Present is Prologue

Tag: Learn Ultra

Blackboard Learn Ultra in 2018: Is it ready and does it matter?
One of our longest-running series of posts is on the prospects and status of Blackboard’s Learn Ultra, the user experience redesign and move to the cloud of the world’s second-most-used (behind Moodle) and highest-revenue-producing academic LMS. It is fashionable to claim the LMS is dead or passé, yet this product category remains the centerpiece of educational technology at colleges, universities, and K-12 districts. To understand Learn Ultra is to understand much of the overall LMS market.

Looking at the timeline of e-Literate coverage, the broad story emerges:
- 2012: Blackboard acquires Moodlerooms, and one benefit was the see of a cloud-based platform strategy.
- 2014: Blackboard prematurely announced Learn Ultra (new user experience) and Learn SaaS (move to the cloud).
- 2015: Learn Ultra is already a year late (more realistically, the BbWorld14 announcement was wildly unrealistic), but the University of Phoenix selects Learn Ultra as its next-generation learning platform.
- 2016: Blackboard switches CEOs, admits that Learn Ultra is still not ready, and struggles with a major messaging problem around the transition.
- 2017: No coverage – maybe we got tired of lack of not having customers to talk to.
- 2018: Blackboard makes Learn Ultra the core of its message at its users conference BbWorld18.
(Note: It might be easier to view this as a full page timeline instead of the embed within this post.)

What we have been asked multiple times, by institutions, by investors, by other ed tech companies: is Learn Ultra ready, and does it matter? The unsurprising answer to both questions is a qualified and somewhat confusing it depends. To describe a little further, Learn Ultra’s Base Navigation is ready, but the Course View is not ready for meaningful adoption; furthermore, Learn Ultra is important to Blackboard’s future, but we think SaaS is more important to its present.

Is It Ready?

To ask this question requires an understanding of terminology, as we first described in this post. Blackboard1 is pushing the metric that there are 61 or 62 Learn Ultra customers “in production” or “using Ultra”, yet we have found very few that use, or even plan to use, Learn Ultra as their primary, institution-wide LMS. What gives? What became quite clear at this year’s BbWorld 18 users conference is that when Blackboard says in production, what they mean is that the LMS administrator has enabled the Ultra navigation, which uses the new Ultra user experience framework as the landing page / dashboard with activity feed that users see before entering a specific course. The company calls this Base Navigation, but at this point every course can be configured to be in the Original Experience or the Ultra Experience. Thus, enabling the possibility of running a course in Ultra counts as in production (note that Blackboard now lists 91 clients on Ultra).

Once a school has enabled Learn Ultra Base Navigation, they could choose to move exclusively to Ultra (e.g. the University of Phoenix, Northwest Florida State College, and a few others), or they could choose to keep all courses in Original (e.g. Northeastern State University), or they could choose to have some courses in Ultra and some in Original (used by the majority of schools investigating Ultra). This last mode is known as Dual Course mode, and even Blackboard executives seemed surprised to find out that the vast majority of schools putting Ultra in production are in fact running in Dual Course. For many of these schools, there are no definitive plans to move exclusively to Ultra.

Upon re-reading this description, I believe that I should give more credit than just describing a landing page and base navigation. The cross-course functionality is and has been a long-term goal of Ultra, as we described as early as 2016.

Creating a brand for a set of design goals is inherently fraught. Let’s look at two examples of how it makes communication of Blackboard’s strategy tricky for them. First, there’s mobile. Blackboard came out last year with a mobile app called Bb Student. It provides students with that activity stream view across courses and, of course, it’s mobile-first. (In fact, it’s mobile-only at the moment.) Furthermore, the company has made the product available for both traditional 9.x customers (which at this point is pretty much everybody) and their SaaS customers. People inside the company feel like they should be getting more credit for delivering on two major design goals (mobile first and stream-based activity views) as well as for delivering it to customers on the 9.x platform (which was more significant of a technical achievement than is immediately obvious).

This is not a matter of Blackboard moving the goal posts, per se, and it is probably more accurate to say that Ultra cross-course functionality enabled by Base Navigation is ready and showing some benefits.

The challenge is that this move is not sufficient to make a material change in Blackboard’s company prospects. At best, Learn Ultra Base Navigation without usage of Course View will slightly slow down the rate of customers defecting for another LMS. For Learn Ultra to matter and to make Learn newly competitive, they need customers to also use Course View as the primary choice at their institution, and that usage by-and-large is not ready outside of a handful of schools.As an example from BbWorld18, Belmont University presented their experience moving to Learn SaaS (the important issue in the present, and a predecessor for adopting Ultra) and to “the Ultra Experience”. But after we asked a question about faculty adoption of the Ultra Course Experience, the administrator clarified that there are no courses running Ultra – all they have done is enable the Ultra base navigation, and they do not expect to do any course migrations for at least another year. This full adoption of Learn Ultra might become important in the future, but it is not driving decisions today.

Does It Matter?

Given that we’ve been asking for three entire years whether Learn Ultra is ready, one obvious follow-up question is whether it matters any longer. I do think the question matters as Blackboard is pinning their corporate turnaround on Learn Ultra as the core piece, and this message was heavily promoted at BbWorld 18.

This messaging makes some sense in that we consider it unlikely that Blackboard can gain significant numbers of new clients (those moving from another LMS to Blackboard Learn, beyond a dozen or fewer schools) without Learn Ultra. Learn Original Experience has too much baggage and is too dated to compete with Canvas or Brightspace by D2L, at least in North America. The company’s new Learn LMS clients are largely the University of Phoenix and ANGEL contract conversions.

To be fair, the exceptions include several schools in North Dakota (migrating from Moodle) as well as Northwest Florida State College (migrating from D2L). But even with NW Florida State, they based their decision on Learn Ultra.

Based on interviews with clients arranged by Blackboard, and based on our own connections at BbWorld, what we consistently heard during dozens of interviews and from listening to panel discussions was that Learn Ultra Course View makes sense primarily for programs or schools that have not been on Blackboard Learn before. Bb Learn clients seem to have too many expectations of needing the same functionality they had before, pushing Ultra to be largely feature-compatible with Original and thus losing some of its simplicity in the process. When the Illinois Institute of Technology migrated from Learn self-hosting to SaaS, which enabled them to explore Ultra, they chose one program and a handful of faculty that were willing to jump into Learn Ultra, but for almost all others they are sticking with the Original Course View for the time being. The soonest they would expect moving primarily to Learn Ultra at the Course View would bet 3-5 years from now. You can hear the same dynamic in a recent Rod’s Pulse Podcast (shared under CC-BY-NC-SA license and also available at Inside Higher Ed), with Rod Murray interviewing Rob McCunney about their school (University of the Sciences) and its migration to SaaS and Ultra. It is a fascinating first-hand description of their experiences. Please note that they use use the terms Traditional and Original interchangeably.

R Murray: We turned on the SaaS in January, but we really kept the Original Experience until July. In mid-July we flipped the switch to turn on the Ultra Experience. Now again for those of you are not as familiar with the way Blackboard works, that wasn’t changing the course format. They were still traditional courses, but you know all those tabs and modules disappeared, and we ended up with a new base navigation in Blackboard, which they called the Ultra Experience. So that was a major change, and we do have some summer sessions, but we felt this was the least painful way to turn it on. We didn’t want to wait till August just before our fall students came back.

In terms of turning on the Ultra Experience, what were some of the major issues that you saw, that you were concerned with?

R McCunney: Besides the fact that we lost the tabs and modules, so we kind of rolled out OneCampus as Rod said, I think one of the major things that that I noticed wasn’t really even on the admin side, it was just getting people used to something that was completely different as soon as they logged in to that institution page. Where’s my stuff, where is my modules? It just looks completely different than what they’re used to, and there’s some stuff missing, and we replaced it. We put stuff in other areas, and we communicated that, but that was probably the biggest hurdle. Just what is this, what is this Blackboard Ultra that you’re changing me to? And at that point, in July we only changed basically the institution page. Your average user, once they get into their course they didn’t notice anything different, but that initial freak out of here I don’t know where my form is. We told them a dozen times where it is, but it’s somewhere else. That was probably one of the major hurdles, and I didn’t anticipate that as being a big as an issue as it was. I thought there was going to be more nuts and bolts issues, which there were very few of those for the most part.

R Murray: Right now of course we don’t have that many students here in the summer, so the real test will be in another week or so when students come back and really start. We all start kicking the tires, even on the traditional courses within the Ultra Experience.

[snip]

R Murray: The next big change that we have to live through has to do with converting courses to the Ultra course view. Now here at our university we certainly didn’t do it en masse, we went to play with it for at least this term and maybe next. But there are some courses that we decided made a lot of sense to convert to the Ultra course view. Those schools that those courses that are brand new, especially online courses that are brand new, it made sense to develop them directly in the [Ultra] course view.

Schools are trying out the Ultra Experience in terms of the landing page and cross-course functionality, but by-and-large they are very cautious jumping into the Ultra Course View where most of the functionality resides.

Based on this situation, we believe that the migration to Learn SaaS might be a better indicator – at least in the short run – than Ultra adoption of whether a school plans to stick with Blackboard. When a school moves to Learn SaaS, they all tend to sign contract extensions for 1 – 3 years or at least internally plan no LMS migrations for more than 1 – 3 years. And the migration to Learn SaaS does not suffer from the vague terminology issues – a school either uses Learn deployed on SaaS (through AWS) or they don’t.

383 clients on Learn SaaS as of BbWorld 18 is good progress and easy to understand. This issue is what likely matters more to Blackboard clients today and for the next few years, but in the long run the company needs Learn Ultra to be accepted – including at the course level – in order to become more competitive and pick up new clients.

In the end, Learn Ultra is partially ready and does matter, more so in the future, but the Learn SaaS migration matters much more today. This answer is a real improvement over the situation a year ago and even from the beginning of this year, but it is still a far cry from a simple yes and yes answer that Blackboard would like to have.

Update: Fixed name of Rob McCunney
September 12, 2018
Timeline of e-Literate Coverage of Blackboard Learn Ultra

While doing research for an upcoming analysis post on Blackboard Learn, I found myself wanting to have a coherent timeline of past e-Literate coverage on the development and adoption of Learn Ultra. The most useful timeline tool seems to be TimelineJS by Knight Lab out of Northwestern University, so I gave it a try. The result of combining article data with this tool is an interactive timeline that allows the reader to browse relevant posts since 2012, showing the date of publication, a linked post title, and a snippet of content. You can click on the timeline navigation at the bottom, or you can browse through the overall story by using the arrows by text or swiping left / right on mobile devices. It might be easier to view this as a full page timeline instead of the embed within this post.

Going through this exercise, I was a little surprised to see the two-year gap in coverage between July 2016 and July 2018.

Let us know if this timeline view is useful. We may create other versions to help navigate topics like the OPM market.

One sample page:

September 11, 2018
Terminology is Key to Understanding Blackboard Learn Prospects
There are three observations from Blackboard’s users conference that we feel are important to share before we pull together our thoughts for more comprehensive posts, and all three issues build off of Blackboard’s strong focus at the conference on Learn Ultra as the future of their LMS product line.

Learn Ultra “In Production” or “Using Ultra”

The first issue is terminology around Learn Ultra. Blackboard ((Disclosure: Blackboard is a client of the e-Literate LMS Market Analysis service and a participating sponsor in our Empirical Educator Project.)) is pushing the metric that there are 61 or 62 Learn Ultra customers “in production” or “using Ultra”, yet we have found very few that use, or even plan to use, Learn Ultra as their primary, institution-wide LMS. What gives? What became quite clear at the conference is that when Blackboard says in production, what they mean is that the LMS administrator has enabled the Ultra global navigation, which uses the new Ultra user experience framework as the landing page / dashboard with activity feed that users see before entering a specific course. The company calls this Base Navigation, but at this point every course can be configured to be in the Original Experience or the Ultra Experience. Thus, enabling the possibility of running a course in Ultra counts as in production.

Once a school has enabled Learn Ultra Base Navigation, they could choose to move exclusively to Ultra (e.g. the University of Phoenix, Northwest Florida State College, and a few others), or they could choose to keep all courses in Original (e.g. Northeastern State University), or they could choose to have some courses in Ultra and some in Original (used by the majority of schools investigating Ultra). This last mode is known as Dual Course mode, and even Blackboard executives are surprised to find out that the vast majority of schools putting Ultra in production are in fact running in Dual Course. For many of these schools, there are no definitive plans to ever move exclusively to Ultra.

This distinction is important, as the majority of functionality for an LMS occurs within a course, even if we did hear a few schools present that they saw some end-user benefits to having the landing page itself. We will add more commentary on this subject in future posts, but for now the takeaway is that Ultra in production numbers from Blackboard do not necessarily mean that any or most courses are in the Ultra Experience.

Product Variations Resulting in Three Dates for New Features

The second issue is that Blackboard Learn has two experiences (Ultra and Original), three deployments (self-hosting, managed-hosting by Blackboard, and SaaS-hosting at using AWS), often resulting in three different dates for full delivery of new features.

Keeping in mind that the Original Experience is available on all three deployment models but Ultra is available only in SaaS, here is the view of the final delivery groupings for the courses:
- Learn Original on self-hosting and Learn Original on managed-hosting, which the bulk of their customers use, is the first case.
- Learn Original on SaaS-hosting, which represents the bulk of their 383 customers on Learn SaaS announced at the conference, is the second case.
- Learn Ultra, which represents some subset of the 62 customers announced as “Ultra in production”, is the third case.
Of course there is significant overlap in terms of common code, such as the micro-services running in the SaaS environment for both experiences, or shared source code between deployment options. But from a feature delivery perspective, the full release often has three different delivery dates – Original SH & MH, Original SaaS, and Ultra.

This is good news or bad news, depending on your perspective. For Blackboard’s customers, it means more options without forced migrations. Blackboard staff stated several times in presentations and in hallway conversations that none of the deployment options or experiences have any plans to go end-of-life or even into maintenance mode. But on the other hand, Blackboard will not achieve many of the benefits of becoming a cloud product company until they can move the majority of development purely onto SaaS.

SaaS Better Indicator Than Ultra of Client Retention

The third issue, which is related to the first two, is that we believe ((OK, OK. I admit that Michael should get credit for seeing this issue more clearly than I did. Not many people read footnotes, so I feel comfortable with this admission.)) that the migration to Learn SaaS might be a better indicator – at least in the short run – than Ultra adoption of whether a school plans to stick with Blackboard. Whether or not the school enables Ultra base navigation or any courses in the Ultra Experience.

When a school moves to Learn SaaS, they tend to sign contract extensions for 1 – 3 years to cover the new services. And the migration to Learn SaaS does not suffer from the vague terminology issues – a school either uses Learn deployed on SaaS (through AWS) or they don’t.

For now, just treat this as clarification on the complexities of Blackboard Learn LMS options that became more apparent at the conference.

Update 7/23: Changed header and some text in second section to focus on dates of feature delivery.
July 22, 2018
D2L Bets on The Cloud and Advances in User Experience
One of the arguments that we have made as part of our LMS Market Analysis service is that if you look beyond market share numbers, there has been a tectonic shift in the academic LMS market that started around 2012, moving from being Blackboard-centric to Canvas-centric. Meaning that the current market trends are largely driven by Canvas adoptions and market reactions to Canvas adoptions. This change has elevated the need for viable LMS solutions to have both a cloud-based deployment strategy as well as a more modern, intuitive user experience than what was acceptable just five years ago.

Blackboard’s move to Learn SaaS (deployment) and Learn Ultra (new user experience) is a prime example of this market dynamic, and it has tended to get the lion’s share of analysis, including here at e-Literate. We have described that D2L has joined Canvas in “an emerging two-horse race for new implementations”, but we could do a better job of describing why we believe they are gaining in the market. ((Disclosure: D2L, Blackboard, and Instructure are subscribers in our LMS Market Analysis service and sponsoring participants in our Empirical Educator Project.))

Short story – D2L has made fairly substantial bets on cloud deployment and a streamlined user experience, and the product design changes present the best explanation for the market gains.

Head in the Cloud

The data looking at new LMS implementations (changing from one system to another) in higher ed across the four global regions we cover in our market analysis shows a remarkable movement away from self hosting, or on-premises hosting, towards a combination of managed hosting by the LMS vendor or cloud hosting designed by the vendor but running on AWS, in particular. From 15% external hosting to 77% in just one decade. Within the external models, there is another major shift away from managed hosting and towards cloud hosting.

D2L has long worked on managed hosting options, but in late 2013 the company introduced Continuous Delivery where software releases are pushed to customers incrementally, such that customers would jointly run the latest versions of Brightspace, their LMS. This move is important, as one primary benefit of cloud deployment is to remove the explosion of software configurations and versions that make it expensive and difficult to diagnose and fix bugs and to release new features.

Three years later in 2016 D2L announced their move to AWS for cloud deployment.

While we heard grumblings from multiple clients during the transition – especially thru early 2017 – D2L clearly made some hard choices and and is aggressively moving to the cloud, not just as an option, but as their primary delivery model. According to David Koehn, VP of Product Management at D2L:
- All new Brightspace implementations are on AWS cloud;
- Virtually all current Brightspace implementations use Continuous Delivery; and
- Approximately 50% of current customers are already on the AWS version of cloud deployment; and
- By the end of 2018, a large majority of customers will be on cloud deployment.
Contrast this move to the cloud with Blackboard’s where they plan to continue offering self hosting, managed hosting, and their own AWS-based cloud hosting options at the customer’s choice, while they believe SaaS and Ultra will lead on new sales. The primary constraint being that to go to Learn Ultra experience, you must first be on Learn SaaS, the cloud hosting option. But the key point is that Blackboard has tended to view the cloud as one deployment option among others, and the numbers show it. According to a company blog post this week from CEO Bill Ballhaus:

As of today, more than 50 clients are running Ultra, with dozens more planning to start using the Ultra experience and courses in the second half of the year. Also, 361 clients around the globe have moved to SaaS deployment for Learn.

Our data show more than 2,000 higher ed customers on Learn, but if you add in K-12 and corporate customers, this roughly equates to just over 10% on or moving to Learn SaaS and 2% on Learn Ultra. These are generous numbers, but more on that in a separate post.

The point is that D2L is making a much more aggressive and focused bet on the cloud than is Blackboard, for better or worse. Canvas, of course, is designed natively for the cloud, and essentially 100% of their customers are on the AWS cloud.

Run to Daylight

David Koehn also pointed out that the real driver for the AWS cloud move by D2L is to enable a redesign of the user experience and to provide improved scalability and reliability. In other words, the cloud deployment is a means to the Daylight end.

Daylight is the name for D2L’s redesign of the user experience and its streamlined user interface. When it was first announced just over a year ago, I was somewhat skeptical as the initial changes were evident in different fonts and cleaner look-and-feel, but not significant improvements in the workflow for faculty and students.

As time goes on and I see more advanced demos, my view is changing. The Daylight Experience does have some real improvements not just in look-and-feel but in fewer and more intuitive clicks to get the same job done. A major focus on the release this summer (in time for D2L Fusion users conference) is more fully encouraging usage of the activity stream for higher ed clients (this feature was initially targeted at K-12 market but has been adapted for colleges and universities).

D2L has long played the Mutually Assured Destruction game of features, targeted at cumbersome procurement processes. D2L (along with Blackboard and Moodle) has a deep set of features which contrasts with Canvas and its streamlined set of features that rely on third-party integrations to solve some of the more specialized use cases. For D2L, it is important to maintain these features as a competitive differentiator with Canvas, and the design approach guiding them is Progressive Disclosure. This design technique relies on progressing from simple to complex, showing the user the information and options they need when they need it or request it and not before.

Consider adding a multiple choice quiz, where the desire is to make this process very simple, but to then have a page or area that exposes more and more options as requested by user or in context of the quiz setup.

As D2L further implements this design approach within the Daylight Experience, we are seeing a more modern and intuitive user experience for Brightspace customers, yet one that is showing real promise to also tap into deeper feature sets. And these changes are being used in production.

Again by way of contrast, Blackboard’s user experience redesign for Learn Ultra has had a bumpy ride, with multi-year delays of getting any customers to use in production. They took more of a big bang approach to releasing Learn Ultra, and when customers pushed back saying that Ultra wasn’t ready, this led to additional delays and eventually a change in the design team. D2L’s Daylight has proven to be a more iterative release of their new user experience.

What to Watch

This year it is becoming difficult to separate LMS products from company finances. Instructure is trying to balance Canvas and Bridge growth to satisfy public markets along with a new executive team. Blackboard is dealing with corporate debt challenges while needing to fully release Learn Ultra. As mentioned in this post, D2L is moving strongly to the cloud with a new user experience while managing expenses. Schoology is trying to grow higher ed market under the radar. Moodle HQ took investment for the first time. There are a lot of open questions on the future of the academic LMS market, and we expect much to be revealed at the big summer (and fall) events.

As for D2L Fusion, we plan to get a better read on how customers and prospects are reacting to the cloud deployment move and streamlined user experience. We are seeing real changes in the Brightspace design and deployment model, but do paying and prospective customers value these changes? Furthermore, will D2L be able to improve its customer service and delivery on promises made for new customers as well as it has improved its product design?

As for Blackboard, Learn Ultra now has D2L’s Brightspace as a major user experience to compete with as well as Canvas. There is a lot more changing in the LMS market than what is obvious on the surface.

Update: Clarified D2L numbers to be specifically for AWS cloud deployment. Also changed several instances of “cloud hosting” to be “cloud deployment” to make terminology more accurate.
June 8, 2018
Moody’s Downgrades Blackboard Debt, Focuses On Learn Ultra Delivery

In Spring 2015 Moody’s affirmed their B2 rating for Blackboard’s nearly $1.4 billion in debt as part of the company’s acquisition of Schoolwires, with a negative outlook for the ratings (meaning there was risk of a further downgrade). Three weeks ago, that downgrade took place.

(“Moody’s”) downgraded Blackboard Inc.’s Corporate Family Rating (“CFR”) by two notches to Caa1, from B2, as well as its Probability of Default Rating, to Caa1-PD, from B2-PD. Moody’s also downgraded Blackboard’s $135 million first-lien revolving credit facility and $920 million (remaining balance) first-lien term loan to B3, from B1, and its $378 million second-lien notes to Caa3, from Caa1. Moody’s also changed Blackboard’s outlook to stable, from negative.

Put in regular terminology, the previous B2 rating indicated that Blackboard ((Disclosure: Blackboard is a subscriber to our LMS market analysis service and is a sponsor for our recent Empirical Educator Project summit.)) had “the capacity to meet its financial commitments. Adverse business, financial, or economic conditions will likely impair the obligor’s capacity or willingness to meet its financial commitments.” But with the new Caa1 rating, Blackboard “is currently vulnerable, and is dependent upon favorable business, financial, and economic conditions to meet its financial commitments.”

The rationale for the downgrade is that Blackboard holds a very high amount of debt (now more than $1.4 billion) relative to its earnings, and revenue growth is not coming from its core markets.

Blackboard’s core North American Higher Education (“NAHE”) and K-12 units, representing 56% of total revenue, continue to show weakening top line results, suggesting that the success of its new Ultra user interface is still uncertain. Blackboard’s international segment, also weak, has shown modest stabilization of late. Only the campus enablement segment, consisting of recently acquired educational community communications and transaction processing services and representing a quarter of Blackboard’s revenues, has shown healthy, reliable revenue growth. Some ratings support is provided by Blackboard’s high level of revenue visibility, with three quarters of 2017 revenues coming from recurring products and services, and underpinned by its 90% renewal rates in 2017. Both of these measures, however, represent declines from prior years.

The turnaround is stalling, and the credit cards are maxed out. Blackboard has continued to cut costs, including “late-year layoffs”, and Moody’s expects “overall revenues to be flat to down slightly in 2018 as competitors have stifled market share gains”.

While this is not good news for Blackboard, the ratings action does give the ed tech community additional insight into the operations and health of the company. Blackboard total revenues are between $700 – $720 million, with earnings (EBITDA, adjusted by Moody’s) between $160 – $180 million.

And in the rationale for the ratings comes specific commentary on Learn Ultra.

Software renewals have been weaker than expected in the NAHE [North American Higher Ed] segment, as the company strives to sell its latest learning management system (“LMS”) software enhancement, Ultra, into a crowded and very competitive marketplace. Given operating seasonality tied to the academic year, the behind-schedule launch of Ultra, in mid-2016, meant that measurable revenue and EBITDA [Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization] contributions from it began to be realized only in the 2017 academic year. There are indications that Ultra is gaining traction relative to Canvas and Desire2Learn, and Moody’s believes the packaging of Ultra with transaction- and payment-processing services may support its competitive positioning. But the success of Ultra is far from certain, and the threat from existing and possibly new competitors remains high as barriers to entry, specifically for web-based software, are relatively low. Meanwhile Blackboard, with a brand new CFO, is focusing its research, sales and marketing, and product development resources in an effort to ensure Ultra’s future.

We have covered the 2014 announcement and ongoing fate of Learn Ultra here at e-Literate, and claiming a “launch of Ultra, in mid-2016” is generous at best. At that point there were educator previews with no ability for institutional adoptions. Fall 2017 is the closest to what I would say is an actual launch. As of a January, 2018 meeting Michael and I had with Blackboard’s management team, they claimed dozens of schools actively piloting Learn Ultra ((I have asked several times for this list, or a subset of this list, of schools piloting Ultra to allow interviews. If and when we receive schools to interview, we will cover in another post.)), and their flagship customer University of Phoenix is beginning rollout of the LMS starting this month.

What is going well at Blackboard is the movement to a SaaS (software as a service, aka ‘the cloud’) model for the LMS – for both the traditional experience and Ultra experience. As of January there were 284 schools on Learn SaaS and 49 others in migration. In a purchase-only report, Moody’s acknowledged this strength and noted the investment that Blackboard is making in this area (more than $50 m expected in 2018).

While the company has shown good progress in migrating its legacy Learn customers onto the appropriate SaaS-based platform from which those customers may choose, in turn, to migrate to Ultra, Blackboard’s efforts to make those transitions smooth for its customers have entailed elevated capital expenditures, which will likely continue through 2019, cutting into free cash flow.

Put this all together, and 2018 is the year that Blackboard needs to transition from ‘wait until Learn Ultra is ready’ to ‘Learn Ultra had better lead to increased sales’. I have been impressed with the new management team’s transparent approach to dealing with analysts, and with their honest approach to understanding the problems they need to solve. But the company needs to deliver, and this is shaping up to be a newsworthy year for Blackboard, for good or ill. There’s a lot to watch here.

April 10, 2018
Blackboard Replaces CEO Jay Bhatt: What happened

Just over four years since Providence Equity Partners acquired Blackboard and three years after they brought in Jay Bhatt to replace co-founder Michael Chasen, the company announced another change in CEO. Blackboard has removed Jay Bhatt and replaced him with Bill Ballhaus. The official reason from the announcement:

Today, we are fortunate to be joined by a great leader – our new CEO Bill Ballhaus. Bill’s philosophy is directly in line with ours and his skill set is going to help us reach new heights. While this is certainly a change for Blackboard, rest assured that the heart of our mission and strategy will remain the same. [snip]

So we have defined our strategy and now, with Bill joining the company, we’ll continue to execute against it. Bill has accomplished much over his career and his operational expertise has led various businesses to great success. He and I share a fundamental belief that if you make your first priority taking care of your customers, the business results will follow. So, under his leadership Blackboard will continue our focus on doing just that. We will deliver next generation teaching and learning capabilities to the market, continue our international growth, and improve even further the way we serve our customers and strive to exceed their expectations. Bill is uniquely positioned to help us execute against these priorities, and with him we’ll achieve significant advances for our customers and for Blackboard.

While the official messaging is ‘full steam ahead’, to me this is a straightforward story that we have already been covering at e-Literate. In a nutshell, the attempted sale of Blackboard this year has failed, and the company has stalled in its turnaround attempts. (more…)

January 4, 2016