e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Blackboard-Inc.

  • What Schoology’s Venture Funding Means for the LMS Market

    LMS vendor Schoology just raised $32 million in Series D venture capital funding, bringing the total that they’ve raised to just over $57 million. If you’ve never heard of them, that’s because they have mostly been focused on K12, where they are doing very well. But they have turned their attention to US higher ed recently. They had a surprisingly big presence at EDUCAUSE, where CEO Jeremy Friedman told me that they are prepared to make an aggressive push. Their ability to get major funding was probably helped by Instructure going to market, and possibly by the leak that Blackboard is putting itself on the block as well. I don’t generally take money guys too seriously in their ability to predict ed tech, but they may be lucky on this one. I think there may be an opening the US higher ed LMS market for a new entrant.

    LMS selection for schools often works a little like the selection process that high school students typically go through when picking a college. Students looking at colleges usually have a favorite going in. Maybe their friends are going there. Or their big brother or sister. Or maybe they just heard that it’s cool. But they don’t apply to just one college, in case it doesn’t work out for one reason or another. So they have a second tier of schools that might be OK too. Generally, they don’t know much about your favorite school going in and they know even less about the “might be OK” schools. Depending on how cautious they are, they might throw in one or two “safety” schools that they really don’t want to go to but that they feel (or their parents feel) should be included for the sake of completeness.

    Likewise, colleges and universities frequently go into an LMS evaluation process with a favorite. Because the selection is generally done by a committee of stakeholders rather than just one person, there might be conflicting opinions on what the favorite is. But more often than not, there is a nascent majority or a consensus opinion about the likely winner, at least among the core selection committee. Back in the early to mid-aughts, the default favorite was usually Blackboard because it was considered to be the safe alternative that everybody was using. When Blackboard faltered, the favorite began to split between D2L and Moodle—and occasionally Sakai, particularly for larger public universities—with type of school and geography having a big influence on which one was likely to be the frontrunner. These days, the schools that Phil and I talk to report Instructure as the starting frontrunner at least four times out of five, across school types or geographies.

    But LMS selection processes still need their “might be OK” candidates. For one thing, most of them are mandated by policy or by law to do a real multi-vendor evaluation. And most evaluation committees genuinely do want to look at alternatives. Just because they have a sense going in of which alternative is most likely to be the best doesn’t mean that they are closed-minded. The trouble is that there aren’t many alternatives that selection committees feel hopeful about these days. Increasingly, Sakai and Moodle aren’t even making it to the serious evaluation stage in US higher ed evaluations; and even when they do, they are often treated like safety schools. Blackboard never fully recovered from reputational damage done under Michael Chasen and their failure to deliver on Ultra this year was a huge setback. At the moment, they are being treated like a safety school as often as not. If Ultra slips further—and maybe even if it doesn’t—they could start losing significant numbers of customers again. And we haven’t run into many schools that are particularly excited about D2L either. Probably the best I can say for them is that they are the least likely of the LMS companies that are not Instructure to be dismissed out-of-hand.

    I think there’s an opportunity for a new entrant to get a fair hearing from selection committees that want a real horse race but aren’t excited about any of the incumbents. Ironically, the rise and success of Instructure has probably reduced risk aversion among schools to go with a scrappy start-up. I don’t know if Schoology is going to be the one that gets a foothold in the market because of this opening, but their timing is definitely good.

  • Is Moodle “Bigger than Martin”?

    In his recent post on why Moodle matters, Phil wrote,

    For a large portion of our readers who deal mostly with US higher education, it could be easy to dismiss Moodle as an LMS and an idea past its prime.[…]And yet no other academic LMS solution comes close to Moodle in terms of worldwide deployments and learners enrolled.

    Likewise, if you’re not embedded in the Moodle community, you may not know how central Moodle creator Martin Dougiamas is to that project, or even know who he is. And yet, he is huge. I can name maybe a handful of people who are relatively widely known and respected in educational technology. I can name only a few who are admired and even beloved. I can name very few indeed who are not working for universities (although that’s changing a little, now that Jim Groom and David Wiley have both joined commercial ventures). Within the circle that knows him, Martin’s many admirers have been fiercely loyal to and protective of him, trusting him absolutely to steer Moodle the product, Moodle the community, and Moodle the brand. When you add to that the size of Moodle’s adoption footprint, one can make the case that Martin Dougiamas is one of the most consequential figures in the history of educational technology.

    Which is why it is so remarkable that Phil and I are hearing, for the first time ever, from a number of different, independent sources, the phrase, “Moodle is bigger than Martin now.” It is another indicator that Moodle is reaching an inflection point.

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  • Blackboard Acquires Large Latin American Moodle Provider

    In my first post-BbWorld blog post, I noted that the international market is hugely important for Blackboard and Moodle is hugely important for their international strategy. Nearly a quarter of the company’s revenue and much of their growth comes from their international business, where they seem to be way ahead of their main North American competition in many countries. Learn has some really large contracts—whole country contracts, in some cases—but Moodle has a lot of smaller contracts. In some countries, you just can’t get traction in the LMS space unless you have a Moodle offering. In my post, I predicted that we would see continuing investments in Moodle, based on what we heard from senior management.

    Today, Blackboard announced that they have acquired Nivel Siete, a Colombia-based Moodle hosting and services provider with over 200 customers in Latin America. This follows their acquisition of Remote Learner UK, a company that serviced about 100 UK- and Ireland-based Moodle schools at the time of the acquisition and their acquisition of the X-Ray learning analytics company that currently is focused on Moodle. These are all in the last year. And they are on top of the original acquisition of Moodlerooms and Netspot, two of the biggest Moodle providers around. There are some interesting—and complicated—long-term implications here for the governance and financial structure of the Moodle ecosystem that Phil and I will eventually write about, but for now it’s worth noting that Blackboard is making serious investments in Moodle and international growth.

  • Blackboard: Ask and Ye Shall Receive (Better Answers)

    About a week ago, I complained about Blackboard’s lack of clarity in messaging about their platform in general and the implications for managed hosting customers in particular. I wrote, in part,

    What is “Premium SaaS”? Is it managed hosting? Is it private cloud? What does it mean for current managed hosting customers? What we have found is that there doesn’t seem to be complete shared understanding even among the Blackboard management team about what the answers to these questions are.

    The problem with this oversight is deeper than just leaving managed hosting customers in the dark. Blackboard is asking customers (and prospects) to have patience as the company performs a major retooling on their platforms. In order to get that patience, they need for customers to understand (and believe) that this really is a major retooling, what is being retooled (at a high level), and what they will get that’s different from other platforms at the end of the process. This is a hard communication challenge, but it is also Blackboard’s live-or-die challenge. They really need to convince customers and prospects that the platform has a bright future, and to do that, they have to communicate nuances and technical issues that are not easy to communicate to executives. This is not something that can be fixed with a couple of DevCon sessions.

    That’s why I was happy to see Blackboard respond this week with more clarity.

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  • Blackboard’s Messaging Problems

    There are a lot of things that are hard to evaluate from the outside when gauging how a company is doing under new management in the midst of a turnaround with big new products coming out. For example, how good is Ultra, Blackboard’s new user experience? (At least, I think the user experience is what they mean by “Ultra.” Most of the time.) We can look at it from the outside and play around with it for a bit, but the best way to judge it is to talk to a lot of folks who have spent time living with it and delivering courses in it. There aren’t that many of those at the moment. Blackboard has offered to put us in touch with some of them, and we will let you know what we learn from them after we talk to them. How likely is Blackboard to deliver the promised functionality on their Ultra to-do list to other customers on schedule (or at all)? Since this is a big initiative and the company doesn’t have much of a track record, it’s hard to tell in advance of them actually releasing software. We’ll watch and report on it as it comes out. How committed is Blackboard to self-hosted customers on the current platform? We have their word, and logical reasons why we believe they mean it when they say they want to support those customers, but we have to talk to a bunch of customers to find out what they think of the support that they are getting, and even then, we only know about Blackboard’s current execution, which is not the same as their future commitment. So there are a lot of critical aspects about the company that are just hard and time-consuming to evaluate and will have to wait on more data.

    But not everything is hard to evaluate. Communication, for example, is pretty easy to judge. Last year I mocked Jay Bhatt pretty soundly for his keynote. (Of course, we have hit D2L a lot harder for their communication issues because theirs have been a lot worse.) In some ways, it is so easy to critique communication that we have to be careful not to just take cheap shots. Everybody loves to mock vendors in general and LMS vendors in particular. We’re mainly interested in communications problems that genuinely threaten to hurt their relationship with their customers. Blackboard does have serious customer communication problems at the moment, and they do matter. I’m going to hit on a few of them.

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  • Blackboard Ultra and Other Product and Company Updates

    Phil and I spent much of this past week at BbWorld trying to understand what is going on there. The fact that their next-generation Ultra user experience is a year behind is deservedly getting a lot of attention, so one of our goals going into the conference was to understand why this happened, where the development is now, and how confident we could be in the company’s development promises going forward. Blackboard, to their credit, gave us tons of access to their top executives and technical folks. Despite the impression that a casual observer might have, there is actually a ton going on at the company. I’m going to try to break down much of the major news at a high level in this post. (more…)

  • 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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