e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Ray Henderson

  • Yup, Something (Good) Is Up at Blackboard

    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.” ((Or “hikes the Appalachian trail.” Pick your favorite euphemism.)) Well-known long-time employees leave the company en masse, some of their own volition and others not. It’s a common enough story trope, but it comes with two distinctly different endings. In one version, the company accelerates its downward spiral until it crashes spectacularly. In the other version, everybody is amazed at the company’s revitalization and they live happily ever after. It is nearly impossible to tell from the beginning of the story how it will end. All of the people leaving the company are, of course, unhappy and are likely to have negative opinions of what’s going on. And often they have valid criticisms, even in the stories that later come to happy endings. When an executive is trying to turn around a billion-dollar company quickly, a scalpel won’t do it. Some meat cleaver work is necessary. Collateral damage is inevitable even in the best of cases. So reports from former employees are interesting but don’t tell the whole story. Customers won’t see the results of the changes for a while, so there will be few clues there. In fact, they may see things get worse before they get better due to the chaos of the reorganization. And even the employees who are on the inside often don’t know what to think in the early stages.

    And so it has been with Blackboard. Up until recently, it has been very hard to tell which way the story will go. But I agree with Phil that we’re beginning to see early signs that we may get the happy ending here. I had an opportunity to visit Blackboard this week, and what I heard is very consistent with Phil’s recent experiences with them.

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  • 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 system like Purdue’s Course Signals is, in fact, adaptive. It sees when a student is in danger of failing or dropping out and sends increasingly urgent and specific suggestions to that student. It does that without “knowing” anything about the content that the student is learning. Rather, it’s looking at things like recency of course login (Are you showing up for class?), discussion board posts (Are you participating in class?), on-time assignment delivery (Are you turning in your work?), and grade book scores (Is your work passing?), as well as longitudinal information that might indicate whether a student is at-risk coming into the class. What Purdue has found is that such a system can teach students metacognitive awareness of their progress and productive help-seeking behavior. It won’t help them learn the content better, but it will help them develop better learning skills.

    Well, last week, Ray Henderson announced Blackboard’s new Retention Center and described it as follows:

    The Retention Center gives critical insight on learning and activity gaps to instructors, within the LMS, that helps them quickly diagnose students that are falling behind. Pre-configured and automatic so they don’t have to hunt for it. No set-up: it automatically calls out students that are at risk while instructors still have time and space to do something about it. With the feature instructors can see:

    • Who’s logging in: this is a simple but powerful predictor of student success. Instructors see how long it’s been since students have logged in to the course and how many have been away for five days or more. And not by fishing through student profiles or reports but in an automatic view complete with red flags where they’re needed.
    • Whether they’re engaged: which students have had low levels of course activity, at 20 percent or below the average in the last week.
    • Whose grades are suffering: which students are currently trending at 25 percent or more below the course average so they can target extra help to where it’s most needed – even when it isn’t asked for.
    • Who has missed deadlines: instructors might know this anecdotally or on a case-by-case basis, but now they can get a real-time view of all students that have missed one or more deadline.

    Eerily similar, no? A number of years back, when I pressed Course Signals inventor John Campbell on which factors in the LMS are most highly predictive of student success across different courses, he named exactly these four. The only surprise here is that this isn’t a common analytics feature of every LMS and courseware platform on the market yet. Purdue proved that their value in helping at-risk students is high. I’m glad Blackboard is stepping up.

    The one piece that’s missing is a simple standard where an SIS or other longitudinal data system could pass an at-risk “credit score” to the early warning system to modify its sensitivity. If a student on the honor roll drops off the radar for a week, it’s less of a cause for concern that a student on academic probation (for example). I tried to push this idea for a standard at the IMS a few years back but got nowhere with it at the time. I hope that Blackboard will push for something like it now that they have a system to take the data.

  • 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 has an interesting reflection blog post up about the transition.

    I’m sure we’ll have more coverage of this event here on e-Literate in the coming days and weeks as we learn more and have time to think about what it means.

  • 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. ((As an aside, I did not know that Ray also holds the CTO title until I went to the Blackboard web site to check his title when sitting down to write this post. I don’t know how new that title is.)) 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 of what they are attempting are much larger than you might infer from the press releases.

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  • 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; perhaps longer than private equity objectives permit.

    Blackboard describes their software business saying: “We typically license our individual software applications either on a stand-alone basis or bundled as part of one of our six product lines: Blackboard Learn Blackboard Transact Blackboard Connect Blackboard Mobile Blackboard Collaborate and Blackboard Analytics.” Professional services account for 8% of revenue; product for 92%.

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  • 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 don’t believe in rewriting my posts after they are published (unless it’s on the level of a typo fix), because I believe in being accountable for what I have posted. So instead, I have inserted a short correction notice into the original post and will issue a longer one here.

    The problem can be best illustrated with the T-shirt that I placed into the post:

    There is a story behind that shirt. It was a gift. While at the Open Ed conference, Blackboard employees George Kroner and Jarl Jonas generously offered to walk me through the details surrounding some recent announcements about Blackboard’s support for OER in CourseSites. As I wrote in a subsequent blog post based on the information I got from George and Jarl, my conclusion was that Blackboard had made a sincere and substantial contribution to the advancement of OERs. At the end of the conversation the two gentlemen, I mentioned that I have a T-shirt from every major LMS except Blackboard. The one pictured here was kindly sent to me by George in response. Even a casual glance at it shows that it is not an official Blackboard T-shirt. I interpreted it as something created by the employees as an expression of affection for Ray’s personal investment in their openness effort. That’s what it meant to me and that’s what made me think of posting it.

    Unfortunately, I didn’t provide that context in the post. Along with my text, it easily could have been interpreted as a suggestion that Ray is trying to hog the limelight. Anybody who knows him even a little bit would not find that credible. I did not mean to suggest that Ray was looking to take credit for the open source move. Rather, I meant to suggest that he is looking to claim responsibility for it. I interpret him as saying, roughly, “To the degree that I’ve earned your trust, please trust me on this. I am personally invested in it.” He wasn’t bragging, nor was he slamming other Blackboard executives. So, my bad for not writing clearly.

    Ray wrote me a respectful and entirely appropriate email calling my attention to the passage in question. He took particular pains to emphasize that the T-shirt was not a Blackboard PR effort intended for external audiences, but rather “a humorous element of our cocktail party.” I do get push-back about my posts by their subjects from time to time and only feel compelled to respond when the objection has merit. This one did.

  • 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 implications and make a few new graphs (which, I admit, were very pretty). If you want to see analysis like this continue in future years, then support the Campus Computing Project.

    In this next part, we’re going to go “off-road” a little and see what we can figure out in areas where we don’t have quantitative data that is as solid as Casey’s. As I wrote in the previous post in this series, there are roughly 875 WebCT and ANGEL customers who will have to migrate to a new LMS in the next few years, in an environment of strong budget pressures. This creates an atmosphere in which more and different schools may be in play than has typically been the case. But evaluating options and choosing to move are two different things. What happens in the next few years is likely to shape the LMS landscape for years to come, at least in North America.

    Let’s see if we can read the tea leaves.

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