Blackboard Mobile is a platform for bringing the teaching, learning, and campus experience to the mobile device. Take teaching and learning mobile with the Blackboard Mobile™ Learn application. In the future, we plan to extend Blackboard Mobile to support additional elements of the campus experience including campus commerce, security, and mass notification.

The Blackboard Mobile Learn app allows students and educators to access teaching and learning wherever and whenever they want through two-way interactions on mobile devices. The Blackboard Mobile Learn app extends and enriches the course experience of the Blackboard Learn™ platform, the leading web-based teaching and learning platform, in native mobile applications for the most popular mobile platforms, including Android™, iPhone®, iPod touch®, iPad®, BlackBerry® and Palm® webOS™. Additionally, Blackboard Mobile™ Learn for ANGEL and Blackboard Mobile™ Learn for CE/Vista extend the course experience for clients licensing Blackboard Learn – ANGEL Edition 7.4 SP10 and 8.0 and Blackboard Learning System™ CE Enterprise/CE Enterprise Limited and Vista 8 SP5. Learn more about Blackboard Mobile Learn.

Blackboard Mobile solutions are available in the US and almost every other country around the world. Blackboard Mobile Learn is available in Arabic, Dutch, Japanese, Portuguese, German and Spanish on iOS devices and Android devices. For more information about availability of a particular solution for your institution, please contact the sales team by emailing Blackboard Mobile.

Blackboard Learn clients interested in learning more about the Blackboard Mobile Learn application should login to Behind the Blackboard™ to download the Blackboard Mobile Learn System Administrator FAQ and access to the Blackboard Mobile Learn Knowledge Base.

Clients licensing Blackboard Learn – ANGEL Edition 7.4 who are interested in learning more about the Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL application should login to Behind the Blackboard in order to get instructions on downloading Service Pack 10 as well as directions on how to install and place the Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL application into production. The Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL Knowledge Guide will be in the ANGEL section of Behind the Blackboard™.

Clients licensing the Blackboard Learning System CE Enterprise/CE Enterprise Limited application and Vista 8 SP5 who are interested in learning more about the Blackboard Mobile Learn for CE/Vista application should login to Behind the Blackboard in order to get the link for Service Pack 5 as well as directions on how to install and place Blackboard Mobile Learn for CE/Vista into production.

Additional information about the Blackboard Mobile platform is available on our website or from our team of Mobile Specialists.

We have developed Adoption Kits to help you promote Blackboard Mobile Learn to your community to help drive adoption and usage. View the Blackboard Mobile Learn Adoption Kit.

Blackboard Mobile Learn™ is an app that lets students and faculty connect to their Blackboard Learn™ courses via mobile devices.

With Blackboard Mobile Learn, students and instructors can interact with their courses and organizations while on-the-go. To learn more about specific functionality, please see our features page.

As announced at BbWorld 2012, institutions that are interested in expanding access to their Blackboard Learn instance to mobile devices will now have two choices for deployment:

1. Institutional License
   • With the Institutional License option, the institution provides free access to the Blackboard Mobile Learn app for students and instructors with iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and webOS devices, on all carriers.
   • The license price is based on the number of Full Time Equivalent students enrolled at the institution, and recurs annually. For pricing information, please click here or call our sales team at 1 (800) 424-9299.
2. Personal License (available mid-September, 2012)
   • With the Personal License option, institutions do not need to purchase a license for Blackboard Mobile Learn. Instead, institutions can enable the free Mobile Web Services Building Block.
   • Students and instructors on iOS and Android devices will be automatically prompted to purchase access to Blackboard Mobile Learn after downloading the app. Introductory pricing is $1.99* per year, or a one-time fee of $5.99*.
   • The Personal License option will become available mid-September, 2012. On that date, it will replace the previous Sprint No Cost version of Blackboard Mobile Learn. If you are currently using the Sprint No Cost version of Blackboard Mobile Learn, click here for more information.

*Plus any applicable taxes

The Blackboard Mobile Learn app is available for download on the following devices:

• iPhone®/iPod Touch®
• iPad®
• Android®
• BlackBerry™*
• webOS®*

However, institutions must enable access to Blackboard Mobile Learn via one of our licensing options to allow students and instructors to log in.

* available to end users only if the institution has purchased an Institutional License.

Click here to check if your institution uses Blackboard Mobile Learn.

For a side-by-side comparison of these two options, please see below:

*Plus any applicable taxes

When we introduced Blackboard Mobile Learn two years ago, we offered two options for institutions to get started: an Institutional License, and a No Cost option that offered access to Blackboard Mobile Learn on Sprint Network devices and iOS devices on Wi-Fi only. The latter option was available only for North America Higher Education and some Professional Education clients.

We saw a tremendous response, with more than 1,100 institutions worldwide using Blackboard Mobile Learn. However, we also received a lot of input that institutions wanted something different. The new Personal License option has been designed with this input in mind.

We are excited about this change because it provides institutions worldwide with more choice in how to meet students' demands for mobile access. We think this improved user experience is also better aligned with current mobile users' expectations.

• Blackboard Learn 9.1, 9.0, and 8.0
• Blackboard Learn: ANGEL Edition (version 7.4+)

Blackboard Mobile Learn will only be available for clients licensing CE Enterprise/CE Enterprise Limited and Vista 8 that are definitively planning to upgrade to Blackboard Learn 9.1 by January 2013. Blackboard Mobile Learn will be available to these clients via an Institutional License; WebCT will not be supported by the Personal License offering.

Yes, anyone who logs into the Blackboard Mobile Learn app will have to purchase access. This includes students and instructors.

No, there is no difference in the features or functionality of the app. Users will have access to all supported features and functionality.

The Blackboard Mobile Learn app will be available for Android, iOS, BlackBerry, and webOS users to download for free from the app stores. When users first open the app and search for their institution, they will be prompted to log in via their Blackboard user credentials.

If the institution has an Institutional License of Blackboard Mobile Learn, the user will immediately gain access.

If the institution has chosen the Personal License option, Android and iOS users will be prompted to purchase access for the introductory price of $1.99* per year or a one-time fee of $5.99* via an in-app purchase. BlackBerry and webOS users will receive a message stating that they cannot access their institution's Learn instance via Blackboard Mobile Learn.

*Plus any applicable taxes

If your institution already has an Institutional License for Blackboard Mobile Learn, you do not need to worry about any changes to your Blackboard Mobile Learn service. Users will not be prompted to make an in-app purchase.

The Sprint No Cost version of Blackboard Mobile Learn will end when the Personal License option is introduced in mid-September. If you are currently deploying the Sprint No Cost version of Blackboard Mobile Learn, you will automatically switch to the Personal License option of Blackboard Mobile Learn when it becomes available mid-September.

You do not need to do anything to facilitate the switch.

If you are interested in switching to an Institutional License prior to September, please contact us here or call our Sales team at 1 (800) 424-9299.

For more information about the switch, please see our FAQ’s for No Cost Clients.

When the Personal License option becomes available, you can enable it at your institution in a matter of minutes. Your Blackboard System Administrator just needs to install the Mobile Web Services Building Block and put it into production; once the Building Block is live on your Blackboard Learn instance, your students and instructors can use the Blackboard Mobile Learn app. You do not need to go through Managed Hosting to go into production; anyone with access to the System Administrator Panel in Learn can install the Building Block.

If you are considering changing from an Institutional License to the Personal License option, we recommend that you speak with your Blackboard Mobile Representative for more details. He or she can help you to evaluate the potential impacts, financial and otherwise, that the switch would have on your institution.

The Institutional License price of Blackboard Mobile Learn is based on the number of Full Time Equivalent students at your institution. To get a price quote, please contact us here or call our Sales team at 1 (800) 424-9299. Starting mid-September of 2012, we will also offer a Personal License option that allows students and instructors to subscribe to the app for the introductory price of $1.99* per year, or a one-time fee of $5.99*, at no cost to the institution. You simply need to install the Mobile Web Services Building Block and put it into production to allow students and faculty to subscribe to the app.

*Plus any applicable taxes

We expect many institutions to be excited about a more comprehensive way to provide mobile access to Blackboard Learn, at no cost to the institution. For many institutions, the Personal License option of offering access to Blackboard Mobile Learn will financially be the best way to get started with mobile learning.

However, for institutions that are looking to do more with their mobile initiative, licensing Blackboard Mobile Learn offers the following benefits:

• Expanded Access: availability for BlackBerry and webOS users
• Subsidized access for users: provide your students and instructors with free and unlimited access to Blackboard Mobile Learn

To learn more about licensing Blackboard Mobile Learn, please contact your regional Mobile Representative. If you have not yet been introduced to the Mobile Representative in your region, please contact us here or call our Sales team at 1 (800) 424-9299.

If you have additional questions about using Blackboard Mobile Learn at your institution, please contact your regional Mobile Representative. If you have not yet been introduced to the Mobile Representative in your region, please contact us here or call our Sales team at 1 (800) 424-9299.

We would strongly discourage customers from disabling access to Blackboard Mobile Learn. However, if that is your desired approach, we recommend that you disable the Blackboard Mobile Web Services Building Block prior to mid-September, when the Personal License option takes effect. It would be unfortunate for users to pay for access, only to have their institution disable the service a few weeks or months later. This would lead to disappointment and confusion for users.

We have heard dissatisfaction from users over the limitations of the current No Cost option. In addition, we have received requests from many clients to make Blackboard Mobile Learn available to more students using a different model. Starting this fall, we are discontinuing our Sprint No Cost offering. We will provide a new option for users at institutions worldwide who do not license Blackboard Mobile Learn. End users can purchase a license to Blackboard Mobile Learn at an introductory price of $1.99* per year, or for a one-time fee of $5.99*. iOS and Android devices on all carrier networks will be supported.

We are excited about this change because we believe it provides more choice; institutions can choose if they’re interested in paying on behalf of their students and leveraging the other premium benefits that come with an Institutional License. Students and instructors at institutions that do not have an Institutional License can decide for themselves if they would value licensing an app that lets them interact with their coursework.

*Plus any applicable taxes

If you have currently deployed the Sprint No Cost version of Blackboard Mobile Learn, you will automatically switch to the Personal License version of Blackboard Mobile Learn when it becomes available in mid-September.

If you already have the Mobile Web Services Building Block enabled, you do not need to do anything to facilitate the switch.

If you are interested in switching to an Institutional License model of Blackboard Mobile Learn prior to September, please contact us here or call our Sales team at 1 (800) 424-9299 for more information.

The initial Sprint No Cost version of Blackboard Mobile Learn restricted app usage to devices on the Sprint network and iOS devices over Wi-Fi. It was also only available to North America Higher Education and Professional Education clients.

The Personal License option enables all iOS and Android users to access Blackboard Mobile Learn, on all mobile carriers around the world. It is also available for all clients, worldwide, licensing Blackboard Learn 8.0+ and Blackboard Learn ANGEL Edition 7.4+.

For a more detailed side-by-side comparison, please see below:

*Plus any applicable taxes

We are currently developing several marketing resources that you can use to inform your students and instructors. You can expect these resources to be available on blackboardmobile.com before September, 2012; please check back then.

If your students have been using the Sprint No Cost option, you will automatically transition to the Personal License option in mid-September. Any students who log into the app for the first time after the switch will also be prompted to buy a license for the introductory price of $1.99* per year, or a one-time fee of $5.99*.

*Plus any applicable taxes

Payment processing, and in particular, subscription payment processing, is not a proven and common paradigm (from a user's perspective, and from a developer implementation perspective) on any platform other than iOS and Android. We didn't want to leverage that part of the ecosystem given the lack of maturity, and instead want to make sure we provide payment options for platforms that put a significant amount of focus and effort into supporting them.

No, there is no difference in the features or functionality of the app. Users will have access to all supported features and functionality.

We expect many institutions to be excited about a more comprehensive way to provide mobile access to Blackboard Learn, at no cost to the institution. For many institutions, the Personal License option of offering access to Blackboard Mobile Learn will financially be the best way to get started with mobile learning.

However, for institutions that are looking to do more with their mobile initiative, licensing Blackboard Mobile Learn offers the following benefits:

• Expanded Access: availability for BlackBerry and webOS users
• Subsidized access for users: provide your students and instructors with free and unlimited access to Blackboard Mobile Learn

To get a price quote, please click here or call our Sales team at 1 (800) 424-9299.

Blackboard Mobile Learn will only be available for CE Enterprise/CE Enterprise Limited and Vista 8 clients that are definitively planning to upgrade to Blackboard Learn 9.1 by January 2013. Blackboard Mobile Learn will be available to these clients via an Institutional License.

We would strongly discourage customers from disabling access to Blackboard Mobile Learn. However, if that is your desired approach, we recommend that you disable the Blackboard Mobile Web Services Building Block prior to mid-September, when the Personal License option takes effect. It would be unfortunate for users to pay for access, only to have their institution disable the service a few weeks or months later. This would lead to disappointment and confusion for users.

For clients licensing Classic 8.0 or Learn 9.0 or 9.1, we support any authentication scheme that does not require a browser plug-in. Just select the appropriate setting on the Blackboard Mobile Web Services Building Block properties page. Institutions with custom authentication on their Blackboard Learn platform may need to contact support to get Blackboard Mobile Learn configured properly, but all schools will be supported.

For clients licensing Blackboard Learn – ANGEL Edition 7.4 or 8.0, we do not support custom authentication schemes. Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL supports local/ANGEL authentication (the passwords are stored within the ANGEL database). For clients using LDAP, Active Directory, or a federated authentication scheme like CAS or Shibboleth, you are not able to use Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL. The ANGEL platform does not support the Safari browser, and since a browser is required to support single sign-on, it is not supported in Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL.

For clients licensing Blackboard Learning System CE Enterprise/CE Enterprise Limited orVista 8, we support any authentication scheme that does not require a browser plug-in.

No FERPA-protected data passes through a central service. When an end user logs into and uses the Blackboard Mobile Learn app, certain information about that specific end-user is passed between the user's mobile device and the Blackboard Mobile Web Services Building Block installed on that institution's Blackboard Learn implementation. It is handled in the same way that user-specific data is handled on a desktop or laptop computer between the web browser and the institution's Blackboard Learn installation. No FERPA-protected user-specific data passes through the central service that supports Blackboard Mobile Learn.

 To power Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL, simply download and install Service Pack 10. The new Mobile functionality is built into Service Pack 10. The following steps should be performed to complete the ANGEL update:

- From the Administrator’s Menu - ANGEL Update Manager, click the Download Now link for this update package.

- After clicking the Download Now link for this package, the ANGEL update will be downloaded to your server in the parent folder of AngelRoot.

- You will then be prompted to run the 2010 ANGEL LMS 7.4 SP10.bat file, which will extract and copy all files, run all database procedures and scripts, and copy and register .dlls.

Configuration is done via a new option called Mobile ANGEL Settings on the Tool configuration nugget, which is found on the application tab of the Administrator Console.

No. Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL does not support uploading content from the mobile device.

Blackboard Mobile Learn was designed to be a collaborative teaching and learning tool that would increase student engagement and therefore improve student retention and graduation rates.  It does not support assessments.  It's not meant to be as robust as ANGEL— just as Facebook on Android isn't meant to be as robust as Facebook.com, or how a mail client on a Blackberry isn't as robust as Outlook. If we were to take all of the complexity, features, use-cases, and target users (students, faculty, admins, course builders, etc.) and build them into a mobile application, the result would be unacceptable.  It would overly complicate the purpose of a mobile application, and its content would reduce the usability of the application. Instead, we took the approach that most successful mobile applications take: we aimed to organize extremely useful & mission-critical information that is complex and disparate into a highly usable, very beautiful, enjoyable and simplistic interface.

There is no assessment functionality in Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL.

No. The mobile app is not intended to be an administrative tool.

The inability to access flash on iOS devices is a device issue, and not specific to Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL or ANGEL itself.

Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL does not support dropboxes.

Yes, announcements (posted by instructors) as well as discussion threads (posted by students and instructors) are automatically updated in Blackboard Learn – ANGEL Edition.

No it does not.

There is no access to mail within Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL.

No.

This was the case when Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL was initially launched.  This was fixed in ANGEL 7.4 SP11.

The mobile application and API do not provide method for supplying or displaying this data in mobile application therefore we are unable to fix at this time.

Yes!  With ANGEL 7.4 SP12, LORs are accessible via the supported mobile devices.  If the content is in any repository, when students click on the link, they will be able to view the content.

The mobile application and API do not provide method for supplying or displaying this data in mobile application therefore we are unable to fix at this time.

Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL is brought to you via a native app on Android™, BlackBerry®, and iOS devices.  If there is a link in a lesson (for example) that pushes the user to the browser, the link will not work since ANGEL 7.4 does not support Safari.  However, we made Safari/Chrome compatibility a major focus of our ANGEL 8.0 deliverables.   As part of this initiative, with ANGEL 8.0 you have the ability  to “view in browser” from your mobile device.

This was the case when Blackboard Mobile Learn for ANGEL was initially launched.  This was fixed in ANGEL 7.4 SP11.

There are a few tablets coming out that do not have 3G services.  However, these tablets do not have the Android Marketplace installed on them and it seems that there is no plan to release the Marketplace to these devices.  If a user were to find a download link online to download the Blackboard Mobile Learn application, they would not be able to access Mobile Learn over wifi using the No-Cost option.

Several important enhancements to the Mobile Learn for ANGEL integration are available to clients upgrading to ANGEL 8.0.  These enhancements include the addition of View in Browser links to the Mobile interface, and the ability to upload files from a mobile device.

Following the release of ANGEL 8.0, we will continue to address priority issues with the Mobile Learn for ANGEL integration in our standard ANGEL maintenance Service Pack releases, as we did throughout 2011.  Beyond these maintenance updates, there are no additional functional enhancements planned for the Mobile Learn for ANGEL solution.