Your students are already taking their questions to AI tools outside the systems you govern. Scholar meets them inside the Blackboard ecosystem, leads each one to the single next best action across every course — and shows your team whether it moves early-term retention.
The students you lose often aren't failing out. They drift: in the first few weeks, when they don't know where to start, and long before a mid-term flag fires.
Scholar gives them a better place to start: one specific next action, grounded in the real course, every time they open it. A missed week never punishes the return. The habit is easy to start and easy to come back to.
Shape is illustrative — it shows the drift Scholar targets, not a result we've measured.
And your course materials are already leaving
Your course materials (syllabi, slides, assignments) are ending up in third-party AI platforms you've never vetted, with none of the privacy guarantees you'd require.
No procurement, no migration, no committee. The cohort is designed to run under your existing Blackboard agreement.
Scholar is made available to your students at the system level — not scoped course-by-course. One install, once, and it's accessible to every enrolled student across all their courses. Where it earns its keep first is the high-enrollment gen-ed classes, where drift concentrates.
Scholar connects through LTI 1.3 and reads course content over REST: the same kind of clicks your admins already do to add a tool. Read-only to the LMS: there is no write-back.
Faculty change nothing about how they run their course: no setup, no grading, no per-course intro. Student adoption is organic: an institution announcement (we provide the kit) and the student welcome email.
No faculty dashboard, no per-student surveillance, by design. Students trust a tool that's on their side, and that trust is what keeps them opening it in the weeks that matter, and what makes the results worth reporting.
One aggregate, de-identified readout — plain enough to put in front of a provost.
A small, invitation-only group of Blackboard institutions bringing Scholar to their students this fall, and shaping what it becomes.
A working product: live today, and steered by what the cohort needs next. The team on the other end: you talk to the people building Scholar, not a ticket queue. And Blackboard's safety and compliance behind it: the posture your review teams expect, already in place.
Real students in real courses: Scholar goes live system-wide, across every class they're enrolled in. A voice in what ships: what you see on the ground steers where we point the product next. And nothing from your faculty: no course to set up, no tool to run, no lift.
To request an invitation, ask your Blackboard account team (CSM) about the Fall 2026 Cohort. Seats are few by design — the institutions that join this fall shape what Scholar becomes. Requesting starts that conversation.
Tell us who you are and we'll take it from there.
We'll route it through your Blackboard account team and follow up if it's a fit.