After our coverage of Blackboard’s CEO change last week, we were both interviewed by the Washington Business Journal, with the following lede: Analysts and sources I spoke with Monday, both on and off the record, said the decision to bring on Bill Ballhaus as CEO was a combination of Bhatt failing to make progress building […]
Solving the Ed Tech Patent Problem
You may have heard that Khan Academy has filed for several patents. Audrey Watters has written a really strong piece providing the details of the filings in the context of the history of ed tech patents and showing why some academics feel that the patent system clashes with the values upon which academia was built. In the process, she excavates some of my personal history in the Blackboard patent war.
Parent Company of University of Phoenix Could Be Sold to Owner of McGraw-Hill Education
Apollo Education Group, parent company of the University of Phoenix as well as Apollo Global, is in “advanced talks” to be purchased by Apollo Global Management, owner of McGraw-Hill Education and of Cengage debt. Got that? To clarify, the Apollo Education Group is the parent company of the University of Phoenix, and they have a […]
What Blackboard’s New CEO Needs to Do Now (and how you can tell if he’s doing it)
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, […]
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 […]
Three Views of Top 10 e-Literate Posts in 2015
It’s the year end, and I have writer’s block. Like many people, I would much prefer to play with numbers than get work done. Instead of just sharing the Top 10 or Top 20 blog posts in terms of 2015 page views, however, I thought it would be interesting to take three different views this […]