Back in September I suggested that someone should develop an application similar to Blackboard for Facebook. When attending the Graphing Social Patterns conference a few weeks ago, one of my readers, Jayson Ahlstrom approached me and told me that his company would soon be releasing a version of Blackboard on the Facebook platform.

Yesterday afternoon I had the opportunity to demo the product and it is amazing! ClassTop, an official partner of Blackboard®, has developed an application that literally takes 95% of Blackboard’s functionality and ports it into Facebook. If you have been out of school for more than a few years chances are you didn’t get to interact with Blackboard. Currently, Blackboard is a relatively ubiquitous product within universities across the country.

The new CourseFeed application provides users with a newsfeed of everything that is going on in their courses. Additionally, CourseFeed is not limited to the invite limits of the Facebook platform since CourseFeed is directly tied into the Blackboard platform and can directly email users. I think this application has serious potential and when I speak of Facebook’s golden application, this could very well be it. This application literally imports all of your Blackboard content directly into the platform.

Students already login to Blackboard daily but they don’t have a significant interaction with it. If you add it to the Facebook platform, I have a feeling things will change. The developers of CourseFeed agree. The real test now is to see if their beta tests go well. Currently, Blackboard functionality is only at a few test schools but they are preparing to opening it up to all schools in the near future. If you want to see what functionality is currently provided at your school, go check out the CourseFeed application.

CourseFeed Homepage

CourseFeed Course Home

CourseFeed Course Announcements

CourseFeed Course Content

CourseFeed Course Roster