e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Business & Economics

The “Business & Economics” category covers the business aspects of ed tech, including the financial health and business models of individual companies, economic aspects of selling in education that shape the available offerings, and coverage of markets and investment.

  • Reuters: Blackboard up for sale, seeking up to $3 billion in auction

    As I was writing a post about Blackboard’s key challenges, I get notice from Reuters (anonymous sources, so interpret accordingly) that the company is on the market, seeking up to $3 billion. From Reuters:

    Blackboard Inc, a U.S. software company that provides learning tools for high school and university classrooms, is exploring a sale that it hopes could value it at as much as $3 billion, including debt, according to people familiar with the matter.

    Blackboard’s majority owner, private equity firm Providence Equity Partners LLC, has hired Deutsche Bank AG and Bank of America Corp to run an auction for the company, the people said this week. [snip]

    Providence took Blackboard private in 2011 for $1.64 billion and also assumed $130 million in net debt.

    A pioneer in education management software, Blackboard has seen its growth slow in recent years as cheaper and faster software upstarts such as Instructure Inc have tried to encroach on its turf. Since its launch in 2011, Instructure has signed up 1,200 colleges and school districts, according to its website.

    This news makes the messaging from BbWorld as well as their ability to execute on strategy, particularly delivering the new Ultra user experience across all product lines – including the core LMS – much more important. I’ll get to that subject in the next post. (more…)

  • U of Phoenix: Losing hundreds of millions of dollars on adaptive-learning LMS bet

    It would be interesting to read (or write) a post mortem on this project some day.

    Two and a half years ago I wrote a post describing the University of Phoenix investment of a billion dollars on new IT infrastructure, including hundreds of millions of dollars spent on a new, adaptive-learning LMS. In another post I described a ridiculous patent awarded to Apollo Group, parent company of U of Phoenix, that claimed ownership of adaptive activity streams. Beyond the patent, Apollo Group also purchased Carnegie Learning for $75 million as part of this effort.

    And that’s all going away, as described by this morning’s Chronicle article on the company planning to go down to just 150,000 students (from a high of 460,000 several years ago). (more…)

  • ASU Is No Longer Using Khan Academy In Developmental Math Program

    In these two episodes of e-Literate TV, we shared how Arizona State University (ASU) started using Khan Academy as the software platform for a redesigned developmental math course ((The terms remedial math and developmental math are interchangeable in this context.)) (MAT 110). The program was designed in Summer 2014 and ran through Fall 2014 and Spring 2015 terms. Recognizing the public information shared through e-Literate TV, ASU officials recently informed us that they had made a programmatic change and will replace their use of Khan Academy software with McGraw-Hill’s LearnSmart software that is used in other sections of developmental math.

    To put this news in context, here is the first episode’s mention of Khan Academy usage. (more…)