LMS evaluations are typically painful ordeals for not just committee members but also for the vendors. They have to provide multiple demos, have lots of Q&A, and write 100+ page proposals based on extensive feature requirements and perhaps even more painful terms and conditions. But there is one case that might be worse – not […]
LMS
Instructurecon 2016: Why This Company is Still Formidable (and Misunderstood)
When I talk to Instructure competitors or critics, I usually hear two complaints about them: They “open wash” or are “fauxpen.” They have no vision. Having attended Instructurecon 2016 a couple of weeks ago, my answer to the first complaint is that the critics don’t understand what Instructure and their customers mean by “openness.” In […]
MoodleMoot US 16: Playing small-ball
At the MoodleMoot in late June in Los Angeles, which serves as close to a users conference for the open source Moodle LMS community as any other event, there was a strong sense of continuity and general improvements. Rather than aggressive rearchitectures and product lineup changes, the Moodle roadmap is based on hitting singles and running […]
MarketsandMarkets: Getting the LMS market wrong
New LMS market analysis with a leader list that includes a company that is retiring its LMS and ignores the company who has a 5x lead in new implementations for its core market? Sign me up. Over the next week or two, we plan several posts at e-Literate based on the various LMS users conferences we recently […]
Blackboard Learn Ultra: Ready or not?
At this year’s BbWorld16 users conference, Blackboard’s new executive team demonstrated their ability to deliver a much tighter, more coherent message of what they are learning from talking to customers and what the focus of the company will be in the next few years. The “1 Learn, 2 Experiences (Original and Ultra), and 3 Deployments (Self-Hosted, Managed-Hosted, […]
About The Blackboard Partnership With IBM And Amazon Web Services
Leading into BbWorld16, Blackboard’s annual users conference in the air conditioned bunker of The Venetian in Las Vegas, the company announced that they were partnering with IBM. Blackboard Inc. and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a collaborative agreement for IBM to manage Blackboard’s datacenters and cloud infrastructure. The two companies will also work together to […]
UC Davis Lessons: Open is as open does
It’s interesting how one phrase can cause such a reaction. There is an interesting angle here in that Sakai is open source yet data is not easily recoverable. This comment came from the original post discussing UC Davis’ SmartSite disaster when their Sakai hosting partner Scriba botched a data center move, leading to a university of […]