I’m looking to get a sense of the reaction of the Blackboard/ANGEL news from ANGEL customers. If you are an ANGEL customer, please let me know what you think in the comments to this post. If you are writing a blog post of your own, please ping this post by linking to it. (Your post will show up as a pingback in the comments section of this post.)
Tag: ANGEL-Learning
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Wow
As you may have heard by now, Blackboard has acquired ANGEL. There will be plenty of time for analysis in the days ahead. For now, I just have a personal message.
To my friends at ANGEL, I wish you well. You all have done great work advancing the causes of interoperability and ease of use, and in providing top-notch customer service. I fervently hope that this acquisition will give you all opportunities to continue your great work.
To my friends at Blackboard (and yes, I do have friends at Blackboard), I hope that you gain all that ANGEL has to offer. In addition to some great colleagues, you are getting a company with a reputation for leading the charge on open standards, supporting independent open source projects, and being superb partners and community members.
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Bad News for Blackboard, Good News for ANGEL
This is another one I’ve been meaning to post for some time. Last year, I wrote a post called Bad News for Blackboard, Good News for Moodle that talked about changes in LMS market share among American community colleges according to a survey done by the Instructional Technology Council. The headline number was that Blackboard’s market share in this customer group was declining rapidly, with Moodle being the primary beneficiary and ANGEL being the secondary beneficiary.
Blackboard’s downward trend continues. According to this year’s study, Blackboard’s market share among ITC’s constituents is 59%, down from 77% percent the previous year. There was a slight drop in market share for the Blackboard platform, but most of it was for WebCT. It looks like Blackboard is failing to hold on to the community colleges that are being forced to migrate off WebCT as it approaches its end of life.
This year is something of a mirror image of last year’s results in the race for the #2 spot. ANGEL zoomed to the top, more than doubling their market share to over 20%. (It’s hard to tell the exact number from the graph in the report.) This is the first time I’m aware of that any non-Blackboard LMS has achieved market share in any U.S. segment that pushed so far into the double digits. The third place, Moodle, is up to about 11%, making ANGEL the clear front runner as the replacement for WebCT, particularly Campus Edition, which has had a lot of market share in the community colleges. (It looks like something close to two thirds of community colleges in the survey who left WebCT in the last year moved to ANGEL.) All the other entrants are at 5% or below.
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CSU Picks Moodle and ANGEL
Cal State University, with its 23 campuses and 250,000 students, has signed contracts with Moodlerooms and ANGEL, according to Campus Technology. (I’ve known this was in the works for some time now, but I guess it just went official.) These are statewide pricing contracts; individual campuses still get to choose whatever system they choose. Still, it’s a big deal for both vendors, as well as for the Moodle community. Word on the street is that both Moodle and ANGEL got particularly high marks because of their strong accessibility; California has strict accessibility laws and regulations.
I have been blogging a fair bit about the IMS LIS standard. I want to point out that LIS makes this sort of adoption more meaningful. Generally speaking, individual campuses tend to be reluctant to move off of whatever they have because of high migration costs. With LIS, one substantial portion of that migration cost—namely, integration—is very substantially reduced. It also becomes much more economically feasible for campuses to run more than one of these systems at the same time. Interoperability standards may not be thrilling from a pedagogical perspective, but if they lower the barriers for IT staff to provide alternatives to faculty and students then they have a strong impact on teaching and learning at the end of the day.
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Social Constructivists and eLearning
This is a guest post by Jim Farmer
On July 15th Luke Fernandez, Weber State University and frequent Sakai contributor, posted “Moodle and Social Constructionism: Looking for the Individual in the Community” on Academic Commons. Broadly interpreting his post about attending the San Francisco MoodleMoot US 2008, he identified two issues: (1) How does the choice of an instructional method impact the design, development, or choice and use of a learning system? (2) And implicitly from his response to this conference, what conferences and conference programs increase the adoption and use of education methodologies and technologies? Both have been topics of discussion since the San Francisco MoodleMoot; this post responds to those issues.
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Bad News for Blackboard, Good News for Moodle
The American Association of Community College’s Instructional Technology Council (ITC) has just published its 2007 Distance Education Survey Results, covering data from 154 U.S. community colleges. And there’s a lot of interesting stuff in it. Here are the headlines that I drew from it:
- Distance education continues to grow at a very healthy clip, particularly in this market segment.
- Blackboard is losing market share rapidly
- Moodle doubled it’s market share in the past 12 months and now has the highest market share after Blackboard/WebCT in this market segment.
- ANGEL and D2L also grew their market share.
- We have reason to expect more LMS churn in the near future, which is bad for Blackboard.
- The top 5 areas of likely distance learning-related service growth in this segment are (1) online student organization web site and services, (2) online counseling and advising, (3) online plagiarism evaluation, (4) audio/video streaming, and (5) online textbook sales.
As you can imagine, the LMS market share stuff is what interests me the most at the moment.
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ANGEL's Open Source Move
ANGEL Learning has announced that they have incorporated TiddlyWiki into their product and that they have released the source code to the enhancements. What the announcement doesn’t mention is that the company also made a financial contribution to TiddlyWiki’s main developer Jeremy Ruston in recognition and support of his work.
I happen to have had a number of conversations with the ANGEL folks about this move, starting from early in their process, and I must say that they made every effort to do this right. They put a fair amount of thought, for example, into where they should contribute the code and considered donating it back to the TiddlyWiki community before settling on EduForge. It’s sometimes difficult for a smallish company to figure out an affordable way to productively contribute back to open source; I hope that other educational software products, including open source and proprietary LMSs, pick up on ANGEL’s contribution and help to build a larger community around it. TiddlyWiki is a great tool for teaching and I think that ANGEL’s enhancements to it are rather clever.
Kudos to ANGEL Learning for understanding and respecting the work of an open source community.