Blackboard just announced the planned availability (in June) of Blackboard Mobile Learn:
Blackboard Inc. (Nasdaq: BBBB) today announced plans for Blackboard Mobile Learn(TM), an application that will bring two-way teaching and learning to mobile devices, creating an interactive mobile learning experience for students and teachers on the go.Blackboard’s existing Blackboard Mobile Central(TM) application already delivers a mobile campus experience that includes news, events, maps and sports among a range of student life and service options.
Blackboard Mobile Learn will take the next step by bringing the classroom experience and learning content to the mobile environment, arming campuses with a high quality option to quickly meet the growing demand from students who want to do more with their smart phones and other Web-enabled devices.
From what we know so far, the main difference between this and the Moodle mobile offerings is that Blackboard plans to have native clients for Android and Blackberry while Moodle so far only provides a Java-based client for non-iPhone mobile phones. (Does anybody have market share data on smart phones for the college aged demographic?) We won’t know if there are actual functional differences until Blackboard releases more details.
It is an interesting development, isn’t it? I wonder how much in kickbacks BlackBoard is making on this arrangement or how much Sprint was willing to pony up for access to a presumably lucrative market. It would appear as though Blackboard are still trying to sell to the enterprise and not have to deal with the hassle of the “end user,” so I’m not sure if “access to end users” was the biggest lure for Sprint. Still strikes me as strange that they would charge extra for mobile access, something many other products accomplish for free. I see they are hyping “two-way” now although I doubt the mobile capabilities will ever border on pedagogically useful. If I were schools, I’d write the heavy price of Bb Mobile off as a marketing expense – something not useful for actual teaching and learning but still worthy of an investment for general usage and student quality of life.