e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: LMS

  • Desire2Learn Raises $80 Million in First-Time Venture Capital Funding

    Desire2Learn has been around since 1999, and John Baker, CEO and founder of the company, has made it a point of pride that the company has grown to over 500 employees without external funding. From a financial perspective, however, the Canadian company just reversed its long-standing approach and raised $80 million in venture capital (VC) funding. From a strategy perspective, there are no changes – rather a plan to accelerate the corporate growth based on the existing strategy. This might seem to be a large investment for this situation, but Desire2Learn’s two VC investors clearly think the possibilities are just now emerging.

    The two venture capital firms behind the investment are OMERS Ventures, the VC arm of a Canadian pension fund, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA), one of the lead investors in Coursera and Edmodo. The $80 million is the 5th largest north american series A VC deal and the largest ever VC deal for a Canadian software company.

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  • ANGEL LMS: Dead or Alive?

    After the recent news of two significant ANGEL LMS customers leaving for other vendors – Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges selected Instructure’s Canvas LMS in the spring, and Michigan State University selected Desire2Learn’s Learning Suite in the summer – there is an interesting question of whether ANGEL is still a viable LMS solution, at least for current clients.

    ANGEL was created at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis in 2000, and after a successful 9 years Angel Learning, the company behind ANGEL, was purchased by Blackboard in May 2009. Shortly after the purchase, Blackboard announced they would place ANGEL in end-of-life status by 2014. This decision to end ANGEL, along with a similar decision for WebCT product lines, has been fueling a large percentage of the LMS market churn over the past 2 – 3 years (more from WebCT than from ANGEL, however).

    In March 2012 Blackboard changed their strategy – no longer pushing all new “acquired” customers to migrate to the Learn 9.x platform, and instead looking to support multiple LMS solutions. The least discussed part of the March announcements was the decision to cancel the end-of-life notice for ANGEL. As described in an open letter to the community from Blackboard:

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  • Michigan State University Moves from Blackboard’s ANGEL LMS to Desire2Learn’s Learning Suite

    Michigan State University has been one of the most well-known implementations of the ANGEL LMS for the past 9 years. Penn State selected ANGEL in 2001 under an agreement that also provided the school perpetual access to the source code. The next major higher education institution to select the LMS was Michigan State in 2003, essentially putting ANGEL on the map as a significant LMS solution to compete with Blackboard, WebCT and Desire2Learn (which won the University of Wisconsin System contract in the same year).

    After a selection process triggered by the 2009 Blackboard acquisition of Angel Learning (parent company of ANGEL), Michigan State announced a decision at the end of July 2012 that the school will migrate to Desire2Learn’s Learning Suite as the new LMS. As described in The State News article:

    After many technical difficulties, lost homework assignments, complaints and deliberation, MSU announced Tuesday the selection of Desire2Learn, or D2L, as the university’s new online learning management system, or LMS.

    Blackboard’s purchase of the company that built ANGEL in 2009 was the push for MSU to officially start looking for a new LMS, Brendan Guenther, director of teaching and learning support teams in MSU Information Technology, said.

    MSU considered proposals from two systems to potentially replace ANGEL: Blackboard and D2L.

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  • LMS Market Updates: June and July News

    Since my most recent post on LMS market updates almost two months ago, there have been a number of LMS selection projects that have been completed. This time period includes the users’ conferences for most of the major LMS solutions. Below are some of the notable selections in reverse order of number of students (a subjective measure, but one worth considering).

    University of Central Florida moves from Blackboard Vista to Instructure Canvas

    UCF, which touts itself as the second largest public university in the United States (58,000 students, behind only Arizona State University), selected Canvas after a 6 month evaluation process that was triggered by the end-of-life notice for Vista. The full migration should be complete by the Spring 2013 term. The UCF evaluation process looked at three solutions in detail – Blackboard Learn 9.1, Desire2Learn Learning Suite and Instructure Canvas – comparing each to the existing Vista implementation.

    See information at the bottom of this post about the LMS selection website available from UCF.

    Sheridan College moves from Blackboard Vista to Desire2Learn Learning Suite

    Sheridan College, a Canadian “institution with over 17,000 full-time and 35,000 continuing education students”, recently selected Desire2Learn as their LMS provider, replacing Vista based on the product end-of-life. From the press release:

    Following an exhaustive internal consultation that involved a working committee of 40 members including managers, IT representatives, faculty support staff, faculty members, and student union representatives, Sheridan concluded that Desire2Learn Learning Suite most closely matched the college’s criteria. [snip]

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  • 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.

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  • Why the Cisco Networking Academy Partnership with Instructure is Important for Education

    Per last week’s announcement:

    Cisco Networking Academy, which bills itself as the “world’s largest classroom” with over 1 million students in 165 countries, announced that the program has selected Instructure’s Canvas as its new LMS, replacing a homegrown system in use for over 15 years. The initial announcement was made at Instructure’s user conference, and a more formal announcement [was] made Monday [June 18] at the Cisco Networking Academy conference in California.

    This news appears to have generated some interest in technology circles (TechCrunch had the best article so far), but I have been surprised how little coverage the US education media has given this news. It almost feels like there is a concerted opinion that this news is mostly irrelevant to educational institutions, particularly to the higher education community. All I can find so far in national education media is one perfunctory quick take in Inside Higher Ed, one short piece cross-posted at T.H.E. Journal and Campus Technology, and absolutely nothing in the Chronicle.

    Really? Their silence speaks volumes, and I think this lack of interest in the announcement is a mistake. This Cisco / Instructure partnership is important for education for at least three reasons.

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  • University of Michigan and Indiana University pause investment in Sakai OAE

    In news that seems to be well understood in the Sakai community but not elsewhere, Sakai founding members the University of Michigan and Indiana University have collectively decided to pause investment in the Sakai Open Academic Environment (OAE) project – formerly known as Sakai 3.

    Most institutions working with Sakai are using the  Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE), formerly known as Sakai 2 – think of CLE as an enterprise LMS like Blackboard or Desire2Learn. Sakai OAE is a next-generation learning platform based on learner-center, collaboration design originally released as version 1.0 in September 2011.  I cannot think of a direct comparison to OAE in a commercial offering, but that is part of the difference. CLE is essentially an evolutionary approach to the LMS, whereas OAE is a revolutionary approach to a learning platform based on different use cases. The Michigan and Indiana decision affects their participation in OAE but does not change their participation in CLE.

    Ian Dolphin, executive director of the Sakai foundation, made an announcement dated June 7th:

    I wanted to appraise you of a recent development in the Sakai OAE project. Indiana University and the University of Michigan recently decided, for a variety of local factors, to pause their investment in the project effective July 1st in order to re-assess institutional direction. We are all aware of the challenging environment facing higher education and understand that local priorities sometimes change institutional involvement in collaborative ventures such as ours.

    The remaining project partners have met to effect planning in this new circumstance. They remain committed to the success of OAE, are heartened by the substantive advances made in recent months, and are confident of a sustainable future path.

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