e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Ray Henderson

  • From Cockroaches To Miniature Elephants: Webinars on Not Your Mother’s Old LMS

    We just finished the third of our three-part webinar series on“The Modern Learning Platform: Not Your Mother’s Old LMS”, hosted by our friends at NobleStream. In the first discussion, Michael and I laid out our vision for why we are analysts for the LMS market and what we hope to achieve, capped off by Michael’s comment “Depending on how you define it, I have a feeling that, for better or for worse, long after humanity is dead and gone, cockroaches will still be using the LMS.”  In the second discussion, we took the institutional view and had Pat James and Anna Stirling, from the California Community Colleges, talking about how they approached LMS selection and in particular how they focused on the academic and strategic needs first, treating the LMS as plumbing to enable the house to be built. In the third discussion, we took the vendor view and had legendary Ray Henderson take a break from his well-deserved steelhead fishing excursions and describe how vendors understand and manage the LMS vendor selection process. This conversation was capped off by my mention of “the miniature elephant in the room”, where strategically-beneficial LMS decisions are typically made in spite of the RFP process, not because of it.

    Michael and I thoroughly enjoyed these discussions and we hope you will, too.

  • Webinars: California OEI on institutional view of LMS decisions, Ray Henderson on vendor view

    We have now had 2 of our 3 webinars (or colloquiums) with NobleStream organized around “The Modern Learning Platform: Not Your Mother’s Old LMS”. In our first webinar, Howard Weiner from NobleStream interviewed Michael and me about the work we do as consultants and market analysts. Video available here. In the second webinar, we had Pat James, executive director of OEI, and Anna Stirling, director of @ONE training and professional development. OEI is the Online Education Initiative from the California Community Colleges, and @ONE is providing key elements of OEI’s faculty and student support services. This Wednesday (Nov 16th), we have Ray Henderson to discuss the vendor perspective, but more on that at the bottom of this post.

    This was a fun discussion with Pat and Anna, as we discussed the LMS decision in context of overall academic strategy, using OEI as a case study. We seemed to end on the metaphor of the LMS as plumbing that needs to be in place to build the house you need. For OEI, the house is the course exchange as well as a shared set of services to help faculty develop online courses throughout the system. Resources, quality rubrics and design support, professional development, support students, etc.

    Coming next: we have Ray Henderson as our guest on Wednesday, Nov 16th, at 2pm EST to discuss the vendor perspective. Ray has a long history on the vendor side, working with eCollege, ANGEL, and Blackboard as a top executive, and he current sits on the board of several ed tech companies. This should be a great discussion. Sign up here for the third webinar.

  • Webinars: When Cockroaches and the LMS Rule the Earth

    Thanks to the good folks at NobleStream, Michael and I are participating in a series of three colloquiums (or colloquia or webinars, you choose) hosted by Howard Weiner. This past Wednesday, the three of us discussed the vision that Michael and I have for e-Literate and our consulting practice with a focus on learning platforms. In fact, the title of the series is “The Modern Learning Platform: Not Your Mother’s Old LMS”.

    At one point Howard asked us about why the LMS is so important and why we started our subscription service around the LMS, to which Michael responded in Feldstein fashion (question starting at 39:00):

    Depending on how you define it, I have a feeling that, for better or for worse, long after humanity is dead and gone, cockroaches will still be using the LMS. It’s just this durable category. People talk about it dying or disappearing or morphing, and what happens is that it slowly evolves. It’s become this critical piece of infrastructure.

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  • Blackboard’s Messaging Problems

    There are a lot of things that are hard to evaluate from the outside when gauging how a company is doing under new management in the midst of a turnaround with big new products coming out. For example, how good is Ultra, Blackboard’s new user experience? (At least, I think the user experience is what they mean by “Ultra.” Most of the time.) We can look at it from the outside and play around with it for a bit, but the best way to judge it is to talk to a lot of folks who have spent time living with it and delivering courses in it. There aren’t that many of those at the moment. Blackboard has offered to put us in touch with some of them, and we will let you know what we learn from them after we talk to them. How likely is Blackboard to deliver the promised functionality on their Ultra to-do list to other customers on schedule (or at all)? Since this is a big initiative and the company doesn’t have much of a track record, it’s hard to tell in advance of them actually releasing software. We’ll watch and report on it as it comes out. How committed is Blackboard to self-hosted customers on the current platform? We have their word, and logical reasons why we believe they mean it when they say they want to support those customers, but we have to talk to a bunch of customers to find out what they think of the support that they are getting, and even then, we only know about Blackboard’s current execution, which is not the same as their future commitment. So there are a lot of critical aspects about the company that are just hard and time-consuming to evaluate and will have to wait on more data.

    But not everything is hard to evaluate. Communication, for example, is pretty easy to judge. Last year I mocked Jay Bhatt pretty soundly for his keynote. (Of course, we have hit D2L a lot harder for their communication issues because theirs have been a lot worse.) In some ways, it is so easy to critique communication that we have to be careful not to just take cheap shots. Everybody loves to mock vendors in general and LMS vendors in particular. We’re mainly interested in communications problems that genuinely threaten to hurt their relationship with their customers. Blackboard does have serious customer communication problems at the moment, and they do matter. I’m going to hit on a few of them.

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  • Blackboard Brain Drain: One third of executive team leaves in past 3 months

    In August 2013 Michael described Ray Henderson’s departure from an operational role at Blackboard. As of the end of 2014, Ray is no longer on the board of directors at Blackboard either. He is focusing on his board activity (including In The Telling, our partner for e-Literate TV) and helping with other ed tech companies. While Ray’s departure from the board did not come as a surprise to me, I have been noting the surprising number of other high-level departures from Blackboard recently.

    As of December 24, 2014, Blackboard listed 12 company executives in their About > Leadership page. Of those 12 people, 4 have left the company since early January. Below is the list of the leadership team at that time along with notes on changes:

    • Jay Bhatt, CEO
    • Maurice Heiblum, SVP Higher Education, Corporate And Government Markets (DEPARTED February, new job unlisted)
    • Mark Belles, SVP K-12 (DEPARTED March, now President & COO at Teaching Strategies, LLC)
    • David Marr, SVP Transact
    • Matthew Small, SVP & Managing Director, International
    • Gary Lang, SVP Product Development, Support And Cloud Services (DEPARTED January, now VP B2B Technology, Amazon Supply)
    • Katie Blot, SVP Educational Services (now SVP Corporate Strategy & Business Development)
    • Mark Strassman, SVP Industry and Product Management
    • Bill Davis, CFO
    • Michael Bisignano, SVP General Counsel, Secretary (DEPARTED February, now EVP & General Counsel at CA Technologies)
    • Denise Haselhorst, SVP Human Resources
    • Tracey Stout, SVP Marketing

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  • Ray Henderson Update

    As e-Literate readers know, Ray Henderson is no longer President of Learning Platforms and is now serving on the company’s Board of Directors instead. This sort of thing naturally sets of all sorts of concerns and speculation. I had the good fortune to be able to speak with Ray today and have some details straight from the horse’s mouth.

    First, he made it clear that this change was initiated by him rather than the company, and it was for reasons unrelated to Blackboard politics or direction. A lot of people don’t know that Ray’s family still lives in Indianapolis; both his kids and his parents are half a country away when  he is at Blackboard headquarters in Washington D.C. Euphemisms aside, when he told me that he needed to spend more time with his family, I believed him. I also believed him when he told me that both Blackboard CEO Jay Bhatt and company owners Providence Equity Partners have been working hard to find alternative arrangements that would keep him involved with Blackboard in a meaningful way. Ray made it clear that he will continue to be a very active participant in Blackboard product planning, albeit now in a non-operational role. Boards on Private Equity-owned companies are different from those in publicly traded ones in that way; it is not abnormal for a member of the Board of a PE-owned company to be actively involved in decision-making on a focused and part-time basis.

    Ray used a lot of the first person plural pronoun—we—when talking about Blackboard’s work going forward. I didn’t get any less of a sense of enthusiasm for what the company is doing than I did when I spoke with him a few weeks ago. I believe he will continue to have meaningful involvement with the company. Whether the new executives being brought in will perform well remains to be seen, but if they have the benefit of Ray’s perspective and experience in the strange market that is higher education, then parts of his job that he will no longer be doing are easier for a seasoned technology executive from another industry to take on and do well. (In fact, in some cases those parts may be better managed by more of an operational specialist.) There’s no question that Ray’s reduced involvement is a loss for Blackboard, but it’s being mitigated and, most importantly, it’s not an indicator that executive management failed to recognize the substantial improvements in the company that have taken place on his watch.

    Beyond that, we can make some reasonable guesses about what Ray’s future might look like. In addition to a continuing part-time commitment to Blackboard, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him involved in due diligence evaluations for Providence when they consider acquiring ed tech companies. Nor would I be surprised to see him involved with other ed tech companies. He mentioned, for example, that he is on the Board of In The Telling. Ray is still a fairly young guy and seems as fired up as ever about education and entrepreneurialism. I doubt that he is going to fade away any time soon.

  • Some big personnel changes in LMS market

    In just the past week we have had three fairly significant people depart higher ed LMS companies. This really is turning out to be a bumpy ride as the market changes.

    • Ray Henderson announced last night that he is leaving his operational role at Blackboard (President, Academic Platforms and CTO) and is moving into a role with the Board of Directors. More info from Jay Bhatt’s post here and Ray Henderson’s post here. Michael is working on an e-Literate post with more information soon. Bill Flook covered in an article here.
    • Devlin Daley, one of the two founders of Instructure, the company behind the Canvas LMS, is leaving the company as of today. I talked to Instructure rep today who indicated that Devlin is looking to get back in to startup ed tech mode, whereas Instructure is becoming a larger company. I’ll write more of an analysis on this move soon. For now I’ll just say that it is extremely rare for a tech founder to leave a company that might go public within a year or two.
    • Al Essa, the Director of Analytics Research and Strategy for Desire2Learn, has left the company to join McGraw-Hill based on his LinkedIn profile. This is curious timing, given Desire2Learn’s major focus on analytics and the Student Success System this year.

    More to come.