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.
Tag: George Siemens
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Blackboard Confronts Erosion of Market Share, Makes a Major Change in Strategy
In a series of announcements that has the educational technology world buzzing, Blackboard reversed their strategy of their core LMS business.
- Blackboard acquired two Moodle hosting and service providers – MoodleRooms in the US and NetSpot in Australia.
- Blackboard created an Open Source Services Group, which includes helping “institutions successfully manage open source learning management systems (LMS) including Moodle and Sakai”.
- Blackboard hired Charles Severance (Dr. Chuck) to lead this new group, and he laid out much of the rationale in his blog (by the way, this was probably the smartest of the four moves).
- Blackboard canceled their end-of-life for the ANGEL LMS product, keeping it available indefinitely.
Most of the discussion in articles and blogs follows the meme of Blackboard entering open source, or even the meme of Blackboard acquiring competitors. I think the news is more significant than either of these two memes.
Blackboard just did a 180-degree turn on their strategy for their core LMS business. They have moved from consolidating all customers into Learn 9.1 to providing products and services that are almost LMS-agnostic. As Dr. Chuck described:
The notion that we will somehow find the “one true LMS” that will solve all problems is simply crazy talk and has been for quite some time.
There is another aspect to this story not described in yesterday’s press releases and the associated articles and blogs. This is the first public strategic decision by Blackboard since they were acquired by Providence Equity Partners. I suspect that if you take all four of Blackboard’s announcements within the context of the private equity ownership, the underlying strategy and rationale make much more sense.