As Phil noted in his post, Blackboard has hired a new CEO, a guy by the name of Bill Ballhaus. We don’t know much about him yet, other than that he came from outside education. (That shouldn’t be considered a disqualifier, by the way. Instructure CEO Josh Coates also came from outside education, for example, […]
Ed Tech
The "Ed Tech" category includes posts about educational technology products themselves, including LMSs and other learning platforms, adaptive learning and other digital curricular materials products, learning analytics, and educational apps of all types. It also includes technical aspects of ed tech products, especially interoperability.
Blackboard Replaces CEO Jay Bhatt: What happened
Just over four years since Providence Equity Partners acquired Blackboard and three years after they brought in Jay Bhatt to replace co-founder Michael Chasen, the company announced another change in CEO. Blackboard has removed Jay Bhatt and replaced him with Bill Ballhaus. The official reason from the announcement: Today, we are fortunate to be joined […]
Unizin RFP For LMS: An offering to appease the procurement gods?
Well this was interesting: Unizin issues an RFP for "Enterprise and Multitentant LMS" https://t.co/kRVSyzQgYI& I owe my wife an engagement ring soon — Phil Hill (@PhilOnEdTech) December 30, 2015 In a blog post from Monday, Unizin announced a public Request For Proposals (RFP) to solicit bids for an enterprise and multitenant LMS. The RFP states its […]
McGraw Hill’s New Personalized Learning Authoring Product
In what has to be the softest launch ever, McGraw Hill has been quietly talking about their new personalized learning authoring system. If you ask them when it will be available to all customers, they will tell you “right now.” But since it doesn’t even have a name yet, I’m not sure how customers would […]
Georgia Tech and Udacity MOOC Degree: Missing targets but still worth watching
Melissa Korn wrote an article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal giving a progress report on that Georgia Tech / Udacity MOOC degree (the master’s in computer science). The Georgia Tech online computer-science program is relatively massive: It has 2,789 students enrolled this semester, compared with 312 in the campus-based version. It’s on track to […]
Personalized Learning and the Teacher
A few weeks ago, Jonathan Rees wrote a post calling out that, no matter what potential of so-called “personalized learning” for improving student outcomes, there is a potential—and a temptation—for it to be abused as a method of lowering (labor) costs in a way that also lowers educational quality and effectiveness. This is a serious and realistic concern, particularly as long as personalized learning is framed as a product rather than a set of teaching strategies.
LMS Market Updates, Dec 2015
There seems to be a series of news and analysis on the LMS higher education market worth summarizing. Major Adoption News I posted last weekend about University of Phoenix (UoP) and their LMS. UoP is well-known for being the biggest user of a homegrown LMS for well over a decade, but in the past several years […]