Stephen Gilfus

Stephen Gilfus is an American businessman, entrepreneur, architect and engineer. He is a founder of Blackboard Inc. and CourseInfo LLC, where he held executive positions from 1997 to 2007. Stephen is known as the primary business, and technical lead of Blackboard Inc. one of the world's most widely used eLearning systems. In July 2007, Gilfus started a global education think tank in Washington, DC focused on education innovation. He is a global education advisor, mentor, investor and inventor.

Stephen Gilfus
NationalityAmerican
Alma materCornell University
OccupationEntrepreneur
Known forCo-founder of Blackboard Inc. along with Michael Chasen, Matthew Pittinsky, Daniel Cane

Cornell University

While at Cornell, as an academic scholar, Gilfus focused on the development of new businesses through his studies as a part of a burgeoning new series of studies within Cornell's Entrepreneurship Personal Enterprise program. Early on, his mentor, Professor Deborah Streeter gave him guidance and support in launching a new student club, the Cornell Entrepreneur Organization (CEO), focused on bringing together students from business and engineering in support of new business ideas, this club evolved into an organization now known as CEN (the Cornell Entrepreneur Network). In this capacity, he was a TA for Professor Streeter's (ARME325,) a business planning class of 90 students, mentoring students on the development of new business plans, ideas and approaches, where he met Dan Cane, who was one of his students. Stephen won an award from Cornell for Business Consulting, on a project he did in Streeter's ARME 425 class. During this time he was also an active student participant during the creation of Cornell's Entrepreneurship@Cornell program.

CourseInfo

In 1997, Gilfus met Daniel Cane, his student, while he was a teacher's administrator for Cornell's entrepreneurship studies assisting Professor Deborah Streeter with her business plan writing classes. That year Cane won an award for a business plan developed in the class called "EleFun" based on an educational website business model. Earlier that year Gilfus had also won an award from Cornell for his work in his business planning and consulting class. Cane approached Gilfus based on his successes at Cornell with the Cornell Entrepreneur Club and the two joined forces to found and develop CourseInfo - 'Making Education Easier'" into a platform for course-based websites or CourseSites as the called them.[1]

CourseInfo LLC was a small cutting edge e-learning company focused on the development of an innovative course management system.[2] As a founder of CourseInfo, Gilfus directed the business's initial vision, writing the company's first business plan and developing its foundational sales and marketing strategy.

On December 8, 1997, Gilfus declared, "It's a Web course-management tool," explains Stephen Gilfus, CourseInfo's co-founder and vice president for marketing. "The entire structure is set up to provide areas where you can input your own information. It supports all file types, including multimedia."[3]

The CourseInfo platform was technologically advanced as it was one of only a few relational database-powered web-based applications launched in the late 1990s. CourseInfo released several product versions including the "Teachers Toolbox" and its foundational first release the Interactive Learning Network v.1. The original product developed at Cornell University was deployed on a Linux BSD system, written in PERL, with an Apache web server, and leveraged MySQL as its relational database, with the front end UI of the system being accessed through a web browser.

One of the first of its kind to use a relational database with a web front end or a "true" web-based application. These deployments are now known a LAMP web application software stack. The CourseInfo team had leveraged MySQL in 1996/1997 just a few short years after the release of the original MySQL database system on May 23, 1995. The Cornell team had unique access to the Cornell Theory Center now the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing and leveraged supercomputing power, one of the key pillars of the internet and ARPANET/NSFNET at the time. NSFNET connected the five advanced supercomputing centers (Princeton, Carnegie-Mellon, UCSD, Cornell, UIUC) to the Internet.

Blackboard

In 1998, CourseInfo Llc., founded by Daniel Cane and Stephen Gilfus, and Blackboard LLC, founded by Michael Chasen and Matthew Pittinsky merged to form Blackboard Inc. The CourseInfo platform became the foundational technology for future generations to come, and the original business plan that Gilfus wrote became the model that Blackboard adopted. The first e-learning product as Blackboard Inc. was branded "Blackboard's CourseInfo", but the CourseInfo brand was dropped in 2000. Gilfus was one of the primary designers and inventors of the CourseInfo and Blackboard Learning System products as a founder and head of corporate and product strategy for the company.

Product strategy

Blackboard was one of the first businesses to provide a free offering "Blackboard.com" for instructors to create free "CourseSites". All of Blackboard technology for .com and related services were hosted onsite at 1899 L St NW in secure server rooms run by the company. So much so that the building's owners had to install extra power to support the server rooms on the 11th floor, and add individual AC capability on the rooftop to support the server rooms.

Early on the company needed to support a multi-platform on-premise installation strategy as academic institutions were consuming both Unix based systems and Microsoft systems. Since the platform was built in PERL the company deployed mod_perl an extension to Apached that would also sit as a module to IIS on windows server machines, this allowed the team to create a multi-platform distribution model enhancing its relationships with ALL Unix based and Microsoft based server technologies. While working with the windows mod_perl the Blackboard engineering team found several bugs that then pushed back to Microsoft to fix in their deployment against IIS.

As the company expanded its market and business relationships Stephen along with Matthew Pittinsky (both company co-founders) jointly collaborated and wrote one of the world's first enterprise platform "App Strategies" Blackboard Product Strategy & Vision White Paper on Building Blocks (B2) Initiative outlining the launch of a "Building Blocks Initiative" introducing new thought concepts to extend the Blackboard Platform through plug-ins and 3rd party integrations, and allowing for greater extensibility of the technology as an open platform for allowing for technology extensions.

In 2001 the company (Blackboard Inc.) began to explore "mobile learning" initiatives and Stephen joined a Mobile Steering Committee established and led by the President and CEO of McGraw-Hill Ryerson to answer the question "What can 'anytime, anywhere' access to learning material contribute to the education experience?" Blackboard ended up buying Kayvon Beykpour's company Terriblyclever out of Stanford to deploy Blackboard Mobile Technologies. Kayvon is now known as the founder of Periscope (app) purchased by Twitter.

Consulting services

From 2004 to mid-2008, Gilfus was head of Blackboard's Global Education Consulting Practice where he built the service's operations and led a team of professionals focused on providing strategic eLearning consulting, training and implementation services. Serving over 2200 academic institutions and implementing and integrating the Blackboard platform into PeopleSoft, Datatel, SunGard and other SIS applications as well as creating custom applications.

Gilfus was one of the key strategists behind Fairfax County Public Schools launch of the Blackboard platform for Fairfax 24/7 Learning.[4]

He also led a core team of individuals that designed and implemented several large publisher white-label enterprise systems based on Blackboard Including:

  • Pearson's Course Compass, a private-label version of Blackboard for Pearson Education.[5]
  • Elsevier Evolve
  • McGraw-Hill
  • and several others

Gilfus also deployed a specialized services team, within his group, to work on Course Compass and directly with Pearson on their development and deployment of their largest technology efforts the MyMathLab project led by Marjorie Scardino, Will Ethridge, Jim Behnke and Mary Ann Perry. When Bill Hughes was hired on to Pearson to lead the Course Compass project Gilfus interviewed him and proved sign off and approval for the hire.

Education framework

During this time, around 2004, still with Blackboard, Stephen began to assemble data from the experiences of thousands of Blackboard customers and authored the "Educational Technology Framework", a model used to contemplate organizational, technological, and social impact of educational technologies on academic institutions – sometimes referred to as “The Gilfus Model of Educational Technology Adoption”.[6] The model was updated in 2010.[7]

Published works

Investments

Gilfus is an active angel investor. He has provided market and technology due diligence services to dozens of industry investors, including New Enterprise Associates for LBO's, strategic investments, and strategic acquisitions. Mr. Gilfus is an Advisor and Investor in several Angel Networks and market-specific funds including:

and is frequently asked to participate in new business venture reviews, business judging and investment due diligence. Other investment and advisory or board positions.

Presentations

Industry references

See also

References
  1. http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/97/10.16.97/Web_company.html
  2. http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/97/10.16.97/Web_company.html
  3. "UCLA Taking a Leading Role in Mandating Cyberlearning". The Scientist. Vol. 11 no. 24. 1997-12-08. p. 5. Archived from the original on 2008-12-04. Retrieved 2020-03-13.
  5. "Pearson's Course Compass"
  6. "Benchmarking Blackboard– From Champions To Transformers"
  7. "Educational Technology Framework"
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