e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Blackboard

  • Launch Of Moodle Users Association: 44 members sign up, mostly as individuals

    The Moodle Users Association (MUA), a crowd-funding group for additional Moodle core development, announced today that it is open for members to join. Technically the site was internally announced on its web site last Friday, but the press release came out today. As of this writing (Thurs evening PST), 44 members have signed up: 37 at the individual level, 1 at the bronze level, 3 at the silver level, 2 not sharing details, and Moodle Pty as the trademark holder. This equates to $8,680 – $22,580 of annual dues, depending on what level the two anonymous members chose.

    Update (1/25): As of Monday morning, the numbers are 51 members: 44 at the individual level, 1 bronze, 3 silver, 2 not sharing details, and Moodle Pty as trademark holder; leading to $8,960 – $22,860 of annual dues.

    Moodle News was the first outlet to describe the new organization (originally called Moodle Association but changed to Moodle Users Association when the organization was formalized), and in early December they summarized the motivation:

    As mentioned recently in an article on e-Literate, it’s possible that a majority of all funding to Moodle.org originates from Blackboard. While this may be ironic, knowing the history of Blackboard, it is appropriate since the LMS company has quietly become the largest Moodle Partner by number of clients through acquisitions and growth over the last few years. (more…)

  • The Massive Decline In Larger Education Company Market Caps

    After our coverage of Blackboard’s CEO change last week, we were both interviewed by the Washington Business Journal, with the following lede:

    Analysts and sources I spoke with Monday, both on and off the record, said the decision to bring on Bill Ballhaus as CEO was a combination of Bhatt failing to make progress building the company’s business and lacking the experience needed to successfully run a company of that scale. And that means at least several years before Providence Equity Partners, which owns a majority of the company after paying $1.64 billion for it in July 2011, begins actively marketing the company for sale, according to industry experts.

    Earlier this week I wrote about Apollo Education Group, parent of the University of Phoenix, putting itself up for sale due to its weakening financial position. I also noted that I doubt that McGraw-Hill Education is going to be able to go public in the near-term. Part of the reason for this latter observation is the dramatic fall of Pearson in the stock market, triggered by its warnings that it would miss earnings estimates. In Audrey’s excellent year-end post on the business of ed tech, she noted:

    Private equity firms sure love buying ed-tech companies. Perhaps because the stock market’s sorta “meh” about them.

    (more…)

  • Blackboard Replaces CEO Jay Bhatt: What happened

    Just over four years since Providence Equity Partners acquired Blackboard and three years after they brought in Jay Bhatt to replace co-founder Michael Chasen, the company announced another change in CEO. Blackboard has removed Jay Bhatt and replaced him with Bill Ballhaus. The official reason from the announcement:

    Today, we are fortunate to be joined by a great leader – our new CEO Bill Ballhaus. Bill’s philosophy is directly in line with ours and his skill set is going to help us reach new heights. While this is certainly a change for Blackboard, rest assured that the heart of our mission and strategy will remain the same. [snip]

    So we have defined our strategy and now, with Bill joining the company, we’ll continue to execute against it. Bill has accomplished much over his career and his operational expertise has led various businesses to great success. He and I share a fundamental belief that if you make your first priority taking care of your customers, the business results will follow. So, under his leadership Blackboard will continue our focus on doing just that. We will deliver next generation teaching and learning capabilities to the market, continue our international growth, and improve even further the way we serve our customers and strive to exceed their expectations. Bill is uniquely positioned to help us execute against these priorities, and with him we’ll achieve significant advances for our customers and for Blackboard.

    While the official messaging is ‘full steam ahead’, to me this is a straightforward story that we have already been covering at e-Literate. In a nutshell, the attempted sale of Blackboard this year has failed, and the company has stalled in its turnaround attempts. (more…)

  • Unizin RFP For LMS: An offering to appease the procurement gods?

    Well this was interesting:

    In a blog post from Monday, Unizin announced a public Request For Proposals (RFP) to solicit bids for an enterprise and multitenant LMS. The RFP states its purpose:

    We seek to identify a qualified vendor (“vendor”) to make available an enterprise and multitenant learning management system and related services (collectively, the “LMS”) to Member Institutions.

    Say what? (more…)

  • LMS Market Updates, Dec 2015

    There seems to be a series of news and analysis on the LMS higher education market worth summarizing.

    Major Adoption News

    I posted last weekend about University of Phoenix (UoP) and their LMS. UoP is well-known for being the biggest user of a homegrown LMS for well over a decade, but in the past several years they rolled out “Classroom”, an entirely new adaptive-learning based design. In a major strategic change, UoP is abandoning this effort and moving to a commercial provider.

    What we can now confirm at e-Literate is that the “learning platform” selected by the University of Phoenix is Blackboard Learn Ultra. This is the cloud-based redesign of Learn that Michael and I have described in several posts. Even with the University of Phoenix’s reduced enrollment, I consider this news to be the most important new client acquisition for Blackboard since at least 2011.

    Today Campus Technology reported that Stanford is moving to adopt Canvas as their campus-wide LMS. Previously Stanford was a founding member of Sakai, with its implementation called CourseWork.

    The university has been piloting Instructure Canvas since the 2014-2015 academic year. The vice provost for teaching & learning (VPTL) said in a statement that about 80 percent of faculty in the pilot reported being “very or somewhat satisfied” with the new platform; even more students (94 percent) found it “very or somewhat easy” to use.

    Alongside the pilot, two Stanford schools had already adopted the application independently. The Graduate School of Education moved to Canvas in 2013-2014, and the Graduate School of Business did so in 2014. Both adoptions were considered successes.

    During this school year, the migration was accelerated. Some 300 classes switched to Canvas. And the plan is to migrate the remaining 4,200 classes still using the legacy LMS software over the next academic year.

    (more…)

  • Exclusive: University of Phoenix moving from homegrown platform to Blackboard Learn Ultra

    The University of Phoenix has a history of using its scale to develop and rely on homegrown platforms, including the  adaptive learning platform branded as “Classroom”. I wrote about this investment in 2013.

    The full significance of the University of Phoenix bet on adaptive learning platforms goes beyond pure dollars and became clear when the school announced the closure of 115 of its 240 locations. The stated usage of the savings from campus closures is primarily to further invest in the platform as described by the Phoenix Business Journal.

    In early 2015 the University of Phoenix experienced “significant disruption with respect to our new online classroom platform”. By summer, the university’s parent company The Apollo Group announced to investors that it planned “to move away from certain proprietary and legacy IT systems”. CEO Greg Cappelli further described these changes in broad terms in the most recent earnings call. (more…)

  • Moodle Moves Give Hints of What a Post-Fork World Could Look Like

    Phil and I have written about the growing tension between the interests of Moodle HQ and a those of a couple of the bigger Moodle Partners, most notably Blackboard. There are a number of ways that this tension could be resolved, but one of the more dramatic possibilities would be a fork of Moodle. While we are not predicting it will happen, a couple of developments hit the wires last week that give us some idea of what the world might look like if there were a real and permanent split between the two groups.

    (more…)