999 On January 19, 2000, the company released CourseInfo Enterprise Edition. Prior to the Blackboard–CourseInfo merger, Blackboard was focused on developing a prototype for IMS (Instructional Management Systems).


Blackboard overview

Blackboard Inc. was formed by the joining of CourseInfo LLC, founded by Cane and Gilfus, and Blackboard LLC, founded by Michael Chasen and Matthew Pittinsky. Originally the Blackboard company began as a consulting firm contracting to the non-profit IMS Global Learning Consortium. In 1998, it merged with CourseInfo LLC, a small course management software provider that originated at Cornell University. The combined company became known as Blackboard Inc. The first line of e-learning products was branded Blackboard CourseInfo, but the CourseInfo brand was dropped in 2000. Blackboard went public in June 2004. It operated publicly until
Providence Equity Partners Providence Equity Partners L.L.C. is a specialist private equity firm, private equity investment firm focused on media, communications, education, technology investments across North America and Europe. The firm specializes in growth-oriented pri ...
purchased the company in 2011. As of January 2014, its software and services are used by approximately 17,000 schools and organizations in 100 countries.


See also

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History of virtual learning environments A virtual learning environment (VLE) is a system that creates an environment designed to facilitate teachers' management of educational courses for their students, especially a system using computer hardware and software, which involves distance ...
*
History of virtual learning environments 1990s In the history of virtual learning environments, the 1990s was a time of growth, primarily due to the advent of the affordable computer and of the Internet. 1980s 1985 The Free Educational Mail (FrEdMail) network was created by San Diego educa ...


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Courseinfo Cornell University