Baruch College, like many colleges and universities, is trying its best to stay on top of new media, and use that to foster education and community among its students. That's certainly no easy task.
Blackboard is certainly a useful tool for interactive and self-sufficient learning. Unfortunately, it's already outdated. It lacks the scaleability and modularity that many new media have. There are limited widgets and interaction with other types of services. Baruch needs to take Blackboard to the next level, or rather have Blackboard help them take it to the next level.
As an example, there is an enterprise CRM solution currently available for companies, called Salesforce. Now, this is not specifically tailored for the needs of education, but has the functionality and scaleability that I think a college would need moving forward (though it ultimately could easily be scaled for university use). It has adopted Facebook's messaging service into their Chatter feature, which looks and functions just like Facebook essentially. That is something we need to have within our online classrooms. Instead of having to manually add our classmates on our Twitter or blogs, etc., it'd be great if we could easily link the two.
Salesforce also integrates with Google apps and docs, to increase functionality. Taking advantage of the biggest, and low-cost or free providers of document and application solutions would be very beneficial to Baruch. Unfortunately, it seems Blackboard has limited capability, or at least takes a rather large investment of time and effort to allow such functionality.
Salesforce also runs a platform that allows for quick and easy deployment of custom solutions. It seems that Blackboard does not. I am not a programmer or database administrator, but yet even I was able to create custom solutions on the Salesforce platform for my work needs. Imagine the flexibility and efficiency that professors could have if they could easily deploy and customize templates/solutions for their classes, based on their specific needs. A social sciences class template, with customizable widgets, applications, etc. A different template and modules for the CIS classes, and so on and so on. Each of those templates can have Facebook and Twitter modules built in, Google Docs and Apps built in (like Google Scholar), and free modules or apps created from university users around the country (or globe) that other colleges and universities can easily use.
Finally, if we could take all that and make a mobile app that will work on iPhones, Blackberrys and Android marketplace, that would be ideal. Students on the go could easily check pertinent information on their classes while on the go.
Scaleability, easy customization, advanced functionality...all things that Baruch needs to address moving forward. Without it, it's IT systems will be in a constant (and expensive) cycle of trying to catch up with technology and the latest trends.
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