e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Educational technology

  • Layoffs at Desire2Learn: Significant or not?

    In a little-reported event the week of Thanksgiving, Desire2Learn let go 28 employees. The only public report I’m aware of comes from The Record out of Desire2Learn’s hometown of Kitchener, Ontario in Canada.

    E-learning company Desire2Learn has cut about 25 workers from its product development department.

    Virginia Jamieson, spokesperson for the Kitchener-based company, said nine per cent of the 280-member product development section was let go. That represents about three per cent of the firm’s total workforce. [snip]

    Since it was founded in 1999, the company has grown to more than 900 [sic] employees in several countries.

    “So it is a small percentage of that, but it happens to be people in Kitchener, which is where our initial growth was, so it may seem bigger than it really is,” Jamieson said.

    While this move might be harsh for those employees affected, it does not sound too significant. But is there more to the story?

    According to Sources

    Michael and I have talked to 10 off-the-record sources and reviewed Twitter, LinkedIn and Glassdoor as we looked into this issue, and the consistent story we heard was that the layoffs may be much more significant, both in number and motivation. After research, we now believe: (more…)

  • 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 the acquisitions by centralizing core functions, particularly under new management.

    From the article:

    Blackboard Inc. carried out a round of layoffs last week as part of a broader reorganization by CEO Jay Bhatt, the latest in a string of actions aimed at revitalizing the 16-year-old ed-tech behemoth.

    Bhatt, in an interview Tuesday evening, confirmed the job cuts, which he described as “a very small action we took to take some costs out of the business, primarily on things that don’t allow us to get where we need to go.” He declined to specify the number of layoffs.

    As for the priority of trimming the fat, it is now fairly clear that Blackboard is not set to divest any major product lines, but rather will follow a path of centralization. The new management team is a key part of the reorganization plans.

    (more…)

  • More Blogging on Automated Essay Grading

    Sometime guest blogger and friend of e-Literate Elijah Mayfield has another great post up on using machine learning tools in the service of improving student writing over at his company blog. However you may feel about the technology, the exploration that he’s doing raises some important question about what good feedback on writing is. This aspect of educational technology—the fact that it forces us to examine our tacit knowledge of teaching and make it explicit—is one of the things that I value most about the field.

    Give it a read.

  • This is not your father’s Blackboard

    Thanks for inviting me to this conference in Las Vegas, but I couldn’t help notice there is no After Party. Could you point me to the BbWorld conference instead? . . . What’s that? . . . Really?? Because I just came out of a product roadmap presentation where people were clapping, and not just for improved customer service but actual product usability and features that people want. . . . OK, OK, maybe you’re right . . . But the ex-WebCT folks were actually clapping the loudest. . . . WTH?

    Blackboard’s user conference this year was unlike any previous BbWorld I’ve attended. After the WebCT acquisition in 2006, the user conferences tended to be love-hate events (love the show and good times, hate the acquisition of competitors and tin ear). After the 2009 acquisition of ANGEL and subsequent changes in the management team, the user conferences moderated to ambivalence. Many of the product announcements were exciting in the abstract, but it was not clear that product roadmaps and new features were directly addressing client concerns.

    BbWorld 2013 was the first time that I’ve seen customers have such a positive response to Blackboard presentations. At least from a short-term roadmap perspective, the product changes presented this year seemed to hit the sweet spot of what current customers have been requesting. There was a sense of appreciation and relief from customers that Blackboard was listening and reacting to them. And that is no small feat.

    (more…)

  • CEO Transition at Blackboard is Latest Move in Corporate Turnaround

    On Monday of this past week Michael Chasen announced that he is leaving Blackboard, the company he co-founded in 1997 and has led as CEO since 2001. Blackboard simultaneously announced the appointment of Jay Bhatt, a software industry executive as the immediate replacement.

    As Rip Empson has noted in TechCrunch, this is the end of an era. I agree with Josh Kim and Ray Henderson in calling out Michael Chasen’s role as an industry pioneer, and I would argue that Chasen was the leading force in creating the enterprise-level, mission-critical educational technology market. Henderson also points out that Chasen played a leading role in developing a sustainable revenue model that enabled much of the transformation seen over the past decade.

    Empson described in his article that this are two sides of this latest story from Blackboard.

     This week, in a letter addressed to “The Education Community,” Michael Chasen stepped down as the CEO of edtech software giant, Blackboard. In a way, it’s the end of an era. Whether or not it was an “era to remember” remains to be seen.

    Why is this significant? Because of what Blackboard has come to represent — both for good and for ill. On the one hand, the company became one of the biggest success stories in the education space, bringing mainstream consumer and investor attention (and scale) to an industry that previously had little. But that’s only one part of Blackboard’s story.

    What should we expect from the future Blackboard? I believe the best way to understand future changes at Blackboard is to view the CEO transition as the latest move in a corporate turnaround – and an unsurprising move .

    (more…)

  • Lore Announcement Shows Promise of Cloud-Based Platforms: Low Cost of Design

    You have to give credit where it’s due – Lore is a fast-moving ed tech startup that is not resting on its laurels. The New York based learning platform company has already rebranded (changing its name from Coursekit to Lore) and rewritten its core platform from the ground up. All in its first year.

    In their latest press release:

    Since launching seven months ago, instructors at over 600 schools—including Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton—have adopted the platform. Lore gives courses a home online, providing management tools like a gradebook, and a Facebook-like environment for students to communicate with each other. [snip]

    “We’ve completely re-designed the platform in the new version,” said 21-year-old CEO, Joe Cohen. “It’s an order of magnitude more beautiful, easy to use, and powerful. ”A highlight of the new version, instructors now have the ability to make their courses available for the public to “audit.” Additionally, Lore now provides all students and instructors with individual profiles to showcase their background, academic achievements, and aspirations.

    (more…)

  • What Are Ed Tech Entrepreneurs Good For?

    The recent ASU Education Innovation Summit, which brought together venture capitalists with aspiring ed tech entrepreneurs, created quite a stir in the edublogosphere and the edutwitterverse. A lot of the reaction came from people who were watching from a distance via video. Audrey Watters, for example, wrote an epic rant on her frustrations. There were many angry tweets from a number of quarters. First-hand reporting was relatively scarce, though. George Siemens, who attended the conference live, wrote a thoughtful and nuanced post on the topic. The question of how entrepreneurs can productively play a role in educational progress, innovation, and reform is a topic that I think about a lot. In fact, I already had a post planned in my backblog from an interview I did with the Instructure founders and CEO on this very topic. So now that e-Literate has successfully migrated to a new host, and before Blackboard buying somebody else forces me to write another post series, I’d like to take some time to lay out my thoughts on the topic.

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