Blackboard Announces New MOOC Platform

Blackboard announced that it was expanding its support for MOOCs, though it is relatively late to the much-talked-about trend of massive open online courses. The company announced at its annual conference here that it would create a new MOOC platform that colleges could use free if they were existing Blackboard customers. The company has already hosted a couple of dozen MOOCs on a service called CourseSites, but the new platform will be enhanced with features to help colleges run courses for large numbers of students—and it will let colleges make some connections between their on-campus courses and their free open courses, if they choose to.