One year ago Blackboard’s strategy for Moodle was floundering. After the 2012 acquisition of Moodlerooms and Netspot, Blackboard had kept its promises of supporting the open source community – and in fact, Blackboard pays much more than 50% of the total revenue going to Moodle HQ1 – but that does not mean they had a strategy. […]
LMS & Learning Platforms
Everything you want to know about Learning Management Systems and whatever comes after them.
Reuters: Instructure has filed for IPO later this year
Reuters is on a breaking news roll lately with ed tech. This time it is about Instructure filing for an initial public offering (IPO). Instructure is planning an initial public offering later this year that could value the education software company at $500 million to $800 million, according to people familiar with the matter. Instructure, based […]
Blackboard Acquires Large Latin American Moodle Provider
In my first post-BbWorld blog post, I noted that the international market is hugely important for Blackboard and Moodle is hugely important for their international strategy. Nearly a quarter of the company’s revenue and much of their growth comes from their international business, where they seem to be way ahead of their main North American […]
Online Teaching Conference (#CCCOTC15) Keynote
Back in June I had the pleasure of giving the keynote at the Online Teaching Conference (#CCCOTC15) in San Diego, put on by the California Community College system. There was quite a bit of valuable backchannel discussions as well as sharing of the slides. The theme of the talk was: Emerging Trends in Online / […]
Blackboard: Ask and Ye Shall Receive (Better Answers)
About a week ago, I complained about Blackboard’s lack of clarity in messaging about their platform in general and the implications for managed hosting customers in particular. I wrote, in part, What is “Premium SaaS”? Is it managed hosting? Is it private cloud? What does it mean for current managed hosting customers? What we have […]
Blackboard Potential Sale: Market timing, financials, and some thoughts on potential buyers
With Reuters’ story last week that Blackboard is putting itself up for sale through an auction, one question to ask is ‘why now?’. As Michael has pointed out, Blackboard is in the midst of a significant, but incomplete and late, re-architecture of its product line. Bottom line: If you think that Ultra is all about […]
Blackboard’s Messaging Problems
There are a lot of things that are hard to evaluate from the outside when gauging how a company is doing under new management in the midst of a turnaround with big new products coming out. For example, how good is Ultra, Blackboard’s new user experience? (At least, I think the user experience is what […]