Stephen Downes and Scott Leslie have both expressed concern that my original post regarding the Zotero lawsuit was possibly too charitable toward Thomson Reuters. Sadly, as more information comes in, it’s beginning to look like they were right.
Tag: edunomics
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Chronicle's Article on Blackboard's Competition
Jeff Young has a great piece in The Chronicle called “Blackboard Customers Consider Alternatives“. As usual, Michael Korcuska has insightful things to say about it. I only have a little bit to add on one quote from Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen:
I have 300 people on my development team working full time on our products and services…I don’t know if there are 300 full-time people currently working on Sakai.
This is entirely consistent with Blackboard’s strategy, outlined in one of my recent posts, of arguing that they are more “enterprise-y” than their competition because they are bigger and spend more money. As Michael K points out, this particular rehearsal of the argument based on developer numbers is specious in a number of ways. But another thing to consider here is that maybe the brute force that Blackboard has to apply in terms of developer numbers to produce their product may indicate that they are actually doing something wrong.
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Blackboard's NG Strategy
A few weeks back, I got an invitation from Matt Small to get a tour of Blackboard NG. Given all the rumors and speculation around it, I was obviously interested. I particularly wanted to know how much of it exists in code today and how much is vapor. So I took Matt up on his offer, and got a tour from him and John Fontaine. And while I didn’t quite get a full answer to the vaporware question, I did learn a lot of other interesting stuff about the platform and Blackboard’s strategy.
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Blackboard, Inc. Analysis, Part 2: Financial Performance
This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.
Investors should be pleased with Blackboard’s stock prices. The stock prices consistently outperform the NASDAQ Composite Index. [1]
Financial analysts continue to rate the stock as outperforming the market with buy and strong buy recommendations. Each quarter Blackboard CEO Mike Chasen, CFO Mike Beach and Senior Vice President Mike Stanton brief analysts winning appreciative comments. They also make presentations at conferences of financial analysts with similar responses.
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IMS Learning Information Services: The Motivating Pain
Today Oracle announced the release of the Student Administration Integration Pack, or SAIP. It’s the first product that I have worked on as an Oracle employee, and I’m proud of it for a number of reasons. It’s not a particularly glamorous piece of software, but I think it’s going to be important. This is my first post in a planned series about it.
I’m going to start the series with a few posts about the IMS Learning Information Services (LIS) specification that the SAIP implements. Because, really, the specification is at the heart of the product. Now, let me get one thing out of the way, because some of you are going to complain ask. A draft of the LIS specification has just left the working group and is currently available to IMS members only. It will be made available to non-IMS members by December, after which there will be a better part of a year when it will be open to public comment and further revision from the working group before it is finalized. I know that this schedule makes some of you unhappy. I have complained about it myself. I’m going to tell you as much as I can now and let you know the moment that more information becomes available to the general public.
Anyway….
Today’s post will focus on describing the main pains schools have been experiencing that motivated the creation of the specification in the first place. In later posts, I’ll talk about how the LIS attempts to relieve those pains (again, not glamorous but still important), and then I’ll write a little bit about some of the moderately sexier possibilities that LIS will also enable.
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Blackboard, Inc. Analysis, Part 1: Software Licenses
This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.
As the dominant supplier of learning system software, Blackboard Inc. is “mission critical” to colleges and universities in the U.S. It has been more than two years since Blackboard completed the acquisition of WebCT. Reviewing Blackboard’s performance may provide some insight.
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D2L Resolves Current Patent Burdens
According to the latest entry on D2L’s patent blog, D2L has payed the court judgment plus post-judgment interest in full and has also migrated all customers to version 8.3 of their software, which they claim does not infringe on the patent. There’s been some FUD flying around about whether D2L could handle the financial impact of the judgment. Well, they just did handle it. End of discussion.