Chasen said that the changes he's seeing now in the industry remind him of those that were going on at the time that he started Blackboard, when colleges were realizing for the first time that putting course materials and course management tools online made a lot of sense.
"When we started Blackboard back in 1997, we had to spend over one million dollars for our server room," remembers Chasen, "the barriers of entry, of creating a startup are much lower than they've ever been before".
He continued to build computer applications, and at age 25 dropped out of law school to start Blackboard, which went public on the Nasdaq exchange in 2004.
He continued to build computer applications, and when he was 25 he dropped out of law school to start Blackboard, an online learning company.
Tuesday, Aug. 2, 10 a.m. to noon, and Tuesday, Aug. 9, 1 to 3 p.m. "Getting Started with Blackboard," an introduction and overview of Blackboard 9.1's capabilities covering basic navigation in the Blackboard interface as well as how to add, organize, copy and modify course content.
The company's big break arrived in 2011, when it won a highly competitive contract to build a mobile application for Social Radar, a Washington company started by Blackboard co-founder Michael Chasen.
Early on, Blackboard started developing Building Blocks to let third-parties customize Blackboard Learn and create extensions for its LMS.
What's more, from the time Blackboard started in 1997, the use of learning management software in education has increased exponentially, with Blackboard often given credit (in varying degrees) for higher ed's adoption of software.
When the song "Rock Around the Clock" started playing during "Blackboard Jungle," teenagers all over got so riled up that the police were called in. Lee Harvey Oswald went to the movies to hide after John F. Kennedy's assasination in Dallas.
When she was in high school, she said, her teacher wrote it on the blackboard and started to diagram it: "Then she stepped back, paused, and said, 'No, that's not it!' She erased it and started again.
He started his first company, Blackboard, with three friends as an undergraduate at Cornell University and later took it public.
