BlackBoard Brings Course Management into Facebook

BlackBoard is a course management software tool that lets teachers and students share documents and have course discussions online.  Apparently, it's popular in colleges (I've been out of school for several years and don't have working experience with it... do any readers use it?)

There are a couple Facebook apps that bring some of the BlackBoard functionality into the social networking sites.  Namely CourseFeed and BlackBoard Sync.  The apps basically provide users with a newsfeed of everything that is going on in their courses.  A new assignment that was posted by the professor, or notes that other students share, or questions that students might post - all can be done within the Facebook environment (and with notifications triggered so that everyone in the class stays in the loop).

Of course, a class roster is displayed as well.  So students can connect with other students in the class on Facebook.  And teachers can put faces to names.

Would something like this be useful for a church?  Pastors can send out announcements, small group leaders can post Bible study assignments, members can connect with each other, urgent prayer requests can be posted, etc. 

If any readers are familiar with BlackBoard software, please email me: joe at mychurch.org.  I'd like to learn more.  Someone told me BlackBoard is ubiquitous across major universities now.  Is that true?

-- Joe Suh from MyChurch, social networking for churches

Comments

[Justin]

I've just started using Moodle with a Sunday School class; only using the quiz function, though. Would be great to have such a function or integration in Facebook.

[Jonathan Brink]

I just finished my Masters at Gonzaga and we used Blackboard. I don't mean to burst your bubble but talk about the dark ages of Internet technology. The only reason the school continued to use it was because they were so locked in they didn't want to have to switch everyone. But everyone WANTED to switch out of it.

My hope is that it gets better.

[Josh Deng]

Yep, Blackboard is our backbone here at VT. There are goods and bads. It's mostly been very good in my underclassmen classes; some of my senior-level professors just do their own thing. For the most part I liked it: it was easy to get new documents/notes/homework, and if the teacher chose to do grades via blackboard it was just a click away to check them too. Might be cool to see in a sunday school class context...

[Joe Suh]

Josh, interesting. Have you played around with the Blackboard apps on Facebook at all? Do you think integration with social networking makes the tool more useful or interesting?