LMS 56 Starfish Retention Solutions

Starfish Retention Solutions is a new company whose goal is to help institutions engage, motivate and graduate more students. They are in the process of launching their first two packages and will be adding more in the near future. The company is led by David Yaskin, former director of product strategy at Blackboard.

Listen to LMS56 (12 minutes)

Web site: http://starfishsolutions.com/

LMS 55 Agilix Labs (Backpack)

Agilix Labs makes the Backpack program that works with Blackboard. Students (and instructors) are able to download their material from Blackboard into their Agilix Notebook software and work with it when they are offline, notate it freely, and combine it with other documnets, all for around $20.

Listen to LMS55 (9 minutes)

Web site: http://backpack.agilix.com

LMS 54 Respondus

Respondus announced their StudyMate Class Server at BbWorld. We talked about it and their other three products.

Listen to LMS54 (9 minutes)

Web site: http://respondus.com

LMS 53 Learning Objects

Learning Objects provides Wiki, Blog, Podcast, and search capabilities through the Campus Pack. They have a number of interesting case studies on their Web site.

Listen to LMS53 (4 minutes)

Web site:  http://learningobjects.com

LMS 52 Waypoint

This is the first of nine short interviews, recorded at the exhibit hall at BbWorld'08 in Las Vegas, NV. We start with Waypoint, a company that provides a number of interesting and powerful capabilities built around rubrics.

Listen to LMS52 (8 minutes)

Waypoint web site: http://gowaypoint.com

LMS 51 Chris Higgins, University of Maryland

Chris Higgins, Manager of Learning Technologies at the University of Maryland, will be presenting the session "Classmates, Communities and Cohorts: Empowering Students Through Blackboard Software" at BbWorld '08 in Las Vegas, July 15-17. In this interview we talked about their use of Wimba Live Classroom to provide virtual group study rooms for students in classes, and, now, their project to make the same capability to student organizations at the University of Maryland.

Listen to LMS51 (37 minutes)