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 […]
Blackboard-Inc.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]