Serendipity35

Ray Henderson, President of Blackboard's teaching and learning division (Blackboard Learn), posted on his blog today that the company has taken two more big bites of the educational technology world: Elluminate and Wimba. Both products have good adoption already within the educational world and with Blackboard customers.

Today we announced a major new investment in real-time collaboration with our acquisition of Elluminate and Wimba.I’ll share a few thoughts here about what brought us to this step, expanding on those next week at BbWorld and further in the weeks to come.Both are leaders in applying synchronous learning and collaboration technology to the education context. Both have very strong technical proficiency and service levels, and enjoy high client satisfaction as a result.They’ve built strong teams and great thought leadership about the application of real-time collaboration technology to many forms of educational collaboration. And our clients have chosen both in good number so we wanted to invest in both to serve our whole community, not just a portion of it. To us it’s a potent combination, and one that provides a strong signal about our beliefs about the educational value and need for further innovation to support social learning and collaboration.