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. Market data from Edutechnica shows that since 2013 the number of adopting US institutions has hit a plateau, but the total number of students served […]
edtech
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 […]
rSmart to Asahi to Scriba: What is happening to major Sakai partner?
It looks like we have another name and ownership change for one of the major Sakai partners, but this time the changes have a very closed feel to them. rSmart, led by Chris Coppola at the time, was one of the original Sakai commercial affiliates, and the LMS portion of the company was eventually sold to […]
Pitchbook Lists Most Valuable Ed Tech Companies
Update: Jeez – sorry about the multiple typos (mistakenly showed in thousands instead of millions). Fixed now. Pitchbook – a database service for M&A, private equity and venture capital – listed in Hot Topics what they saw as the top ten most valuable ed tech companies based on public valuations1. The definition of startup is […]
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 […]
Educational videos now outrank cat videos – my ticket onto NPR
From NPR this morning: With 1 billion unique visitors per month, YouTube offers a glimpse of the online world’s tastes and interests. And this year, one notable trend — for better or worse — is that people are spending more time watching videos about video games. [snip] In case this has you thinking, “Oh great, […]