Launched earlier this year, the CourseSites user community now includes more than 16,000 K-12 and higher-education instructors representing over 9,000 institutions and school districts. The expanded language support enables instructors and students around the globe to access the high-quality cloud-based online course option in their native language.

CourseSites has been updated to include functionality from the latest releases of Blackboard Learn™ 9.1 for course management and Blackboard Collaborate™ for live virtual classroom, web conferencing, and instant messaging. In addition, the system now features capabilities of Blackboard Connect™ for Learn, which enables instructors to send SMS notifications directly from the course to students.

With the new capabilities and language support, CourseSites offers users of all types the ability to experience Blackboard's newest teaching and learning technologies in an integrated, free solution.

CourseSites has proved popular with instructors who do not have access to a learning-management system at their institution and are looking to experiment with online courses. It has also been utilized by instructors and administrators who want to preview Blackboard's latest solutions before their institution makes a purchasing or upgrade decision.

CourseSites contains a range of innovative features including social learning and sharing tools, dedicated homepages and URLs, templates to guide course development, themes to allow instructors to customize the look and feel of courses, and the ability to login using credentials from popular Web sites like Facebook and Twitter.