e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Blackboard

  • Blackboard Potential Sale: Market timing, financials, and some thoughts on potential buyers

    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 playing catch-up with Instructure on usability, then the company’s late delivery, functionality gaps, and weird restrictions on where the product can and cannot be run look pretty terrible. But that’s probably not the right way to think about Ultra. The best analogy I can come up with is Apple’s Mac OS X. In both cases, we have a company that is trying to bring a large installed base of customers onto a substantially new architecture and new user experience without sending them running for the hills (or the competitors). This is a really hard challenge.

    Market Timing

    On the surface, it seems to be a high-risk move to try and sell a company before the changes are solidly in place and customers have demonstrated that they will move to new architecture rather than “running for the hills”.

    Assuming that the Reuters story is accurate, I believe the answer to the question on ‘why now’ is that this move is about market timing – Blackboard wants to ride the current ed tech investment wave, and Providence Equity Partners (their owners) believe they can get maximum value now. This consideration trumps the otherwise logical strategy of waiting until more of the risk from the new user experience and cloud platform roll-out is removed by getting real products into significant number of customers’ hands. VC investment and M&A activity are at high and potentially unsustainable levels. 2U has shown that ed tech companies can go public and be a success. Lynda.com has shown that relatively mature companies can be acquired for very high valuations. Instructure is likely to go public in early 2016. If you want to get a high price, sometimes it’s worth going on a hot market before addressing most of the re-architecture risk. (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • 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 it hopes could value it at as much as $3 billion, including debt, according to people familiar with the matter.

    Blackboard’s majority owner, private equity firm Providence Equity Partners LLC, has hired Deutsche Bank AG and Bank of America Corp to run an auction for the company, the people said this week. [snip]

    Providence took Blackboard private in 2011 for $1.64 billion and also assumed $130 million in net debt.

    A pioneer in education management software, Blackboard has seen its growth slow in recent years as cheaper and faster software upstarts such as Instructure Inc have tried to encroach on its turf. Since its launch in 2011, Instructure has signed up 1,200 colleges and school districts, according to its website.

    This news makes the messaging from BbWorld as well as their ability to execute on strategy, particularly delivering the new Ultra user experience across all product lines – including the core LMS – much more important. I’ll get to that subject in the next post. (more…)

  • 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 examples cross a line. They misuse and misrepresent academic outcomes data – whether public research-based on internal research – and essentially take credit for their technology “delivering results”.

    This week brought welcome updates from D2L that go a long way towards addressing the issues we raised. As of Monday, I noticed that the ‘Why Brightspace? Results’ page now has links to supporting material for each claim, and the UWM claim has been reworded. Today, D2L released a blog post explaining these changes and admitting the mistakes. D2L even changed the web page to allow text selection for copy / paste. From the blog post: (more…)

  • 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 we have established a pattern of behavior.

    Michael and I have been quite critical of D2L and their pattern of marketing behavior that is misleading and harmful to the ed tech community. Michael put it best:

    I can’t remember the last time I read one of D2L’s announcements without rolling my eyes. I used to have respect for the company, but now I have to make a conscious effort not to dismiss any of their pronouncements out-of-hand. Not because I think it’s impossible that they might be doing good work, but because they force me to dive into a mountain of horseshit in the hopes of finding a nugget of gold at the bottom. Every. Single. Time. I’m not sure how much of the problem is that they have decided that they need to be disingenuous because they are under threat from Instructure or under pressure from investors and how much of it is that they are genuinely deluding themselves. Sadly, there have been some signs that at least part of the problem is the latter situation, which is a lot harder to fix. But there is also a fundamental dishonesty in the way that these statistics have been presented.

    Well, here’s the latest. John Baker put out a blog called This Isn’t Your Dad’s Distance Learning Program with this theme: (more…)

  • 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 statement ((Statement from the original article before it was updated.)) worth exploring [emphasis added].

    “eCollege” will soon be a thing of the past.

    TCU has narrowed its search for a Learning Management System to two platforms, Blackboard and Desire2Learn (D2L).

    “We’ve had feedback, from faculty specifically, that it’s time for change,” Assistant Provost of Educational Technology and Faculty Development Romy Hughes said.

    TCU has used Pearson’s Learning Studio system since 1999.

    “Pearson is out of the learning management system game,” Hughes said. “We need something to evolve with the Academy of Tomorrow and where we’re moving to at TCU.”

    That last comment got my attention. (more…)

  • 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. While Ray’s departure from the board did not come as a surprise to me, I have been noting the surprising number of other high-level departures from Blackboard recently.

    As of December 24, 2014, Blackboard listed 12 company executives in their About > Leadership page. Of those 12 people, 4 have left the company since early January. Below is the list of the leadership team at that time along with notes on changes:

    • Jay Bhatt, CEO
    • Maurice Heiblum, SVP Higher Education, Corporate And Government Markets (DEPARTED February, new job unlisted)
    • Mark Belles, SVP K-12 (DEPARTED March, now President & COO at Teaching Strategies, LLC)
    • David Marr, SVP Transact
    • Matthew Small, SVP & Managing Director, International
    • Gary Lang, SVP Product Development, Support And Cloud Services (DEPARTED January, now VP B2B Technology, Amazon Supply)
    • Katie Blot, SVP Educational Services (now SVP Corporate Strategy & Business Development)
    • Mark Strassman, SVP Industry and Product Management
    • Bill Davis, CFO
    • Michael Bisignano, SVP General Counsel, Secretary (DEPARTED February, now EVP & General Counsel at CA Technologies)
    • Denise Haselhorst, SVP Human Resources
    • Tracey Stout, SVP Marketing

    (more…)