One year ago Blackboard’s strategy for Moodle was floundering. After the 2012 acquisition of Moodlerooms and Netspot, Blackboard had kept its promises of supporting the open source community – and in fact, Blackboard pays much more than 50% of the total revenue going to Moodle HQ1 – but that does not mean they had a strategy. […]
Moodle
Blackboard Acquires Large Latin American Moodle Provider
In my first post-BbWorld blog post, I noted that the international market is hugely important for Blackboard and Moodle is hugely important for their international strategy. Nearly a quarter of the company’s revenue and much of their growth comes from their international business, where they seem to be way ahead of their main North American […]
Blackboard Ultra and Other Product and Company Updates
Phil and I spent much of this past week at BbWorld trying to understand what is going on there. The fact that their next-generation Ultra user experience is a year behind is deservedly getting a lot of attention, so one of our goals going into the conference was to understand why this happened, where the […]
Giving D2L Credit Where Credit Is Due
Michael and I have made several specific criticisms of D2L’s marketing claims lately culminating in this blog post about examples based on work at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) and California State University at Long Beach (CSULB). I understand that other ed tech vendors make marketing claims that cannot always be tied to reality, but these […]
Instructure Is Truly Anomalous
Phil started his last post with the following: I’m not sure which is more surprising – Instructure’s continued growth with no major hiccups or their competitors’ inability after a half-decade to understand and accept what is at its core a very simple strategy. Personally, I vote for Door #1. As surprising as the competition’s seeming sense […]
D2L Again Misusing Academic Data For Brightspace Marketing Claims
Update 5/17/16: I made a mistake in my math on the UW Milwaukee improvements. The number of A’s and B’s increased 163% increased 220% for “unprepared” students and 170% for “prepared” students. I apologize for the error. Update 7/23: Read this blog post for D2L admission of mistakes and changes to claims. At this point I’d say that […]
Moodle Association: New pay-for-play roadmap input for end users
As long as we’re on the subject of changes to open source LMS models . . . Moodle is in the midst of releasing a fairly significant change to the community with a new not-for-profit entity called the Moodle Association. The idea is to get end users more directly involved in setting the product roadmap, […]