Blackboard charts route through the online jungle
By Christopher Swann in Washington
Published: March 21 2005 02:00

The bosses of universities are increasingly hard to distinguish from the hard-headed managers of the corporate world.

Acutely aware of the competition, they employ professional investors to manage their endownments, bid aggressively for the best professors and make every effort to publicise their student facilities.

It is not surprising, therefore, that leading universities have been increasingly keen to improve their productivity by using the internet.

Among the most successful companies set up to help them do so is Blackboard, a Washington-based business providing software that enables universities to create an on-line dimension to their courses.

A rare survivor of the dot.com bubble, Blackboard - which has a partnership with Pearson, owner of the Financial Times - allows college professors to put reading material and lecture notes on-line and to respond to student questions.

On the Blackboard system, students can register for courses from their computer, take tests and hand in homework on-line, set up discussion groups with their classmates and professor and watch videos.

Michael Chasen, chief executive and co-founder, says universities are increasingly thinking like business analysts. "Universities are looking at IT from a return-on-investment perspective," he says. "With many schools struggling to keep pace with rising enrolment, adding an on-line element enables teachers to be more efficient with their time."

Teachers no longer have to make 100 print-outs of course material, but can put it on-line instead. Rather than having 10 students knocking separately on their door to ask the same question, they can often answer one person's question on-line and all their classmates will be able to see the response. Students who are too shy to ask questions in a crowded class should be less inhibited on the internet and will be at less risk of being left behind.

There is also growing pressure from a new generation of technology-savvy students to offer such services. "In such a competitive environment, schools realise that if their rivals have this technology, they can't be left behind," says Mr Chasen.

With university tuition fees rising in many parts of the world, an increasing number of students also having to work to support themselves, the flexibility of an on-line learning tool is all the more important.

From a standing start in 1997, Blackboard provides software to 2,700 academic institutions, including six of the US's seven ivy league schools.

The company reported its first post-tax profit of $9m last year and, with sales rising fast, expects post-tax profits of between $20.5 and $21.5m this year. It has been expanding in Asia and now provides software to 40 institutions in China.

After an explosive 43 per cent rise on its first day on the Nasdaq in June last year, the company's stock has settled down to between 15 and 20 per cent above its listing price of $14. The $53m raised by the public offering will help fund expansion.

There company is also hoping to sell more to existing clients - the vast majority of whom use only one of the company's five products.

The company has a strong market position, but faces competition on two fronts.

One threat comes from the Sakai Project, led by Stanford University, MIT and the Universities of Michigan and Indiana. This offers the prospect of free software to thrifty academic institutions.

The $6.8m project has launched the first version of its offering. Although it does not provide technical support, many large universities have a large enough IT staff to maintain the system.

One the other side is a range of commercial competitors, including WebCT,

eCollege.com, Desire2Learn, SunGard Data Systems, Diebold and CNord Group.

Mr Chasen says Blackboard has never lost a customer to free software. Demetra Katsifli, head of information and communication technology at Kingston University in the UK and a Blackboard client, says free software would have been a false economy.

She says: "We needed a system that was easy to use for both students and teachers, easy to scale up and add features to and that had good support. Blackboard met all these requirements. It was so easy that students hardly needed training. A two-hour tutorial was more than enough.

The Blackboard technology platform, costs from as little as $9,500 a year to several hundred thousand dollars a year, depending on size of institiution and the level of service.

Eros (mythology)

Eros (mythology), in Greek mythology, the god of love and counterpart of the Roman Cupid. In early mythology he was represented as one of the primeval forces of nature, the son of Chaos, and the embodiment of the harmony and creative power in the universe. Soon, however, he was thought of as a handsome and intense young man, attended by Pothos (“longing”) or Himeros (“desire”). Later mythology made him the constant attendant of his mother, Aphrodite, goddess of love.

In Greek art Eros was depicted as a winged youth, slight but beautiful, often with eyes covered to symbolize the blindness of love. Sometimes he carried a flower, but more commonly the silver bow and arrows, with which he shot darts of desire into the bosoms of gods and men. In Roman legend and art, Eros degenerated into a mischievous child and was often depicted as a baby archer.

Electronic patient record delayed by tests

By Nicholas Timmins, FT.com Public Policy Editor
March 1 2005 02:00

An important part of the National Health Service's information technology programme has slipped by six to nine months.

The delay, which will hit more than 100 hospitals and thousands of doctors' practices, is because IDX, the software developer, decided more testing time was needed before elements of the programme, that allow an electronic patient record to be built, were introduced.

It follows slower than planned progress on "choose and book" - the system that allows online booking of hospital outpatient appointments, which is now likely to cover only 60 to 70 per cent of England by the end of the year rather than all of it. The NHS's programme for IT has confirmed delays in introducing elements of the care record in the two regions where IDX is responsible. These are London and the south. The delay will affect about 40 per cent of the population.

The programme, which has been criticised both within the NHS and by the National Audit Office for failing to engage doctors and nurses sufficiently, underlined that IDX had taken its decision "following consultation with clinicians" that identified the need for more testing time.

The programme stressed that other work would continue, with software ready to support "choose and book", electronic transmission of prescriptions and the transfer of records between GPs.

In addition, new GP systems and hospital patient administration systems would continue to be installed. The delay is understood to affect elements that allow the summary care record to be built up - the stage at which the programme starts to become clinically useful.

Those elements may now be delayed from the autumn until late spring 2006, the programme said, although leaked NHS communications seen by E-Health Insider, the online newsletter that monitors the programme and first highlighted the delay, show some NHS managers now believe it will be delivered in June next year "at the earliest".

The programme said the other regions should not be affected, but the delay underlines the difficulty of delivering the £6.2bn venture to highly ambitious timescales. The NAO reported in January that only 63 appointments had gone through "choose and book" pilots by the end of last year against the 205,000 planned and that the upgrading of hospital systems that could not cope with the technology was behind schedule.

The programme has, however, had some marked successes, including installing to time and budget a programme to underpin the new family doctors' contract.

Yesterday the programme announced that electronic transmission of prescriptions had started in the first of the "early implementer" sites.