Stephen Gilfus is an American businessman,
entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...
, architect and engineer known as "The Father of Modern E-Learning". He is a founder of
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 ...
and
CourseInfo LLC
CourseInfo LLC, one of the two companies forming Blackboard Inc. was founded in 1997 by Daniel Cane and Stephen Gilfus while at Cornell University. They joined together to officially form the partnership known as CourseInfo and developed the ...
, where he held executive positions from 1997 to 2007. In July 2007, Gilfus started a global education think tank in Washington, DC focused on education innovation.
Cornell University
While at Cornell, as an academic scholar, Gilfus focused on the development of new businesses through his studies as a part of a burgeoning new series of studies within Cornell's Entrepreneurship Personal Enterprise program. Early on, his mentor
Professor Deborah Streetergave him guidance and support in launching a new student club, the Cornell Entrepreneur Organization
CEO, focused on bringing together students from business and engineering in support of new business ideas. This club evolved into an organization now known as CEN (th
Cornell Entrepreneur Network. In this capacity, he was a TA for Professor Streeter's business planning class, in which he mentored students on the development of new business plans and ideas and approaches., Gilfus won an award from Cornell for Business Consulting on a project he did in Streeter's class. During this time he was also an active student participant in the creation of Cornell'
Entrepreneurship@Cornellprogram.
CourseInfo
In 1997, Gilfus met
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 ...
, his student, while he was a teacher's administrator for Cornell's entrepreneurship studies assisting Professor Deborah Streeter with her business plan writing classes. That year Cane won an award for a business plan developed in the class called "EleFun" based on an educational website business model. Earlier that year, Gilfus had also won an award from Cornell for his work in his business planning and consulting class. Cane approached Gilfus based on his successes at Cornell with the Cornell Entrepreneur Club and the two joined forces to found and develop
CourseInfo
CourseInfo LLC, one of the two companies forming Blackboard Inc. was founded in 1997 by Daniel Cane and Stephen Gilfus while at Cornell University. They joined together to officially form the partnership known as CourseInfo and developed the ...
into a platform for course-based websites or CourseSites as the called them.
CourseInfo LLC
CourseInfo LLC, one of the two companies forming Blackboard Inc. was founded in 1997 by Daniel Cane and Stephen Gilfus while at Cornell University. They joined together to officially form the partnership known as CourseInfo and developed the ...
was a small
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 ...
company focused on the development of an innovative
course management system
A virtual learning environment (VLE) in educational technology is a web-based platform for the digital aspects of courses of study, usually within educational institutions. They present resources, activities, and interactions within a course stru ...
. The CourseInfo platform was technologically advanced as it was one of only a few relational database-powered web-based applications launched in the late 1990s. CourseInfo released several product versions including the "Teachers Toolbox" and its foundational first release the Interactive Learning Network v.1. The original product developed at Cornell University was deployed on a Linux BSD system, written in PERL, with an Apache web server, and leveraged MySQL as its relational database, with the front end UI of the system being accessed through a web browser.
One of the first of its kind to use a relational database with a web front end or a "true" web-based application, these deployments are now known a LAMP web application software stack. The CourseInfo team had leveraged MySQL in 1996/1997 just a few short years after the release of the original MySQL database system on May 23, 1995. The Cornell team had unique access to the Cornell Theory Center, now the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing and leveraged supercomputing power, one of the key pillars of the internet and ARPANET/NSFNET at the time.
Blackboard
In 1998,
CourseInfo
CourseInfo LLC, one of the two companies forming Blackboard Inc. was founded in 1997 by Daniel Cane and Stephen Gilfus while at Cornell University. They joined together to officially form the partnership known as CourseInfo and developed the ...
Llc., founded by Daniel Cane and Stephen Gilfus, and ''Blackboard LLC'', founded by
Michael Chasen
Michael Chasen is an American businessman. He is a co-founder and former CEO of Blackboard Inc., a position he held from 1999 to 2012. In April 2013, Chasen co-founded SocialRadar, a technology startup company developing a location-based social ...
and Matthew Pittinsky merged to form
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 ...
The first e-learning product as Blackboard Inc. was branded "Blackboard's CourseInfo," but the CourseInfo brand was dropped in 2000.
Product strategy
Blackboard was one of the first businesses to provide a free offering "Blackboard.com" for instructors to create free "CourseSites". All of Blackboard technology for .com and related services were hosted onsite at 1899 L St NW in secure server rooms run by the company. The building's owners had to install extra power to support the server rooms on the 11th floor, and add individual AC capability on the rooftop to support the server rooms.
Early on, the company needed to support a multi-platform on-premise installation strategy as academic institutions were consuming both Unix based systems and Microsoft systems. Since the platform was built in PERL the company deployed mod_perl an extension to Apached that would also sit as a module to IIS on windows server machines, this allowed the team to create a multi-platform distribution model enhancing its relationships with ALL Unix based and Microsoft based server technologies. While working with the windows
mod_perl
Mod, MOD or mods may refer to:
Places
* Modesto City–County Airport, Stanislaus County, California, US
Arts, entertainment, and media Music
* Mods (band), a Norwegian rock band
* M.O.D. (Method of Destruction), a band from New York City, US
* ...
the Blackboard engineering team found several bugs that then pushed back to Microsoft to fix in their deployment against IIS.
As the company expanded its market and business relationships, Gilfus and Pittinsky (both company co-founders) wrote one of the world's first enterprise platform "App Strategies"
Blackboard Product Strategy & Vision White Paper on Building Blocks (B2) Initiativeoutlining the launch of a "Building Blocks Initiative", introducing new thought concepts to extend the Blackboard Platform through plug-ins and 3rd party integrations and allowing for greater extensibility of the technology as an open platform for allowing for technology extensions.
In 2001, Gilfus joined a Mobile Steering Committee established and led by the President and CEO of McGraw-Hill Ryerson to explore mobile learning. Blackboard ended up buying Kayvon Beykpour's compan
out of Stanford to deploy Blackboard Mobile Technologies.
Consulting services
From 2004 to mid-2008, Gilfus was head of Blackboard's Global Education Consulting Practice where he built the service's operations and led a team of professionals focused on providing strategic eLearning consulting, training, and implementation services.
Gilfus was one of the key strategists behind
Fairfax County Public Schools
The Fairfax County Public Schools system (FCPS) is a school division in the U.S. commonwealth of Virginia. It is a branch of the Fairfax County government which administers public schools in Fairfax County and the City of Fairfax. FCPS's headqu ...
launch of the Blackboard platform for Fairfax 24/7 Learning.
He also led a core team of individuals that designed and implemented several large publisher white-label enterprise systems based on Blackboard Including:
* Pearson's Course Compass, a private-label version of Blackboard for
Pearson Education
Pearson Education is a British-owned education publishing and assessment service to schools and corporations, as well for students directly. Pearson owns educational media brands including Addison–Wesley, Peachpit, Prentice Hall, eCollege, ...
.
* Elsevier Evolve
* McGraw-Hill
* and several others
Gilfus also deployed a specialized services team, within his group, to work on Course Compass and directly with Pearson on their development and deployment of their largest technology efforts the MyMathLab project led by
Marjorie Scardino
Dame Marjorie Scardino, , FRSA ( Morris; born 25 January 1947) is an American-born British business executive. She is the former CEO of Pearson PLC. Scardino became a trustee of Oxfam during her tenure at Pearson.
She was criticized by ''Pri ...
,
Education framework
Around 2004, still with Blackboard, Stephen began to assemble data from the experiences of thousands of Blackboard customers and authored the "Educational Technology Framework", a model used to contemplate organizational, technological, and social impact of educational technologies on academic institutions – sometimes referred to as “The Gilfus Model of Educational Technology Adoption”. The model was updated in 2010.
"Educational Technology Framework"
/ref>
Published works
* Gilfus, Stephen (2000-12-20)
"Product Strategy and Development Roadmap"
PDF). Blackboard Inc. (Product strategy for the core Blackboard platform from V4 - V6 and beyond.)
* Gilfus, Stephen; Pittinsky, Matthew (2000-01-01)
"Blackboard Product Strategy & Vision White Paper on Building Blocks (B2) Initiative"
(PDF). Blackboard. (Pragmatic partner program for the extension of the Blackboard platform.)
* Roberts, Judy; Beke, Jensen, Mercer (2000-12-20)
"Harvesting Fragments of Time"
McGrawHill Ryerson. (Team Researcher) (Led by McGraw-Hill to design a model around "mobile learning" device distribution for students.)
* Gilfus, Stephen et al. (2001-01-10
"Blackboard 5: Introducing the Blackboard 5 - Learning system"
Blackboard Inc. (1st extension of the product strategy outlined in 2000. This is V.5)
* Gilfus, Stephen et al. (2002-03-23
"Blackboard 5 - Release 5.5 Overview"
Blackboard Inc. (A Release 5.5 Update.)
* Gilfus, Stephen (2002-09-15
"Release of Bb SCORM Player"
Blackboard Inc.. (SCORM 1.2 Player in collaboration with the National Defense University, ADL Co-Labs, and the DOD)
* Gilfus, Stephen (2004-12-20
"Educational Technology Framework"
* Ellis, Cathy (2004-04-23
"Benchmarking Blackboard– From Champions To Transformers"
BbMatters. (An independent article on the Educational Technology Framework.)
* Gilfus, Stephen et al.(2009-04-10
"Social Learning" Buzz Masks Deeper Dimensions"
(One issue with today's offerings for social software in education
Social software, also known as social apps or social platform, include communications and interactive tools that are often based on the Internet. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing and presentation of communication, usua ...
is that they are being presented as “social learning” solutions, but they are not being designed, packaged or integrated with the greater concepts of social learning theory in mind.)
* Gilfus, Stephen et al. (2009-10-25
"Intelligence Emerges from Enterprise Education Platform"
(One of the most acute information technology gaps at colleges today is the huge discontinuity between the LMS and the ERP.)
* Gilfus, Stephen (2009-10-27
Education Think Tank, Predicts Top Five Education Innovation Trends
* Gilfus, Stephen (2010-12-20
"Educational Technology Framework 2010"
Blackboard Inc. - Stephen Gilfus (Updated Educational Technology Adoption for 2010, for educational technology adoption.)
* Gilfus, Stephen et al. (2010-12-10
"Promise of Community Changes Technology Paradigms"
(The changing paradigm of Learning Management Systems and web 2.0 social networking technology.)
Investments
Gilfus is an active angel investor. He has provided market and technology due diligence services to dozens of industry investors, including New Enterprise Associates
New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With ~$25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of the w ...
for LBO's, strategic investments, and strategic acquisitions. Mr. Gilfus is an Advisor and Investor in several Angel Networks and market-specific funds including:
* Baltimore base
New Markets Venture Partners
since its inception.
* Cornell alumni investment grou
Red Bear Angels
Presentations
* Gilfus, Stephen Cornell eClips Presentatio
Matthew Pittinsky Provides Introduction to Dan Cane, Steve Gilfus and Lecture on Company, Blackboard
* Gilfus, Stephen Cornell Class Presentation describing the founding of Blackboar
View the Cornell University Presentation transcript
* Stephen Gilfus, Blackboard Founder
Discusses Academic and Professional Background at Entrepreneurship at Cornell Celebration 2009
Industry references
* FORBES and Gilfus on Archipelago
Why Is Archipelago Outpacing All Other Education Stocks?
* Campus Technology,
5 Higher Ed Tech Trends for 2012 from the Gilfus Education
an
of the Department of Education.
* The Journal
5 K-12 Ed Tech Trends for 2012
See also
* 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:Gilfus, Stephen
American computer businesspeople
1970 births
Living people
People from Pittsford, New York
Pittsford Mendon High School alumni
Cornell University alumni
Software companies based in New York (state)
Virtual learning environments
Companies established in 1997
Software companies of the United States