Blackboard and Tegrity Give Teachers the Power to Add Multimedia Recordings of Live Classroom Lectures to Their Online Courses.

Business/Education Editors and Technology Writers

WASHINGTON, D.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 8, 2000

Blackboard CourseInfo(tm) software and Tegrity's WebLearner

add a new dimension to the online learning experience

You can bring the Internet into the classroom, but bringing the classroom lecture onto the Internet is more difficult -- or at least it was, until today.

Blackboard Inc., the leading online education company, and Tegrity Inc., the provider of WebLearner, an advanced solution for generating Web-based content, today announced an agreement that will enable faculty to post multimedia recordings of classroom lectures to their online courses using the Blackboard CourseInfo platform. This agreement will allow students who may have missed all or part of a lecture to view it on any Internet browser at any time and for faculty to share their lectures easily with colleagues. For example, a journalism professor may wish to provide a clip of her presentation on election coverage to a political science professor's course Web site on the presidency.

Here's how it works: Faculty will use a portable Tegrity WebLearner system in the classroom to record lectures. The system is the size of a small, standard media cart, and provides the basic technology needed to generate Web-based lessons. The system's projector displays a professor's presentation onto a regular whiteboard. It provides simple tools for navigating through the presentation and capturing indexed audio, video, high-resolution display of slides, whiteboard writing and other elements of a classroom lesson. Once it is uploaded to a course Web site using the Blackboard software platform, it can then be viewed at any time.

Nick Laudato of the University of Pittsburgh, Center for Instructional Development &Distance Education, who has already been using the two systems, said, &uot;The Blackboard and Tegrity products work well together -- the Tegrity solution allows us to add more personal, more human, and more interesting components to the Blackboard environment. We believe this increases the effectiveness of our instructional materials.&uot;

Dr. Laudato has used Tegrity with CourseInfo to help create self-instructional seminars to train other faculty in using CourseInfo.

&uot;The marriage of good course content and recordings of lectures given by skilled teachers brings online learning closer to the live classroom experience,&uot; said Lou Pugliese, CEO of Blackboard. &uot;And for people who study in an environment outside of the classroom -- often hundreds of miles from the campus -- the ability to view full lectures over the Internet fills a significant gap in their learning. This attention to the needs of faculty and students, with partners like Tegrity, has helped propel Blackboard to the leadership position in online learning worldwide.&uot;

Daniel Platzker, Tegrity CEO, stated, &uot;I am impressed with Blackboard and excited that they are becoming a Tegrity eLearning Alliance partner. Our customers have already embraced our solution for converting traditional classroom teaching into rich, Web-based lessons, and now many of them will be better able to manage this content through Blackboard's enterprise solution.&uot;

Last month, Blackboard announced the launch of Blackboard CourseInfo Enterprise Edition(tm), the first enterprise-grade software platform designed specifically from the ground up to integrate institutions' academic, administrative, community and e-commerce functions online.

About Blackboard Inc.

Blackboard is the leading online education company. Its software products and Web services power the online teaching and learning environments at more than 1,600 colleges, universities, K-12 schools and other organizations in every state and in more than 70 countries. More than 2.1 million people worldwide teach and learn in online education environments powered by Blackboard. Blackboard education partners include Academic Systems Corp., Archipelago, GEO Interactive, HorizonLive.com, Houghton Mifflin, KPMG LLP, Learnware, Microsoft, NextEd, Norton Publishing, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Sun Microsystems, Tegrity Inc. and The TLT Group. Additional information about Blackboard can be found at http://www.blackboard.com.

About Tegrity

Tegrity Inc. based in San Jose, Calif., was founded in 1995 to develop software tools and services to aid group learning processes and incorporate new technologies into traditional classroom settings. Today, Tegrity's patented technology is changing the face of education by providing a bridge between traditional, classroom-based education and Web-based learning. Tegrity WebLearner(tm) is a complete solution on a mobile cart with all the basic technologies needed for both classroom and Web-based learning. With the Tegrity system, instructors can seamlessly integrate legacy materials with digital media and Internet content, and effortlessly broadcast, record and store their lessons on the Web with no production cost. Additional information about Tegrity and sample recorded lessons can be found at http://www.tegrity.com/.