By Lyndsey Layton and Emma Brown, Published: November 26, 2011 WashingtonPost.com A Virginia company leading a national movement to replace classrooms with computers — in which children as young as 5 can learn at home at taxpayer expense — is facing a backlash from critics who are questioning its funding, quality and oversight. K12 Inc. [...]

Multiple zero-day security vulnerabilities have been found in the world’s most popular educational software – holes that allow students to change grades and download unpublished exams, whilst allowing criminals to steal personal information. Vulnerabilities in the Blackboard Learn platform have the potential to affect millions of school and university students and thousands of institutions around the world.

Sept. 10th 2008
Open source software encourages learning, the exchange of knowledge and information, and project improvements that rely as much on its users, and its developers’ colleagues, as it does the developer. It’s not unlike education. Ideally, learning is a continuous cycle of taking in, processing, and giving back, with modifications.

October 24th,2004
“E-learning is going to disappear as a [distinct] concept,” predicts Matthew Pittinsky, chairman of Blackboard Inc., whose course-management and other software served 15,000 students in 1998 and six years later reaches 12 million in 50 countries.

October 1st, 2004
A Networked Learning Environment in the Inter­net age applies new technology to a very old con-cept—that learning is much more than classes and grades. It is about the learning that takes place in a vibrant community of people and resources. The Internet has removed the limits of time and proxim­ity that once restricted this community. In a true Networked Learning Environment, any student, instructor or researcher can access any learning resource at anytime from anyplace.

Authors: Ellen R. Cohn, University of Pittsburgh. Gary P. Stoehr, University of Pittsburgh Abstract Course management web-based software packages such as CourseInfo, (www.blackboard.net) promise benefits for institutions, instructors, and their students in the form of cost savings, (e.g., reduced departmental copying of handouts) and administrative efficiency, (e.g., the electronic “posting” of student grades). Course management [...]

January 1998
CourseInfo, one of the two companies forming Blackboard Inc. was founded in 1997 by Dan Cane and Stephen Gilfus while at Cornell University.