With last week’s release of Blackboard Learn Release 9, the first release in the new Project NG series, people can begin to explore my implementation of the Learning Environment Connector API to integrate Sakai 2.5.3+ with Blackboard.

The integration consists of two parts, a Building Block portion contributed to the OSCELOT community found here
http://projects.oscelot.org/gf/project/bb-sakai-lec/ under the Apache License, Version 2.0,
and a Sakai project contributed to the Sakai community here
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/BBLEC under the Educational Community License, Version 2.0. Combined, the two enhancements enable the integration of Sakai user, course and enrollment data into Blackboard and allows the users to access their Sakai course data from within the Blackboard user interface.

While the initial release of the connector implementation should still be considered beta, we’ve successfully tested and demonstrated the implementation and plan to begin further testing by the end of February. Hopefully we’ll have the integration running in production locally for the start of the next Fall semester.

For further details, including screenshots, please visit either of the links above. I’m looking forward to hearing your feedback!

I haven’t posted an update in awhile since I’ve been “heads down” working on the integration between the Sakai CLE and Blackboard learning environments. It’s a lot to do in a short amount of time, but things are going well…I have good help. More updates/details regarding the project to follow once the connector is released alongside Blackboard 9, the first release of the new Project NG series.