Barnes and Noble’s pursuit of the higher education market continues to move forward as they’ve partnered with Blackboard to make it easier for millions college students to access interactive e-textbooks as part of their online courses.
The partnership between the two companies will give students more options for digital learning material through the Blackboard Learn program as well as the newly-announced NOOKstudy platform, creating greater interoperability between the two.
“This partnership will make it much easier for students to access the resources they need for their courses and leverage the best in interactive, digital content,” said Matthew Small, Chief Business Officer at Blackboard. “This is part of our overall strategy to transform the way that students and instructors use and share digital content.”
More key information from the press release:
Under the partnership, the companies will work to enable students to access and purchase e-textbooks and other course related materials directly in Blackboard Learn™, the leading Web-based teaching and learning platform. The effort will help streamline the ability for instructors to assign content from Barnes & Noble’s vast catalog of over one million titles, including e-books, e-textbooks, relevant study aids, test prep guides, periodicals, and hundreds of thousands of trade and professional titles.
The integration is expected to be available to Blackboard clients later in the year as a Blackboard Building Block™ for institutions running Blackboard Learn Release 8 and higher. As part of the partnership, Barnes & Noble becomes a Blackboard Premier Partner™ in the Blackboard Alliance Program™. The announcement was made at BbWorld®, Blackboard’s annual user conference held in Orlando, Florida.