The term CourseWeb refers to the University of Pittsburgh’s implementation of the Blackboard/CourseInfo course management system.CourseWeb is available to all of the schools, faculty and students in the University community. It runs on a complex of Sun/Solaris servers hosted by Computer Services and Systems Development at the University’s server farm in RIDC park.

Blackboard is an integrated software suite that enables faculty members to develop, manage, and use Web pages for instruction.The successor to CourseInfo, Blackboard is a prototypical example of the emerging breed of Web-based applications called “Course Management Systems”.

Blackboard, the newest version of CourseInfo, is course management software that functions as a “container” for organizing the instructional components of an online course. It offers tools and middleware to administer, grade, and record quizzes, to conduct synchronous chat sessions, and to hold asynchronous threaded discussion groups. It also provides user-friendly software to facilitate the instructor’s efforts to create new Web pages or incorporate existing pages, send e-mail, transfer files to and from students, and manage an online grade book.Blackboard is accessible using standard Web browsers and plug-ins.

CourseInfo/Blackboard was implemented in a controlled pilot during the Fall Term, 1998. Within the first three years of its initial implementation at Pitt, the service has grown to involve over 1,000 faculty members and serves one-half of the University’s 32,000 students.Most of the 1,400+ unique courses that have been developed to date use Blackboard as a supplement to traditional classroom instruction, but about 5% serve students studying at a distance.

The selection of Blackboard/CourseInfo at the University of Pittsburgh was the result of a nine-month deliberation by a committee that included University faculty as well as staff from the Center for Instructional Development & Distance Education, the centralized computing services groups (CSSD), and the University Library System.The work of the selection committee is summarized at the Web site http://www.pitt.edu/~washburn/ccs.html.

For more information about the Pitt implementation of Blackboard/CourseInfo, click here to view a paper presented at the EDUCAUSE 99 conference by CIDDE’s Associate Directors.