Blackborg Rides Again

Blackboard went on another buying spree today. Just a few random thoughts.
  • If Blackboard had purchased either Wimba or Elluminate, they could have spun it as a strategic business decision. By purchasing both of them, the only possible explanation is that it is another example of squelching innovation and limiting competition.
  • In Ray Henderson's blog post, he refers to both companies as "former rivals." Although it's true that Blackborg has some sort of a lame virtual classroom, synchronous tool (I believe they call it the Bb POS), very few people who work in educational technology would have seen Wimba as a rival of Blackboard. Or Elluminate. Hell, we barely see D2L or Moodle as rivals of Blackboard.
  • Maybe when you are the most hated company in the education sandbox, everyone seems like a rival to you.
  • Ray also says "We hear consistently from our clients that their online infrastructure and offerings have grown from important to mission critical." Apparently they stop listening when those clients follow that up with "However, the last thing we want is to have total vendor lock-in where we are completely dependent upon you and at your mercy (of which you have none)."
  • My favorite tweet of the day went something like this: "Blackboard Collaborate sounds so much nicer than Blackboard Conglomerate, Blackboard Cartel, or Blackboard Cabal"
  • It seems to me that buying Wimba would have been sufficient since it is more fully developed than Elluminate. However, by purchasing Elluminate they have effectively upset the partnership arrangements that Elluminate has with Desire2Learn eCollege, RemoteLearner (Moodle), and Unicon (Sakai). If you believe that Blackboard will really continue to "sustain this work and the partnerships," then you just haven't been paying attention.
To all the Bb lovers out there (you know who you are), I have one question:

Will you still be Blackboard lovers when they purchase Apollo (UofPhx), Kaplan, Capella, and others to complete their vertical integration into the education space?

Comments

Unknown said…
For Blackboard, collaboration means to eliminate the competition. The acquisition of Elluminate and Wimba will dampen my interest in the products as I search for a synchronous tool for online course enhancement.
July 08, 2010 8:53 AM
Mike Condon said…
Deja vu all over again for Carol Vallone (Wimba CEO/Chairman - formerly pres/CEO/Chairman @ WebCT)?

And Frankie (whose school runs Bb, and therefore uses it some) asks:

Do people love Bb? Who?

-mike
July 08, 2010 1:03 PM
deniszgonjanin said…
Just like people have been moving to Moodle, this will prompt many to move away from Wimba and Elluminate. For an open source alternative, check out http://bigbluebutton.org/
July 08, 2010 1:58 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ed2Go is NOT Higher Education

Image
For several years now I have railed against the use of ed2go courses when they are affiliated with a college or university. During my time on the Minnesota Online Council I was especially adamant against the listing of the ed2go courses at the MnOnline website as though they were endorsed courses from a member institution. There is no way that I think the brand should be diluted by including courses like this in our offerings. Why not? Glad you asked. NOTE: most of this post was written after I discovered that my own school had recently signed on with ed2go. This saddens me to no end since I spent the past five y ears railing against the use of ed2go in Minnesota Online and our colleges. Our VP in that division assures me that they will do what they can to not harm our reputation for quality online offerings - and I believe that, I'm just not sure how much of that we can actually control. I waited a couple of weeks before posting this to see whether my opinion would be changed by...
Read more

Another Switch from Blackboard to Desire2Learn

Image
As many of you know, I am always interested in the comings and goings of the LMS wars. Who's leaving Blackboard and what are they going to? I rarely have to ask the opposite question - who's migrating to Blackboard from a non-Blackboard platform - because it almost NEVER happens. The latest one to catch my eye was the University of Surrey in the UK. Here's their press release about choosing D2L . Nowhere in the release do they mention what platform they've been on - but it doesn't take much effort to find this on their current website: So, yes, this is another school switching from Blackbeard to Desire2Learn. I find portions of their press release to be revealing about their previous experience with BlackCT Vista. "A new hi-tech system is being introduced at the University of Surrey to enable students to learn on computers and mobile devices via a more personalised platform ." "The new Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), replacing and vastly improving...
Read more

New Netiquette Guidelines for LSC Online

The LSC Online Programs Advisory Committee decided to craft a set of netiquette guidelines that would serve as the recommended list that faculty could use for their online courses. It's not a full policy or anything like that, just an attempt to give them some useful information to post in their online courses. Faculty are free to use them, change them, add to them, not use them at all, or whatever. The list is posted in the LSC wiki . This project was taken on because many of our online faculty had been using a particular web resource for many years as a netiquette guide. That web page began carrying less-than-attractive banner ads and quite frankly was always more about general online netiquette rather than focused on online learning. There are quite a few other sets of guidelines out there, but many of them are rather lengthy or include items that we don't feel are needed, and occasionally we just disagreed with them. So, we decided to write a relatively short list of our ow...
Read more