With Reuters’ story last week that Blackboard is putting itself up for sale through an auction, one question to ask is ‘why now?’. As Michael has pointed out, Blackboard is in the midst of a significant, but incomplete and late, re-architecture of its product line. Bottom line: If you think that Ultra is all about […]
Blackboard
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 […]
Reuters: Blackboard up for sale, seeking up to $3 billion in auction
As I was writing a post about Blackboard’s key challenges, I get notice from Reuters (anonymous sources, so interpret accordingly) that the company is on the market, seeking up to $3 billion. From Reuters: Blackboard Inc, a U.S. software company that provides learning tools for high school and university classrooms, is exploring a sale that […]
Giving D2L Credit Where Credit Is Due
Michael and I have made several specific criticisms of D2L’s marketing claims lately culminating in this blog post about examples based on work at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) and California State University at Long Beach (CSULB). I understand that other ed tech vendors make marketing claims that cannot always be tied to reality, but these […]
D2L Again Misusing Academic Data For Brightspace Marketing Claims
Update 5/17/16: I made a mistake in my math on the UW Milwaukee improvements. The number of A’s and B’s increased 163% increased 220% for “unprepared” students and 170% for “prepared” students. I apologize for the error. Update 7/23: Read this blog post for D2L admission of mistakes and changes to claims. At this point I’d say that […]
Interesting Comment on Pearson’s LMS Plans From Customer
On April 1, long-time eCollege (aka Pearson’s LearningStudio) customer Texas Christian University (TCU) gave an update on their LMS selection process to the student newspaper TCU360. In this article there was an interesting statement1 worth exploring [emphasis added]. “eCollege” will soon be a thing of the past. TCU has narrowed its search for a Learning […]
Blackboard Brain Drain: One third of executive team leaves in past 3 months
In August 2013 Michael described Ray Henderson’s departure from an operational role at Blackboard. As of the end of 2014, Ray is no longer on the board of directors at Blackboard either. He is focusing on his board activity (including In The Telling, our partner for e-Literate TV) and helping with other ed tech companies. […]