e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: ANGEL-Learning

  • Instructure Is Truly Anomalous

    Phil started his last post with the following:

    I’m not sure which is more surprising – Instructure’s continued growth with no major hiccups or their competitors’ inability after a half-decade to understand and accept what is at its core a very simple strategy.

    Personally, I vote for Door #1. As surprising as the competition’s seeming sense of denial is, Instructure’s performance is truly shocking. After five years, I continue to be surprised by it. It’s not just how well they are executing. It’s that they seem to defy the laws of physics in the LMS market. We had no reason to believe that any LMS company could rack up the numbers they are showing—in several different areas—no matter how well they execute.

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  • The Evolving LMS Market, Part II

    I have gotten a lot of very nice compliments in the last 24 hours about the first post in this two-part series. I do want to emphasize that a huge portion of the value in that post comes from the great survey work that Casey Green does. All I did was tease out a few implications and make a few new graphs (which, I admit, were very pretty). If you want to see analysis like this continue in future years, then support the Campus Computing Project.

    In this next part, we’re going to go “off-road” a little and see what we can figure out in areas where we don’t have quantitative data that is as solid as Casey’s. As I wrote in the previous post in this series, there are roughly 875 WebCT and ANGEL customers who will have to migrate to a new LMS in the next few years, in an environment of strong budget pressures. This creates an atmosphere in which more and different schools may be in play than has typically been the case. But evaluating options and choosing to move are two different things. What happens in the next few years is likely to shape the LMS landscape for years to come, at least in North America.

    Let’s see if we can read the tea leaves.

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  • The Evolving LMS Market, Part I

    As Casey Green said in my recent interview with him, the LMS space is a “market in transition.” In 2005, the year that Blackboard acquired WebCT, the two platforms had a combined total of 75.6% U.S. higher education market share, and the next closest competitor had barely cracked 2% market share. Today, the situation is substantially different and changing rapidly. But the narratives around exactly what’s happening tend to be off. Typically, I hear the frame as being a contest between Blackboard and “open source.” Has “open source” (by which we mean Moodle and Sakai, the two open source LMSs with significant market share in the United States) made inroads into the market?  If you read what the majority of sell-side financial analysts ((Sell-side analysts are financial analysts who work for major brokerage houses and provide stock analysis to retail investors. Comments by analysts that you read in business news articles are typically from sell-side analysts.)) are writing, you may see the claim that “open source” is not putting a major dent in Blackboard. If you talk to Moodle or Sakai advocates, you might hear that they are crushing the company in sales. Neither account is really capturing what’s happening in the market, so I’m going to try to explain what we know about what’s really going on in a two-part series. In this post, I’ll talk about what the data are telling us so far about the recent shifts in the market, describe how colleges and universities come to decide that they need to go to market for an LMS, and assess the degree to which we may see an uptick in the number of schools that decide to look around and evaluate their options. In the second post, I’ll describe how the next four years of market transition may be different than the previous four and what signs we should be watching for to see which way the market is going to break.

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  • Has the Department of Justice Called You?

    Jeff Young from The Chronicle of Higher Education has a well-researched piece up on the Department of Justice’s early steps toward investigating ANGEL’s acquisition by Blackboard. If anybody out there has talked to the DoJ and would like to share some details, please let me know. You can contact me privately at michael [at] mfeldstein [dot] com.

  • US Department of Justice Investigating Blackboard ANGEL Acquisition

    This just in from Desire2Learn’s patent blog:

    Blackboard issued two press releases regarding its acquisition of ANGEL Learning (ANGEL) – one on May 6, announcing the intention to acquire, and one on May 11, stating that the acquisition was complete. Indeed, Matthew Small, Blackboard’s chief business officer (and general counsel) stated “I don’t think that there’s any anti-trust concern with this combination.“

    On May 14, 2009, nearly 2 weeks ago (and the day that Michael Chasen addressed the attendees at the ANGEL users’ conference), the United States Department of Justice, Antitrust Division (DOJ) opened an investigation on the Blackboard acquisition of ANGEL. We were notified that same day (presumably Blackboard and ANGEL Learning were notified well before then). At that time we thought this information was confidential, so we did not disclose it.

    Today the DOJ advised us that the investigation is not, and has never been, confidential. In the coming days and weeks, it is likely that we will be responding to requests from the DOJ about the market.

    Given the interest of the educational community in these developments, we thought it important to share this information.

  • Three Tests for the 'New' Blackboard

    Today Blackboard announced that ANGEL’s Ray Henderson will be the new President of the Blackboard Learn division. This is great news. Ray is one of the best executives in educational technology today, known for his competence, his integrity, and his leadership in supporting open standards and openness in general. Does this mean a new beginning for Blackboard?

    Many of us remember when WebCT’s Chris Vento was made Blackboard’s Senior Vice President of Technology and Product Development after that merger. Like Ray, Chris was regarded as a leader in the field. And like Ray, he was a champion of open standards. I remember listening to Chris, soon after the merger, speaking with great confidence about how Blackboard was committed to standards like Tool Interoperability, how openness was good for Blackboard’s business, and how it was a new day. A year later, he was gone. Blackboard is not known today for its leadership in open standards. Nor is it known for its leadership in customer service—something that the company claimed it was going to learn from WebCT and claims again that it will learn from ANGEL. Going by the tweets from the ANGEL user conference, Blackboard’s leadership wasn’t talking a whole lot this week about how Chris and the WebCT leadership helped to change Blackboard’s culture for the better. When the speakers mentioned WebCT at all, it seemed to be mostly to say that they underestimated how buggy the software was. That’s not change we can believe in.

    So the question is whether Blackboard will prove more willing to be changed by Ray and ANGEL than they were by Chris and WebCT. Are they ready to learn? Time will tell. But there are three specific actions I will be watching for as early tests of just how serious Blackboard is about learning from ANGEL, particularly with regard to openness.

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  • Open Thread on Blackboard/ANGEL Merger

    Update: It looks like “bbplusangel” has already gotten some momentum on Twitter, so I’m switching my tag over to that.

    I’ve already invited the opinions of ANGEL customers on a different post, but let me throw the doors wide open. I’m really curious to hear from all of you regarding your opinions. What are your hopes? Your fears? Your expectations? How does this change the landscape? Please comment.

    Again, if you are writing your own blog post on the topic, you can ping this post by linking to it. Alternatively, I’m proposing the tag “bb-angel” for blogging, Twittering, del.icio.us…ing, etc.