When a company the size of Blackboard makes substantial organizational changes, it can be difficult to assess what is really going on. In the beginning, the stories tend to look similar. The old CEO…decides he wants to “spend more time with his family.”1 Well-known long-time employees leave the company en masse, some of their own volition […]
Ray Henderson
Blackboard’s New Early Warning Analytics Product
A couple of weeks ago in my post about the different types of learning analytics, I described retention early warning systems thusly: Most people don’t think about early warning systems as being in the same category as adaptive analytics, but if you consider that “adaptive” really just means “adjusting to your personal needs,” then a […]
Michael Chasen Leaving Blackboard
In case you haven’t heard the news yet, Blackboard has hired a new CEO—Jay Bhatt, previously the CEO of Progress Software. According to Mr. Chasen’s “open letter to the education community,” he will be participating in the transition for the next few months. No word yet on what he will do after that. Ray Henderson […]
Blackboard’s New Platform Strategy
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the BbWorld conference and conduct a private interview with Chief Technology Officer and President of Academic Platforms Ray Henderson.1 What I learned is that the company is embarking on a fairly radical, high-risk/high-reward strategy of re-architecting both their platform and their business model. The implications […]
Blackboard and MoodleRooms: An insight to private equity
There has been speculation about Blackboard’s acquisition of MoodleRooms and its announcements about support of open-source learning systems. This is also an opportunity to see decision-making by Blackboard owner Providence Equity. The motivation of a private equity firm is rapid increase in the value of its assets. Some of Blackboard initiatives may take several years to take final form; […]
My Blackboard Open Source Post: A Correction
I screwed up. My recent post about Blackboard’s moves into open source was a particularly challenging one to organize coherently. While wrestling with that, I failed to give my usual attention to the tone. As a result of that oversight, I communicated a substantially different message than the one that I intended to communicate. I […]
The Evolving LMS Market, Part II
I have gotten a lot of very nice compliments in the last 24 hours about the first post in this two-part series. I do want to emphasize that a huge portion of the value in that post comes from the great survey work that Casey Green does. All I did was tease out a few […]