Setting the standards for 
Online Learning.

The EDUCAUSE IMS Project is a powerful industry coalition that selected Blackboard to help create an industry-standard architecture for online learning technologies. The IMS project is supported by more than 1,600 colleges and universities, the Department of Defense’s training division, and companies such as Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, IBM, Pearson Education, and International Thomson Publishing.

The IMS attempts to address three obstacles for providing effective online materials and learning environments:

• Lack of standards for locating and operating interactive platform-independent materials
• Lack of support for the collaborative and dynamic nature of learning
• Lack of incentives and structure for developing and sharing content

What is needed to address the obstacles described above is a specific set of higher-order standards and tools that enable teachers, learners, software developers, content providers, and other parties involved in the learning process to create, manage and access the use of online learning materials and environments. The IMS is this set of standards and tools.

Blackboard and IMS

Recognizing the remarkable opportunity that a set of emerging industry standards represents, Blackboard is proud to have served as the primary technical contractor to IMS. Specifically, between February 1997 and December 1998, Blackboard acted as both a leader in IMS’s standards design work and the primary development team for the creation of “example” software based on the standards.

Committed to seeing IMS succeed, Blackboard is working to make its products compliant with standards published by the IMS project.

For more information about the IMS project, please visit www.imsproject.org.