This week was both D2L’s FUSION conference and Blackboard’s BbWorld. The conventional wisdom going around is that there was no big news out of either conference. In Blackboard’s case, that’s just not true. In fact, there was an astonishing amount of very significant news. It’s just that Blackboard didn’t do a very good job of explaining it to people. And that, by itself, is also news.
Tag: Stephanie Weeks
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Blackboard Analytics Update
In my last post, I promised that I would give an update specifically on the state of Blackboard’s learning analytics. Well, here you go. This is a summary of what I learned about their product from a chat with Mark Max, Blackboard’s VP of Learning Analytics and, to a lesser degree, with VP of User Experience Stephanie Weeks. I wrote about Blackboard’s Retention Center product some time ago. That product (or feature set, since it is free in Blackboard) directly competes with Desire2Learn’s Student Success System. This post is more broadly about their Analytics product suite, which is most directly analogous with Desire2Learn’s Insights product, although it is actually much, much broader in scope.
The short version is this: Blackboard has very solid and reliable technology base from which they are building their learning analytics. It is easily the most mature platform among the LMS providers from that perspective. What they are a little short on is vision. In other words, they are pretty much the mirror image of Desire2Learn.
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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.