Blackboard and WebCT merge

Acidangl writes "Blackboard and WebCT, leading providers of enterprise software and services to the education industry have announced plans to merge." From the article: "Under terms of the agreement, Blackboard will acquire WebCT in a cash transaction for $180 million, which values the offer at approximately $154 million, net of WebCT's August 31, 2005 cash balance of $26 million. The ultimate value of the offer will vary depending on WebCT's cash balance at closing."

Comments

Possible rising costs

[ZerocarboN]

IS this the big break for Moodle?

Re:Possible rising costs

[Anonymous Coward]

I love moodle, I really do... I use it to run a small, private, online school and it runs very nicely. The BIG break for moodle however, will be when they clean up the code so that it runs faster and uses less cpu.

        Right now, one user simply clicking onto the main page, with no other connections to apache, is pushing an httpd process out to 21 meg of ram, and 19% of cpu. When someone actually does something, or when a whole class is connected, things go downhill a bit. No one's getting connection time outs that I know of, but I do worry about it.

    I'm using the best hardware I can afford to run it but I still have to put the database server on another machine or it just gets too laggy to be useful. I can't afford to just throw more hardware at it, so my little school remains private with very limited enrollment.

        I'm grateful that moodle is free and I love the software, but I'd love it even more if I could open my little school to the public and let anyone who wants to enroll, enroll.(grins)

P.S. - My school is free, no teachers are paid and no students are charged, so extra hardware really is _not_ an option... I just have to hope they'll optimize it a bit :)

Great...

[sH4RD]

So when does either company provide technology which can actually scale to user load, is actually powered by modern technology, and generally isn't a Piece of Shit (tm)?

I've used my fair share of Blackboard, and I've had some great experiences:
1) The ability to embed Flash and JavaScript into free response questions. 2) The time Blackboard's database started crashing, which caused it to take at least 5 tries to login. 3) And better yet, the 1 in 2 odds that when you finally logged it, it would be as someone else as the database switched your tokens. 4) Best of all, the 1 in 20 odds that person would be a teacher or professor.

And I've heard WebCT isn't much better...

Blackboard doesn't know web standards

[sockonafish]

Until just a few months ago when an upgrade was rolled out at my university, the only web browsers officially supported on OS X were Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Tiger, which had been out for a few months at the time, was not officially supported.

Blackboard is also a fan of frames, ugliness, and odd behaviors. It's impossible to enroll a system administrator in a course, no matter what. They can only self-enroll.

Re:Yes, but

[dgatwood]

My initial thought was "Wow, so two of the worst pieces of software I've ever had the misfortune of dealing with will now be under one roof. Maybe this will spark some competition that's actually worth using."

Then I realized that if software this bad is the state of the art in the field, it probably means that there's no real money to be made in the field, so no one will bother. *sigh*

Open Source Opportunity, I suppose.

Re:Yes, but

[phlako66]

I'd say that this merger is directly in response to an LMS market that is increasingly becoming dominated by excellent Open Source offerings, ie. Moodle and Sakai. There's becoming fewer and fewer reasons to pay the high prices for licensing either of these products, especially as the Open Source ones are so good and getting better and better. The developers community for Moodle for example is phenomenal.

Re:Wow

[b17bmbr]

I used WebCT last year for an online class. I really didn't like it. Perhaps it is because I have been doing web development for years, I found the whole interface and page creation process totally distracting and useless. I also didn't like its test and quiz creation features. My district was part of a statewide testing program and we have settled on WebCT but I'd rather give teachers a choice or some more freedom. WebCT forced things to be a certain way far too much for my tastes. I imagine for someone with no experience designing web pages, then maybe it'll be helpful. But, it's just too confusing to create links, topics, etc. Overall I'd give it a C-. But then again, I was a little jaded. Also, the kids didn't like it too much either. They had trouble with some of the features and it was confusig for them.

My problem with Backboard

[Anonymous Coward]

My principle problem with blackboard isn't usability or UI issues (I agree it stinks but I can tolerate lousy UI). What grinds my gears is that Blackboard is used to EXCLUDE students from online course content! Maybe I'm old fashioned but I thought that the purpose of schools were to educate fools like me. Unless I'm registered for a class, I can't take a look at handouts or problem sets! How are we supposed to "try out" classes at the beginning of the quarter/semester/term? Not all of us can afford to register for 10-15 classes at the beginning of the term.

As a result, some of us have resorted to posting course materials on "p2p" networks and we are aware that members of the administration are actively looking for us (with the goal of expelling/arresting the perpetrators). Ironic that we have to do this stuff to try to learn.

Re:It all makes sense

[R.Mo_Robert]

Maybe my area isn't the norm, but we have a lot more private colleges here (midwest, specifically Iowa) than public ones (or were you thinking only of high schools--do some of them really use these systems?). My school made the switch to Moodle this year after years of using Blackboard--although they *did* come up with their own name for it because they probably couldn't keep a straight face telling their students to go to Moodle (their name is Kaite, spelled with various degrees of capitalization and periods or with a lack thereof, for "Knowledge and Technology in Education" and a play on the fact that this is Luther College and Luther's wife was named Katie).

Granted, I was never here when they used Blackboard, but I don't think I've heard many complaints about Moodle.