Stephen Gilfus

From 2004 to mid-2008, Gilfus was head of Blackboard's Global Education Consulting Practice where he built the services 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.

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”. The model was updated in 2010.

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.

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.

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.

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 call "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 Coornell 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.

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."

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 fe short years after the release of the original MySQL database system on May 23rd 1995. The Cornell team had unique access to the Cornell Theory Center now the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing and leveraged super computing 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.

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 it's relational database, with the front end UI of the system being accessed through a web browser.

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 buildings 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.