If you hold to the notion that learning is all about pushing content to students then you will be excited to hear about Blackboard’s recently announced collaboration with the text book publishers: Cenage, Macmillan, Pearson and John Wiley & Sons.
In contrast if you believe that education needs to move from the passive educational environment of main lecture points, content dumping, rubrics, individual competition and standardized testing to an active educational environment of interactive presentations, critical and analytical thinking, collaboration and meaningful projects then this announcement will actually be viewed as an example of a market leader taking potentially disruptive innovations like online learning and electronic content and deploying them in sustaining ways. History has shown that educational institutions at all levels are too quick to jump on the band wagon and simply accept a sustaining innovation that does little to improve learning.
While companies like Blackboard attempt to hide behing labels like Learning Management Systems (LMS) their products have very little to do with learning and everything to do with course and content management. While there are exceptions on how they are used, CMS like Blackboard, Moodle and the like are primarily used for content delivery, assessment and grades assignment and general course administration. As Jeff Young points out:
For professors, the new links will make it easier to push students’ grades on online quizzes from the publishers’ e-textbook systems to the gradebook they use on the Blackboard system.
Automating testing and grade assignment is not going to do anything to improve learning and the easier we make it to use automated testing and grading the less progress we are making toward truly reforming education. Technology today offeres education so much potential, yet we struggle to move beyond 19th and 20th century thinking and methodologies.
