GAMING

Blackboard Inc. and Giunti Interactive Labs, a Giunti Publisher company , announced a strategic alliance at the e-Learning Results 2004 Conference. Under the terms of the alliance, Blackboard and Giunti Interactive Labs have agreed to jointly develop a standards-based solution through the Blackboard Building Blocks Program that allows for the importation and exportation of courses and SCORM content between the companies respective products. Once developed, global higher education institutions utilizing the Blackboard Learning System or the Blackboard Learning System ML (Multi-Language) along with Giunti's Learn eXact will be able to natively create and exchange Blackboard courses. "The standards-based approach that Giunti Labs and Blackboard are taking further reinforces Blackboard's commitment to an open platform and open standards," said Andrew Rosen, President of Blackboard's International Business. "The interoperability achieved through Building Blocks, ADL SCORM and the IMS, will deliver a rich open system to global higher education institutions." "We are very pleased to add the Blackboard Learning System course format along with other supported standards in the Learn eXact LCMS Suite," commented Fabrizio Cardinali CEO of Giunti Interactive Labs. "The use of application profiles and formats in implementation and conversion projects via open standards makes our new offering a winning combination for clients with investments in platform independent content." The Blackboard and Giunti alliance comes in response to client requests for course and content portability in their online learning computing environments. Angelo de Florio Manager of the networking department at CINECA Italy's leading academic supercomputing center and IT consortium for 23 Universities in Northern Italy stated, "We are very happy to see two of our core technology providers collaborating on interoperable e-Learning content . This combined effort demonstrates that interoperability standards are a reality and a good return on investment. Development effort such as the one between Blackboard and Giunti will be critical in eliminating the previous nightmares of proprietary content production and closed e-Learning systems." "Already, our tests have proved that we can produce XML and standards- based Learning Objects that interoperate between Learn eXact and the Blackboard Learning System," stated Mr. Michiel Van Geloven, Programme Manager at the Dutch Digitale Universteit Consortium. "This collaboration is of great benefit to the Digital University, which relies heavily on content interoperability to service its online constituencies."