e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Barry-Dahl

  • Giving D2L Credit Where Credit Is Due

    Michael and I have made several specific criticisms of D2L’s marketing claims lately culminating in this blog post about examples based on work at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) and California State University at Long Beach (CSULB).

    I understand that other ed tech vendors make marketing claims that cannot always be tied to reality, but these examples cross a line. They misuse and misrepresent academic outcomes data – whether public research-based on internal research – and essentially take credit for their technology “delivering results”.

    This week brought welcome updates from D2L that go a long way towards addressing the issues we raised. As of Monday, I noticed that the ‘Why Brightspace? Results’ page now has links to supporting material for each claim, and the UWM claim has been reworded. Today, D2L released a blog post explaining these changes and admitting the mistakes. D2L even changed the web page to allow text selection for copy / paste. From the blog post: (more…)

  • Blackboard's Market Share Erosion

    Barry Dahl is asking the question, “Is Blackboard losing clients?” and has created a wiki for people to enter information on whether they are migrating to Blackboard, migrating from it, or re-evaluating their installation. In general, it would be great to see more visibility of information of this kind. I’d love to see a wiki or database where schools can enter the LMS(s) they are using and their state of evaluation for the future, regardless of brands they adopt or consider. But at a coarse-grained level, we already know the answer to Barry’s question. In November of 2007, bolstered by the excellent financial forensic work of Jim Farmer, I wrote a post entitled “Blackboard Is Losing Customers, But What Does It Mean?” Then in March, 2008 I reported on a survey by the American Association of Community College’s Instructional Technology Council (ITC) showing a loss of Blackboard’s market share within the American community college cohort.

    The main takeaways from these data points are as follows:

    • Blackboard is losing market share.
    • Most or all of this loss is happening at the low end of the market.
    • The two main drivers for loss on the low end are (1) Blackboard raising their average price to $50K/customer, and (2) Blackboard announcing the imminent death of WebCT CE, which is forcing low-end campuses to re-evaluate their vendor situation.
    • Despite the market share loss, Blackboard is growing both revenues and profits.
    • The reason Blackboard is growing both of these is that they are able to cross-sell and up-sell more product to their higher end customers (and even some of their mid-sized customers) while acquiring new high-end customers. 
    • So far, it appears that Blackboard is continuing to do very well on the higher end of the market, probably because they are perceived as a “safe bet” by the average risk-averse university.
    Blackboard CFO Michael Beach explicitly acknowledged much of this in the company’s last quarterly earnings call. Responding to a question about Blackboard’s shrinking number of international customers over the quarter, Beach responded,

    Yeah, I think clearly we never want to lose clients, but I think the trend, which generally what we’ve kind of experience broader across Blackboard, which was we had attrition of low priced customers at the same time we were adding higher priced customers. So, the overall dynamic the overall impact on contract value is positive but from a unit back that we, we didn’t had enough to cover the losses.

    So the answer to Barry’s question is yes, Blackboard is losing clients, but that doesn’t mean that they are losing net business.

  • Bring On Da Noise: The Backchannel Panel

    I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. Barry Dahl has a great post analyzing the back-channel comments from our recent panel discussion with Stephen Downes and Robbie Melton. He concludes that only 31% of the posts were productive, by which he means on-topic questions or comments. This issue came up during the panel discussion itself, and Robbie (brilliantly, in my opinion) characterized it as a “teachable moment.”

    I think a big reason why there was so much off-topic chatter is that we didn’t really establish clear patterns or norms for how the back-channel would be encorporated into the larger dialog. The audience treated it like an experiment because we treated it like an experiment. I heard some suggestions from audience members afterward about how the technology could be modified to improve the experience (e.g., disallow anonymous posting, shut off the flow when the panelists are talking, have a moderator filter the comments, etc.), but before I would want to try imposing any of those hard limits on the participants, I would first want to try having a little more preparatory dialog with them about the most productive ways to use the backchannel and how we all would like to interact with it.

  • The Blackboard Patent Pledge

    I’m late to the party on the pledge news for a variety of reasons (not the least of which is a recalcitrant DNS server out there in the ether that denied me access to my new blog site for the better part of the last two days…grr). It is gratifying to see that my absence really didn’t matter much. A lot has been written about this in the past few days and I don’t really have anything new to add.

    If you’re playing catch-up on the issue, you’ll want to start with Blackboard’s own page on the patent pledge. Equally important to read and read carefully is the joint statement by the EDUCAUSE and Sakai Foundation boards in response. In posting the letter to the Saki listserv, Sakai Foundation Board Chairman John Norman introduced it with the following warning:

    Bb announced an Open Source Patent pledge today. www.blackboard.com

    In their press release they refer to ‘collaboration’ with Sakai and Educause. Our ‘collaboration’ was to try make it as useful as possible. Since Bb quote selectively from our statement, I reproduce it in full below. It will go up on the Sakai website later today.

    I recommend taking John at his word and read the whole letter, in part because it is very well-crafted and encapsulates a lot of the sentiments–both postive and negative–that have been expressed about the pledge since the announcement. For your convenience, I have reproduced the letter in its entirety “below the fold” in this post.

    Inside Higher Education has a good piece on the story this morning, with quotes from many of the usual suspects as well as a few unusual ones. THE Journal has some good, in-depth quotes from Sakai and Blackboard representatives. Slashdot has picked up the story as well, and includes a few interesting and informative comments. Not covered in any of these are comments from the bloggers you’ll always want to read on this topic, including (but not limited to) Seb, Barry, and Stephen. Also interesting is Elgg developer Ben Werdmuller’s (re)assertion that Bb’s patent wouldn’t cover Elgg anyway.

    Since the community as gotten so good at responding to these issues, I think we should take better advantage of the whole RSS thing and consolidate the various comments for easier consumption. If people blogging on this topic would include “edupatents” as a tag or somewhere in the body of their post text, I would be happy to set up an aggregator on e-Literate that scoops up those posts (and would encourage others to do the same). Let me know if there is interest in this; it would be pretty easy for me to do.

    Now, if you haven’t seen the EDUCAUSE/Sakai statement, keep reading:

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