Two years ago today, Blackboard made a dramatic change of course with a series of public announcements: Blackboard acquired two Moodle hosting and service providers — Moodlerooms in the US and NetSpot in Australia (although they had different business models). Blackboard created an Open Source Services Group, which helps “institutions successfully manage open source learning management systems […]
Blackboard
New look at LMS data for US small colleges
Last fall I mentioned two new non-survey data sources available to track LMS adoption within higher ed. While surveys for subjective, attitudinal information still make sense, surveys of hard data are losing their value over time. Analyses of automatically collected system data place less of a burden on the organizations providing the information, and these […]
The Resilient Higher Ed LMS: Canvas is the only fully-established recent market entry
For a few years starting in 2009, it seemed one of the best ways to raise VC funds or corporate internal investment was to say “we can beat Blackboard with a new cloud-based platform”. Witness Coursekit / Lore, Instructure / Canvas, OpenClass, LoudCloud Systems, Helix, and even more recently MOOC platforms. There were many articles […]
Update: Blackboard and Washington Post change the employee count
Well that was a major change. As I noted yesterday, Blackboard described its reorganization efforts to the Washington Post for its Saturday profile of the company and CEO Jay Bhatt. Blackboard today is completely reorganized, compared with a year ago, a process that required layoffs in some departments and new hires in others, Bhatt said. […]
Blackboard seems to have cut large amount of workforce
Update: Please see new post with updated information. Update: I heard back from the company that part of the discrepancy in numbers is that public statements about employee count may have changed in whether they included the call center employees (which vary seasonally). If I can get some hard numbers from Blackboard, I will publish […]
State of the Anglosphere’s Higher Education LMS Market: 2013 Edition
I shared the most recent graphic summarizing the LMS market in September 2012, and thanks to new data sources it’s time for an update. As with all previous versions, the 2005 – 2009 data points are based on the Campus Computing Project, and therefore is based on US adoption from non-profit institutions. This set of longitudinal […]
Layoffs and reorganization at Blackboard
Bill Flook, who covers the DC technology scene for Business Journals, just interviewed Blackboard CEO Jay Bhatt about last week’s layoff. The full article can be found here. From a quick read, it looks like Blackboard is executing on two key priorities: Trimming the fat caused by years of acquisitions and redundant operations; and Completing […]