As I wrote in an earlier post, defections of Blackboard Enterprise customers to other LMS platforms might be an indicator of a greater market share movement that we’ve seen in the past because, absent any forced migration, schools just don’t change LMSs very often. Well, Duke has announced that they are moving from Blackboard Enterprise to Sakai. Particularly interesting is their reasoning for undertaking an LMS evaluation in the first place:
Since future versions of Blackboard are significantly different than the current Blackboard 8, any upgrade would necessitate a fair amount of change for users. [Emphasis added.] On top of that, Duke’s needs and priorities have shifted in the 10+ years since we first adopted Blackboard as the campus LMS. This plus the fact that our Blackboard license is up for renewal in July 2012 suggests that it is a good time to review the LMS “landscape” and determine if Blackboard is still the best system to meet Duke faculty, student and strategic needs.
It sounds as though the Duke folks thought that the changes from Blackboard 8 to Blackboard 9 were large enough that they amounted to a forced migration. They passed the threshold of user retraining beyond which you might as well look at all options.
This is always a tough dilemma for developers of software with a significant installed base. You need to evolve your software to keep up with the competition, but in doing so, you force your users to deal with change, when not requiring them to change has been one of your competitive advantages. The challenge for Blackboard is that they face this dilemma at a time when they are also putting their WebCT and ANGEL customers through a forced migration. So if the move to Blackboard 9 from Blackboard 8 is also perceived as, effectively, a forced migration, then that means an alarmingly high percentage of their LMS customers might be looking around at alternatives.
I’m interested in hearing from people who have experience with both Blackboard 9.x and 8.x. In your opinion, is it really a big change? How much user retraining does it require?
At university of Leicester we moved from 7.3 to 9.0 this summer (2010). Training really hasn’t been an issue, some things have changed their names (gradebook > gradecentre) or changed position in the control panel. But overall I don’t think the instructor user experience is that big a leap. I’m not on our Admin staff but I understand from them that there was a huge amount of work to do at the back end on the database, so perhaps Duke is considering this too. I’d like to see us think about why we want a VLE and what purpose it serves, then seek some tools to do it. Being forced into new versions of software because previous ones are being aggressively unsupported is not a good way to plan forward and think about what good teaching needs to support it’s delivery
At Edge Hill University we’re currently moving from Blackboard CE8 to 9.1 and it sounds like we’ve had a similar experience to Jo at Leicester so far. The academics and students will not see massive change and most of our efforts have gone into system integration at the back end.
It actually seems to me that the instructor experience on Blackboard 9.1 is acceptable. Not a great compliment, but I’ve not felt like that about any VLE until now, and it makes me feel better as a Learning Technologist when I’m encouraging people to use it. It is worth going through forced disruption when that is the case, while it wasn’t as satisfying after our previous ‘forced’ migration when we moved from version CE4 to CE6.
At my university we have just moved from Bb 7.2 to Bb 9.1. I would agree with the other respondents in that I don’t think there is a huge change. The interface is prettier. Other than that, the main functionality is not massively changed. Having said that, we can never underestimate the ability of many academic staff (particularly those being prodded into the use of an LMS) to find great difficulty with even the simplest interface change.
Thanks, folks. My previous impression had been that this was pretty much an incremental upgrade for users, which is why I was somewhat surprised by the Duke comment. I probably just read more into it than was intended.
I’m curious how the Sakai 3 project played into Duke’s (and UNC’s) decision. Are they expecting Sakai 3to be usable as an LMS within the next two years (it won’t be)? Or did they decide based on Sakai 2, which works, but feels dated and is being poorly maintained* with so many resources focused on Sakai 3.
* I don’t mean to disparage anyone’s efforts. What development work has been going into Sakai 2 has been great. But very little work is being contributed, and the big architectural problems are being ignored while we wait for Sakai 3 to save us.
I don’t know the details of Duke’s decision-making process beyond what’s been published, but I disagree with both of your assertions about Sakai development. First, there is significant work being done on Sakai 2.x, including some plans to overhaul the user experience. As for the project formerly known as Sakai 3 (which is being called Sakai Open Academic Environment, or OAE, for now), there is very good reason to believe that it will be quite adoptable for some schools in two years. Perhaps more conservatively, it will certainly be a solid complement to Sakai 2.x and will integrate well with it. (One reason of the 2.9 user experience overhaul is to make integrated hybrid mode more seamless for the users.)
I think Chuck’s presentation about a 2.9 UI upgrade makes some good points, the same ones I’m trying to make: from 2.5 till 2.8, Sakai has languished as the majority of shared development resources have been thrown at Sakai OAE; the “safe” route to a notional “next generation Sakai” is “evolutionary not revolutionary”; and community support for 2.x is vital. But his proposal would be a major update, and would need to touch a lot of different tools. I like the vision (except for the overemphasis on social networking features–our users aren’t interested in Sakai becoming a half-baked Facebook wannabe), but I don’t see any immediate evidence that there is community support for the effort.
As for Sakai 3/OAE, we’re six and a half months into the one-year plan for Sakai OAE 1.0, and it hasn’t even reached its first-quarter goals yet:
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/3AK/Roadmap
If you’ve been following the dev lists, you’ll know that the underlying data store is undergoing massive architectural changes and rewrites to address major performance problems identified leading up to the 0.1 release, and the rest of the team is working on backlogged requirements while attempting to transition to a new development methodology. If all three of those issues are suddenly solved in the next two weeks, then we’ll be four months behind schedule. And Sakai OAE as yet has no gradebook, no assignments tool, no tests and quizzes tool, no discussion tool, no chat tool, no calendar tool, and no admin tools. Plus the roadmap promises a workflow engine, full LTI support, wiki-like page editing, social networking features, and a complete hybrid mode. Every one of those items is several man-months worth of design, development, testing, and QA work. When is this going to get done? Two years would be a miracle. How much better off would Sakai 2 be if even half of those resources went into it, a working, proven system, instead of what looks more and more like a utopian pipe dream of the OAE.
So that’s why I’m concerned. If Duke bought into the Sakai OAE vision, they’ve got a long wait ahead of them, and two painful migrations (one to Sakai 2, then another to Sakai OAE). Blackboard upgrades can be rough (I’ve been through a couple–6 to 7 was a nightmare), but upgrading Sakai is rougher. Sakai 2 to Sakai OAE will not be pretty.
First, I think you’ll find that folks will rally around the work that Chuck is proposing. Once again, I don’t agree that Sakai CLE has “languished” from 2.5 t0 2.8, but I do think that the focus has been on incremental improvements rather than an overarching vision for major changes. Chuck’s proposal is already garnering support and I am confident that the work that needs to be done will be resourced.
Regarding OAE, you are correct that the back end is being refactored, and for that reason it is behind on its goals. The project team has learned some major technical and non-technical lessons and is responding to them. The time to make those changes and to deal with the most difficult technical and process issues are now, at the beginning of the managed project. There is no particular reason to believe that the current pace is indicative of the next 18 months of development, even if the current resourcing level were all the project will get. Which it isn’t.
I’m not sure who you are, Finn, but you’re obviously somebody who is personally invested in Sakai and worried about its future. You needn’t be. Both Sakai CLE and Sakai OAE have solid futures and will continue to gain more development resources as the community continues to grow. Not all of this growth may be immediately apparent to you from the posts on the listservs, but I can assure you that it is happening. The folks at Duke are not idiots; nor are the folks at University of North Carolina, Miami University, and the other schools that have recently chosen Sakai. I’m sure they’ve done their comparative evaluations and their risk assessments.
I generally try to separate my supportive comments about Sakai as an insider in that community from my general reporting on developments elsewhere in the market; it wasn’t my intention for this to become a Sakai boosterism thread. But I frankly feel your characterization of the state of both projects is inaccurate enough that I am compelled to correct the record.
Relax, Finn. Sakai isn’t on the verge of falling a part. Trust me on that.
I’ll understand if you delete this comment. But I wanted to say one last thing. I don’t think the perception of what’s going on in the development process matches the reality. Overoptimistic timelines and the softpedaling of exactly how different Sakai OAE is going to be from 2.x have given non-technical decisionmakers a wildly distorted view of what the product is like and what it includes. This is happening at my own institution and at many others that I’ve personally dealt with. I see it in the assumptions people make when they post on the listservs. I don’t think the folks at Duke and UNC are “idiots”. Far from it. But if they believe what they read about the state of Sakai on the website and the various slideshows, then they are being mislead.
I may well be overly negative about the OAE’s prospects, but the track record thus far is not good. I am not privy to the high-level discussions, but I hope that somewhere there is a plan for what to do if the OAE fails to produce a workable system within the next 18 months. How long do we keep chasing our sunk costs? If you step back and ask how much work would it be to improve Sakai 2.x to parity with the OAE vision versus how much it will take to get OAE to an LMS-complete 1.0 with some upgrade path from 2.x, it seems clear to me that we’re better off putting all the effort and talent now committed to the OAE into 2.x. Yes, there are lots of architectural flaws. They can be retrofitted piece by piece. Replacing the entire structure in one go is the far riskier path, and after three and a half years of trying, we have very little to show for it. It’s time to cut our losses and invest in the one working LMS we do have.
I really should delete your comment, since you continue to sign your comments with a fake name and non-working email. (Also, this thread really has swerved well off-topic.) But I’ll indulge you this one last time.
You seem to think that resource investments in the two Sakai products are a zero-sum game, i.e., that the resources currently invested in Sakai OAE would be automatically redirected to Sakai CLE if OAE didn’t exist. That is largely false. Schools are making different investments in the two products for different reasons. I am quite confident that a majority of Sakai OAE resources would go elsewhere if OAE didn’t exist. Likewise, we will continue to see an influx of new resources to work on Sakai OAE that wouldn’t be coming to the Sakai community of OAE didn’t exist. Of course, every institution that makes a resource commitment does some due diligence first to see if the resource is worth the investment. I’m talking about doing more than just looking at web sites and slide shows. If OAE really is such an obviously poor investment, then nobody would be stepping up to invest in it. But that’s not the case. To the contrary, you seem to be unhappy with the fact that smart, capable developers are working on OAE when you would rather have them work on your (thus far entirely unspecified) priorities for CLE. There is a disconnect here.
You also seem to think that both the existing community and system evaluators are abandoning Sakai CLE for the vision of OAE. That is also false. From what I can tell based on Duke’s publicly available documentation, it looks like they relied on feedback from peer institutions who are currently using the LMSs being evaluated. Since nobody is currently using OAE as a full LMS, that means the Sakai schools consulted were running Sakai CLE. And by the way, I have never once run into a school that would base their choice of a mission-critical application like an institution-wide LMS on something that hasn’t been released yet. Schools that are evaluating Sakai today are evaluating Sakai CLE, unless they are expressly interested in a cutting-edge system that is still under development, with all the risks that implies. Nobody is going to bet their primary school LMS installation on something they can’t even test yet.
Your comments seem to imply that Sakai CLE is so clunky that schools choosing to adopt Sakai must be enticed by what you apparently believe are false promises about OAE. In your world, if the people making the selections are not idiots then it must be the case that they are being “misled.” But the other possibility is that they have had access to the same information you do and came to different conclusions about both CLE and OAE.
I find this whole conversation hard to take seriously when you hide behind a pseudonym and false email address. Sakai is an open source community. It works on…uh…you know…openness. What that really means is that people and institutions choose to co-invest based on what they perceive to be in their enlightened self-interest. You talk about how “we” should cut “our” losses. People at the institutions investing in Sakai OAE, people at the institutions choosing to migrate to Sakai CLE, they are making very public commitments of both their beliefs and their resources. Hypothetically, do you think that you would be effective at persuading people that have decided to license a private source LMS for their institutions that “we” should cut “our” losses and all invest in one open source platform because you don’t think their platform of choice is evolving quickly enough by complaining anonymously on a blog post about one school’s adoption decision? Because what you’re apparently trying to do here really isn’t any different.
If you want decision-makers to make more or different resource commitments, then you’re going to have to look them in the eye and persuade them that there is a better course of collective action for meeting their needs. And I’ll tell you right now that “Finn Q” doesn’t have any credibility with them. Or with me. You might, whoever you are, but Finn doesn’t. Finn is just an anonymous whiner who comes off as being bitter and alarmist because his (unspecified) personal priorities aren’t getting the attention that he thinks they deserve. I might have been inclined to read your comments more charitably and take your concerns more seriously, but I have no such inclination toward Finn.
Which is a perfect example of why I felt it necessary to create a new policy of limited tolerance for anonymous commenting. If you had attached your real name to your comments, you might have felt compelled to make more careful and specific recommendations, and the people who are in a position to act on those recommendations might have felt at least somewhat inclined to take them seriously (although you’d have a better chance of that happening if you actually directly addressed those people in one of the forums in which these decisions are actually discussed, rather than in the comments thread of some random blog post whose main purpose is to report on the facts of one school’s adoption decision).
If there were some real reason why you felt you would be persecuted for honest criticism, you could have contacted me privately and I could have helped you figure out a way of maybe getting a little traction for your concerns while protecting you from whatever it is that you’re afraid of. But you didn’t choose to do that. Instead, after reading my public warning, which you clearly understood to be related to you, you chose to persist in posting with a pseudonym and a fake email address. If you can’t trust me far enough to let me know who you are even privately, then you can’t comment here.
You have exhausted my patience and my good will. Please go away now.
I find the comments about the differences between Bb 9 and previous versions very interesting. I just left Miami University (Ohio), which was in the middle of a migration from Bb 8 to Sakai. They used the same logic as Duke to justify to faculty, staff and students the “need” to look into alternatives.