Blackboard Mobile is a platform for bringing the teaching, learning, and campus experience to the mobile device. Blackboard Mobile applications currently address two vital expectations of an institution's increasingly mobile campus community: taking teaching and learning mobile with the Blackboard Mobile™ Learn application and bringing the campus experience to the mobile device with the Blackboard Mobile™ Central application. In the future, we plan to extend Blackboard Mobile to support additional elements of the campus experience including campus commerce, security, and mass notification.
The Blackboard Mobile Learn app allows students and educators to access teaching and learning wherever and whenever they want through two-way interactions on mobile devices. The Blackboard Mobile Learn app extends and enriches the course experience of the Blackboard Learn™ platform, the leading web-based teaching and learning platform, in native mobile applications for the most popular mobile platforms, including Android™, iPhone®, iPod touch®, iPad®, BlackBerry® and Palm® webOS™. Additionally, Blackboard Mobile™ Learn for ANGEL and Blackboard Mobile™ Learn for CE/Vista extend the course experience for clients licensing Blackboard Learn – ANGEL Edition 7.4 SP10 and 8.0 and Blackboard Learning System™ CE Enterprise/CE Enterprise Limited and Vista 8 SP5. Learn more about Blackboard Mobile Learn.
The Blackboard Mobile Central solution brings the campus experience to the mobile device with custom, institution-branded applications. The Blackboard Mobile Central application is available natively for the iPhone, iPod touch, Android, BlackBerry and Palm webOS, as well as in mobile web versions for browser-enabled devices. Services supported today include Directory, Maps, News, Athletics, Courses, Events, Tours, Transit, Places, Library, Images, Video, and Get Help, as well as the ability to build custom modules based on the needs of your community using the Blackboard Mobile SDK. Learn more about Blackboard Mobile Central.
The Blackboard Mobile Learn solution extends your existing Blackboard Learn, ANGEL, or CE/Vista functionality to the mobile device. It gives students and instructors mobile access to the content available in the Blackboard Learn platform in multiple formats, with the ability to post announcements, create discussion threads and posts, and view grades, all from their mobile device. Students and faculty at institutions running Blackboard Learn, Releases 8, 9 and 9.1 can also comment on blogs and journals, create threaded discussions, upload media as attachments to discussion boards and blogs, and create content items within the course map. With the launch of Blackboard Mobile 3.0, students at institutions running Blackboard Learn 9.1 can now elect to receive automatic, personalized notifications delivered straight to their mobile devices to help them stay informed easily. Additionally, students are able to take tests in a beautiful and easy interface on their Android and iOS devices. Any test that includes compatible question types (like Multiple Choice, Short Answer, Hot Spot, Fill in the Blank, etc) can be taken from Blackboard Mobile Learn.
The Blackboard Mobile Central application gives your campus community on-demand access to essential campus information, when and where they need it. Connect instantly with anyone on campus with the Directory, browse the course catalog and even see course availability, stay up-to-date with the latest campus news, find out where you are on the Map, and more. It’s your interactive campus in the palm of your hand.
Together, these two solutions allow institutions to take their full campus living and learning experience mobile with a single, unified mobile application. With a licensed version of Blackboard Mobile Learn bundled with Blackboard Mobile Central, you get custom-branded applications with all of the services your community needs all in one place, accessible to all users, regardless of mobile provider.
Blackboard Mobile solutions are available in the US and almost every other country around the world. Blackboard Mobile Learn and Blackboard Mobile Central are both available in Arabic, Dutch, Japanese, Portuguese, German and Spanish on iOS devices and Android devices. For more information about availability of a particular solution for your institution, please contact the sales team by emailing Blackboard Mobile.
Blackboard Learn clients interested in learning more about the Blackboard Mobile Learn application should login to Behind the Blackboard™ to download the Blackboard Mobile Learn System Administrator FAQ and access to the Blackboard Mobile Learn Knowledge Base.
Clients licensing Blackboard Learn – ANGEL Edition 7.4 who are interested in learning more about the Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL application should login to Behind the Blackboard in order to get instructions on downloading Service Pack 10 as well as directions on how to install and place the Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL application into production. The Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL Knowledge Guide will be in the ANGEL section of Behind the Blackboard™.
Clients licensing the Blackboard Learning System CE Enterprise/CE Enterprise Limited application and Vista 8 SP5 who are interested in learning more about the Blackboard Mobile Learn for CE/Vista application should login to Behind the Blackboard in order to get the link for Service Pack 5 as well as directions on how to install and place Blackboard Mobile Learn for CE/Vista into production.
For more information about the Blackboard Mobile Central solution please visit our website or contact our team of Mobile Specialists.
Additional information about the Blackboard Mobile platform is available on our website or from our team of Mobile Specialists.
Blackboard Mobile Central is augmented with the Blackboard Mobile Central Software Development Kit (SDK), a set of tools that aid in developing new custom applications. The SDK is critical to providing the best mobile strategy possible—one that fits your institution's unique needs. If your institution wants to build a new module for your application, you can do so easily with our SDK. The SDK is currently available for the iPhone platform, and can be accessed by the Project Manager designated by your institution.
The SDK is currently available for the iPhone platform, and can be accessed by the Project Manager designated by your institution. Learn more.
We have developed Adoption Kits to help you promote Blackboard Mobile Learn and Blackboard Mobile Central to your community to help drive adoption and usage. View the Blackboard Mobile Learn Adoption Kit.
The Blackboard Mobile Central adoption kit is available via your Client Implementation Manager.
For clients licensing Classic 8.0 or Learn 9.0 or 9.1, we support any authentication scheme that does not require a browser plug-in. Just select the appropriate setting on the Blackboard Mobile Web Services Building Block properties page. Institutions with custom authentication on their Blackboard Learn platform may need to contact support to get Blackboard Mobile Learn configured properly, but all schools will besupported.
For clients licensing Blackboard Learn – ANGEL Edition 7.4 or 8.0, we do not support custom authentication schemes. Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL supports local/ANGEL authentication (the passwords are stored within the ANGEL database). For clients using LDAP, Active Directory, or a federated authentication scheme like CAS or Shibboleth, you are not able to use Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL. The ANGEL platform does not support the Safari browser, and since a browser is required to support single sign-on, it is not supported in Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL.
For clients licensing Blackboard Learning System CE Enterprise/CE Enterprise Limited or Vista 8, we support any authentication scheme that does not require a browser plug-in.
To get started with the Blackboard Mobile Learn solution, for clients licensing Classic 8.0 or Learn 9.0 or 9.1, your system administrator can install the free Blackboard Mobile Web Services Building Block™, which will enable your existing Blackboard Learn deployment to power the native Blackboard Mobile Learn applications on Android, BlackBerry and iOS devices. You can either download and install the Building Block separately or you can install Blackboard Learn, Release 9.1 Service Pack 1 which includes the Blackboard Mobile Web Services Building Block. Service Packs now include this Blackboard Building Block for Blackboard Learn Releases 8.0 and 9.0.
For clients licensing Blackboard Learn – ANGEL Edition 7.4, your system administrator can simply download and install Service Pack 10. The new Mobile functionality is built into Service Pack 10. A few additional easy steps are required to register your institution with the MLCS (Mobile Learn Central Service). Blackboard Mobile Learn is also available for clients licensing Blackboard Learn – ANGEL 8.0.
For clients licensing Blackboard Learning System CE Enterprise/CE Enterprise Limited or Vista 8, your system administrator can simply download and install Service Pack 5. The new Mobile functionality is built into Service Pack 5. A few additional easy steps are required to register your institution with the MLCS (Mobile Learn Central Service).
To get started with Blackboard Mobile Central, please contact our Mobile Sales Team. You do not need to be an existing Blackboard client or use the Blackboard Learn platform to purchase and use Blackboard Mobile Central.
Institutions that license the Basic Edition of the Blackboard Learn software can install the Blackboard Mobile Web Services Building Block through a command line installation process outlined in the Installation Guide. Clients must be running Release 8.0 Service Pack 6 or higher. The Blackboard Building Block is also bundled with Release 8.0 Service Pack 7. Currently, clients who license the Basic Edition of the CE platform do not have access to the Blackboard Mobile Learn solution.
The Blackboard Mobile Learn app replaces the existing Blackboard Learn iPhone application, part of Blackboard Sync™, which was a primarily a one-way notification extension of Blackboard Learn. The Blackboard Sync app is no longer available for download on the Apple iTunes App Store, and ceased working for all existing users until December 31, 2010. Until then it was considered to be in "operational support" mode with no active maintenance or bug fixes. We believe that this approach assisted users in the transition from the old solution to our new, more robust interactive teaching and learning app, Blackboard Mobile Learn.
No FERPA-protected data passes through a central service. When an end user logs into and uses the Blackboard Mobile Learn app, certain information about that specific end-user is passed between the user's mobile device and the Blackboard Mobile Web Services Building Block installed on that institution's Blackboard Learn implementation. It is handled in the same way that user-specific data is handled on a desktop or laptop computer between the web browser and the institution's Blackboard Learn installation. No FERPA-protected user-specific data passes through the central service that supports Blackboard Mobile Learn.
The Mobile Learning Update Portal Module provides another way to promote the Blackboard Mobile Learn solution to your end users. It enables users that are logging on to the Blackboard Learn platform through a normal web browser to see a highlighted set of information about Blackboard Mobile Learn and the fact that it is now available at your institution. It is a very valuable source of news and information for students, and is updated every six to eight weeks, in order to ensure the most recent news, enhancements, and best practices are shared.
Statements regarding our product development initiatives, including new products and future product upgrades, updates or enhancements represent our current intentions, but may be modified, delayed or abandoned without prior notice and there is no assurance that such offering, upgrades, updates or functionality will become available unless and until they have been made generally available to our customers.
To power Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL, simply download and install Service Pack 10. The new Mobile functionality is built into Service Pack 10. The following steps should be performed to complete the ANGEL update:
- From the Administrator’s Menu - ANGEL Update Manager, click the Download Now link for this update package.
- After clicking the Download Now link for this package, the ANGEL update will be downloaded to your server in the parent folder of AngelRoot.
- You will then be prompted to run the 2010 ANGEL LMS 7.4 SP10.bat file, which will extract and copy all files, run all database procedures and scripts, and copy and register .dlls.
Configuration is done via a new option called Mobile ANGEL Settings on the Tool configuration nugget, which is found on the application tab of the Administrator Console.
No. Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL does not support uploading content from the mobile device.
Blackboard Mobile Learn was designed to be a collaborative teaching and learning tool that would increase student engagement and therefore improve student retention and graduation rates. It does not support assessments. It's not meant to be as robust as ANGEL— just as Facebook on Android isn't meant to be as robust as Facebook.com, or how a mail client on a Blackberry isn't as robust as Outlook. If we were to take all of the complexity, features, use-cases, and target users (students, faculty, admins, course builders, etc.) and build them into a mobile application, the result would be unacceptable. It would overly complicate the purpose of a mobile application, and its content would reduce the usability of the application. Instead, we took the approach that most successful mobile applications take: we aimed to organize extremely useful & mission-critical information that is complex and disparate into a highly usable, very beautiful, enjoyable and simplistic interface.
There is no assessment functionality in Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL.
No. The mobile app is not intended to be an administrative tool.
The inability to access flash on iOS devices is a device issue, and not specific to Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL or ANGEL itself.
Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL does not support dropboxes.
Yes, announcements (posted by instructors) as well as discussion threads (posted by students and instructors) are automatically updated in Blackboard Learn – ANGEL Edition.
There is no access to mail within Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL.
Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL can be integrated into Blackboard Mobile Central, our solution that brings the campus experience to the mobile device.
This was the case when Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL was initially launched. This was fixed in ANGEL 7.4 SP11.
The mobile application and API do not provide method for supplying or displaying this data in mobile application therefore we are unable to fix at this time.
Yes! With ANGEL 7.4 SP12, LORs are accessible via the supported mobile devices. If the content is in any repository, when students click on the link, they will be able to view the content.
The mobile application and API do not provide method for supplying or displaying this data in mobile application therefore we are unable to fix at this time.
Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL is brought to you via a native app on Android™, BlackBerry®, and iOS devices. If there is a link in a lesson (for example) that pushes the user to the browser, the link will not work since ANGEL 7.4 does not support Safari. However, we made Safari/Chrome compatibility a major focus of our ANGEL 8.0 deliverables. As part of this initiative, with ANGEL 8.0 you have the ability to “view in browser” from your mobile device.
This was the case when Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL was initially launched. This was fixed in ANGEL 7.4 SP11.
There are a few tablets coming out that do not have 3G services. However, these tablets do not have the Android Marketplace installed on them and it seems that there is no plan to release the Marketplace to these devices. If a user were to find a download link online to download the Blackboard Mobile Learn application, they would not be able to access Mobile Learn over wifi using the No-Cost option.
Several important enhancements to the Mobile Learn for ANGEL integration are available to clients upgrading to ANGEL 8.0. These enhancements include the addition of View in Browser links to the Mobile interface, and the ability to upload files from a mobile device.
Following the release of ANGEL 8.0, we will continue to address priority issues with the Mobile Learn for ANGEL integration in our standard ANGEL maintenance Service Pack releases, as we did throughout 2011. Beyond these maintenance updates, there are no additional functional enhancements planned for the Mobile Learn for ANGEL solution.