e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Blackboard-Inc.

  • Pre-EDUCAUSE Announcements and Other Odds and Ends

    We’re in that period leading up to EDUCAUSE when everybody makes their big announcements. Two caught my eye as being relevant to e-Literate; I’m sure there will be more.

    First, Blackboard announced some improved integration of Wimba and Elluminate with competing LMS platforms. I argued previously that there’s good reason to believe that they would live up to their promise of continuing to support such integrations, and now we have the evidence. Several Wimba products now support the cross-platform IMS Basic LTI integration standard, and Elluminate now has a new (or improved?) Moodle-specific integration connector. As Blackboard continues to widen their portfolio of products, I think you’ll see more and more about them actively working with competing LMS providers.

    Second, Desire2Learn announced progress on their mobile support. I’ve been meaning to blog about their efforts in this area since they announced their plans at their conference this summer, but I just haven’t managed to get around to it before now. Like Blackboard and Moodle, D2L is pursuing a belt-and-suspenders approach to mobile by building out both phone-specific apps (Blackberry and iPhone for sure; they’ve hinted about Android but I don’t know if they’ve announced anything about it explicitly yet) and a device-independent HTML-based mobile interface. As I have written before, this strikes me as an expensive strategy. But I guess if you can’t be sure which way the market is going to go in an important area like mobile, you invest the resources necessary to hedge your bets. Anyway, what I appreciate about D2L’s current press release is that they tell you exactly what subset of LMS functionality their mobile interface supports. None of these mobile apps are going to do everything that their native interface does at this point, and the details can really matter. I’d love to see a feature list like this one from all the LMS providers.

    I’ll be at EDUCAUSE on Wednesday and Thursday and hope to come back with some tidbits and possibly some interviews to share. If you want to try to catch up with me while I’m there, your best bet is probably to go to the community source reception.

    One last non-EDUCAUSE-related tidbit: If you haven’t watched Robert Scoble’s interview with Blackboard’s VP of Mobile Kayvon Beykpour, you should. Beykpour founded the company Terribly Clever that Blackboard acquired for its mobile academic portal. In the interview, he proves himself to be…well…terribly clever. He has some interesting insights into where the academic mobile space is going, and Scoble does a good job of asking the right questions.

  • Blackboard's Wimba and Elluminate Acquisitions

    I have often said that, if you want to understand the likely future behavior of a publicly traded company, the best way to approach it is to think of it as a complex money-making machine. If you can understand how the machine works, then you can make reasonable guesses as to how it will behave under different circumstances and the degree to which that behavior is likely to help or hurt your interests.

    There has been a lot of hand-wringing about Blackboard’s announced acquisitions of Wimba and Elluminate. Let’s look at the facts.

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  • Blackboard Mobile Learn: More on Web vs. Native Development

    Update: Literally a minute after I published this, Scott Wilson tweeted about this Slideshare presentation about the relative advantages of web-native development for smartphones.

    Thanks to George Kroner for this link to data on student mobile phone usage at University of Edinburgh. Now, this is just one data point, so we have to be careful not to overgeneralize. However, what strikes me about the survey, in addition to the high usage of smart phones in general, is how different the market share numbers are from the U.S. In this survey, Nokia has a full 25% of smartphone market share—substantially more than RIM has. Nokia’s smartphones run Symbian, an operating system that barely registers in the U.S. in terms of market share. It would appear that smartphone market share can be highly variable across different markets.

    This may be one reason why the growth in mobile touch-friendly web sites is far outstripping the growth in native mobile apps:

    Source: Taptu via GigaOm

    Even within the United States, smartphone market share has been highly volatile. Consider this graph from The New York Times:

    Source: The New York Times

    We tend to forget that, just three years ago, Palm was at the top of the U.S. smartphone market and Apple didn’t have a smartphone. Given that Palm has just been purchased by HP, Microsoft is coming out with a ground-up rewrite of their mobile operating system, and Android is gaining traction fast, making a bet that you know which phones are going to be hot three years from now and developing a separate native app for each of them can be a risky and expensive proposition.

    This is part of what makes the Blackboard vs. Moodle dueling mobile strategies interesting. Blackboard has chosen the more expensive native app approach and is charging extra for the capability (a decision that Ray Henderson felt a need to justify in his recent blog post). Moodle has several different approaches being developed by various parties, but the one most closely associated with the Moodle community management is web-native and (of course, given that it’s open source) free. In terms of mobile functionality, we have no real evidence that one platform is leading the other, although I suspect that they will remain close to comparable for the short to medium term.

    I have no doubt that Blackboard will make some Mobile Learn sales in the short term (although, given that they don’t break out their sales in their earnings reports anymore, we’ll have no way to know how many Mobile Learn versus Mobile Central sales they make, or how many mobile sales they make in the aggregate). The question is how much pressure will they come under how quickly from their customer base to bundle this capability for free as their competitor does. And will their native app approach yield them a competitive edge that enables them to continue to charge, or will it turn out to be a financial millstone around their necks as they are forced to continue the higher-cost development strategy to provide a free application?

  • Moodle 2.0 Versus Blackboard 9.0/9.1

    Here’s a video highlighting some of the features in Moodle 2.o, which is expected to be released some time in the next couple of months:

    You can see a video of Blackboard 9.1 highlights here. (Sorry, it’s not embeddable.) Note that neither of these videos are “official”; they are both made by adopters.

    It’s interesting to note that the highlights list of the Moodle 2.0 release has a fair bit of overlap with the highlights of the Blackboard 9.0 and 9.1 releases:

    • Both tout improved usability
    • Specific improvements in test creation usability
    • Both now support searching for and embedding external media (e.g., YouTube videos, Creative Commons-licensed photographs, etc.) within their UIs.
    • Both now support mobile clients
    • Wikis (new in Blackboard 9.0, improved in Moodle 2.0)
    • Improved support for blogs

    Developing a good LMS is hard and I happen to think that both development teams have done some good work on improving their respective platforms. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to feel a little bit of that frustration of the edupunks when looking at these highlights. For example, I have been able to search for and embed videos and images inside of WordPress for years now. There is a balance that needs to be struck between creating a coherent, supportable environment and getting out of the way of the unbelievable pace of innovation on the consumer web. We’re making some progress toward that balance, but we’re clearly not there yet.

  • Some Strengths of Sakai 2

    Image: University of North Carolina

    I write a fair bit about Sakai 3 because I am excited about the possibilities for change that it represents. That said, there are a couple of points worth emphasizing. First, Sakai 3 doesn’t exist yet and won’t be adoptable as a full LMS for a while. (See Sakai 3: What It Is and When To Move To It for details.) Second, Sakai 2 is a very good current-generation LMS that is meeting the needs of many schools today.

    University of North Carolina, which has been piloting Sakai 2, has been putting out some excellent evaluation materials on it. (See UNC’s Sakai Evaluation Results, for example.) Their Sakai pilot blog also contains some gems. For example, they have identified five “big ideas” that they believe represent some of Sakai’s strengths—particularly in comparison to Blackboard, their current LMS. Here is a video describing the first of those ideas:

    In addition to the school-wide evaluation, the UNC medical school has been looking at Sakai to meet their more specialized needs. (See Academic Study of Blackboard vs. Sakai at UNC School of Medicine.) They have some niche requirements which are critical for them, foremost of which is a good calendaring system. Here’s a video of medical school faculty talking about how Sakai works for them:

  • Blackboard's iPad App and its implications

    Ray Henderson has a post up about his sense of responsibility to customers regarding balancing innovation with mature products (careful refinements in features and support services to meet customer needs) versus innovation in new areas (bold thinking and experiments). It’s vintage Ray—thoughtful, balanced, and customer-focused. And while Ray is always the first person to admit that words and deeds do not amount to the same thing, I suspect that Blackboard customers are going to be pleased to hear the company’s leadership talking this way.

    Ray also unwrapped a demo video of Blackboard’s new iPad application:

    Honestly, this looks like a promising app. If I were a student or faculty member heavily using Blackboard and had an iPad, I would want it. I would go further and say that if I were a student or faculty member heavily using Blackboard and thinking about buying an iPad, I might find this app to be an additional motivator to buy one. One common weakness of LMSs is that they don’t always make multitasking easy. Blackboard’s iPad app appears to help in that area. Of course, we don’t know just how much functionality is covered, which is critical. But conceptually speaking, I find the execution to be appealing. The LMS may not be your bag, but if you have to use one heavily, then this may not be a bad way to go.

    Let’s tease out a few additional implications:

  • A Closer Look at Mobile App Development for Higher Education

    I have been blogging a fair bit lately about the competing mLearning efforts between Blackboard and the Moodle community. Much of the conversation so far has focused on the front end apps and whether web-based or native apps are better. (The latest is that there is a native iPhone app for Moodle in addition to the mobile browser app.) But let’s be clear: Many of the smartphone apps you have for your iPhone, Android, Blackberry, or whatever were built by lone developers working part time. I don’t want to trivialize that work, but it’s hard to see how one platform is going to achieve a durable competitive advantage against the others based on its mobile client.

    I’m going to draw on some recent conversations about mobile apps in the Sakai community to reflect a little on what it takes to build an mLearning platform. In the process, I’ll also think out loud about what kind of a business this area will or will not sustain in the long run.

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