This year, Pearson's MyLab and Mastering programs are projected to have more than nine million student registrations at higher-education institutions, many of which use Blackboard's learning-management system. The announcement was made at BbWorld® 2011, Blackboard's largest user conference, which took place in Las Vegas in the second week of July.

With the planned integration, faculty and students will gain fast, easy access to digital content and the MyLab and Mastering programs using a single sign-on process and their Blackboard® credentials. Faculty will have quick access from their Blackboard Learn course to MyLab and Mastering tools, assignments, and learning analytics, including the transfer of MyLab and Mastering grade information to the Blackboard Learn gradebook.

Academic and IT administrators will benefit from the integration's use of industry standards to efficiently scale and manage campus users' access to MyLab and Mastering for improved learning outcomes. A well-established service relationship between Pearson and Blackboard will provide customer service for the integrated products.

The announcement follows a decade of collaboration between Pearson and Blackboard, starting with the 2001 launch of Pearson's CourseCompass™ and MyMathLab™, which now serve more than three million higher-education mathematics students annually.

"This partnership can deliver a real advancement for instructors and learners by bringing together some of the best in digital content and tools with our learning platform to deliver greater simplicity and opportunity to users", says Matthew Small, Chief Business Officer at Blackboard. "We're reducing barriers to wider use of these resources with a streamlined, powerful approach to leveraging publisher tools and content right from the course platform."

In addition to the MyLab and Mastering programs, the partnership developed by Pearson and Blackboard will provide students and faculty with a seamless learning experience via CourseConnect™, Pearson's award-winning suite of online courses, available through the Blackboard Extensions program. CourseConnect offers research-based instructional content, assessments, and instructor resources with Blackboard's robust set of learning tools.

Demand for the MyLab and Mastering programs soared in 2010, with 232 million assignments submitted and more than 750,000 students logging in daily.