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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."
Hopefully someone can provide some sort of competition to this company.
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
IS this the big break for Moodle?
Seriously, it's often so hard to find where a professor has put the file you're tyring to find. With so many different places to put things, it just gets students confused. Not to mention all the trouble one has to go to in order to find a specific post, send an e-mail, etc..
I don't mean to troll, but both systems could stand to see quite a bit of tweaking.
Having web sites for each class using Blackboard(tm) or WebCT(tm) which are now one and the same thanks to this merger means that students are always able to check out their course website multiple times a day while they're procrasting by browsing websites such as this one (Slashdot) or Fark.
I have used this software for 5 courses online and it was great for getting the most recent problem sets and scanned in PDFs etc.
It's just so much easier to have professors use a simple web form to post things rather than worry about building an entirely different course web page for each class they teach.
Also, it's hush-hush in academia, but professors just aren't good with computers aside from those with MS.
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
Moodle
The school I'm at made the shift and hasn't looked back(well, aside from the technophobe teachers who grumble about learning something new a few years after they started to grasp the old system).
What's more interesting is that WebCT's Vista was out pacing Blackboard's product in terms of features (at least when I left in October 2003). Blackboard was, I believe, an ASP.NET product, WebCT's Vista is J2EE (and written in Struts and JSP, not Tapestry, alas).
My guess is that one of the two product lines will be phased out. This could become an interesting competative case for .Net and J2EE.
Sorry, JEE. Cause Sun can't stand to stick with just one name for anything.
Howard M. Lewis Ship -- Independent J2EE / Open-Source Java Consultant -- Creator, Apache Tapestry and HiveMind
Given how few schools are privately owned, I can see why consolidation might be necessary in the "enterprise software for the education industry" market.
Or did I miss something?
What this will ensure is less innovation in the online schooling front; competition generally drives innovation. Unfortunately, these two packages are so very cumbersome that innovation is unlikely; the pedagogical framework that once strengthened the software(s) is kaput.
It will be a challenge, but Moodle stands a great chance to out-think the combined WebCT/Blackboard group. What they MUST do effectively is reach out to districts - THIS is where the combined merger will find its force, in its broad reach.
~d
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...
WASTE - The Secure P2P
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.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
Usability on the products are horrible. We use WebCT where I work and we can't even get the professors to use it for the most basic tasks. The UI is horrible, and even after teachers are trained and start using it, they end up going back to a simple web page. We can't even get 15% of classes to use the system. I know CS professors who hate it and personally I do too. It is good for giving quizzes and posting things on the calendar, but beyond that NO ONE USES IT. I agree that the concept could be extremely powerful, but the implementation is just bad. And please don't tell me how professors are just too lazy to learn the system, they just don't have the time to waste troubleshooting a confusing system. In the end, it's usually easier to break out frontpage and post assignments and test dates on a simple website. IMHO, these products have a long ways to go before the time they are supposed to save is realized.
I have some insight on this topic as a university professor. I've used both systems, and I was on the Academic Technology Committee when it was advising the CTO and CIO on purchasing decisions for such systems. We wound up paying for both. As you say, they both suck, and I'm sure whatever unholy combination is produced will suck even worse. At the time - 1999 or 2000 I believe - "open source" was something my colleagues on the committee had heard of but didn't know anything about, and the CTO and CIO were computer-savvy but looked on open source with disdain (this made sense as they were constantly wined and dined by folks who represent closed source companies looking for big deals). I was teaching summers at UCLA at the time and had the opportunity to use ClassWeb, an open source alternative to such tools. My experience with the tool was exemplary; I thought it was easy to use, it fulfilled the necessary functions and was not needlessly confusing for students. It was also free. Best of all, the developer worked at UCLA so when there were features I wanted I was able to ask him for them and they were available in days. It was truly a classic case of the superiority of the open source model working well. For much less the price we paid for Blackboard and CT, which all the students complain about, we could have hired programmers to handle coding issues on classweb and had an open source solution that we could fine tune at will. But when I made the suggestion, the feeling around the table (particularly from the CTO and CIO) was, shut up hippie.... Today I don't use any such tools -- I still code my course web pages by hand using html and have some very primitive open source discussion board technology for discussions. I think it's necessary to have courses online these days for various reasons, but the tools offered by these companies are needlessly ornate and confusing. The open source model makes sense in general but especially in public university settings where costs are a relevant factor and where the freedom to tinker with code brings with it additional educational benefits.
WebCT is an utterly horrible piece of crap.
My school uses WebCT for all classes, so I have to deal with it daily (coincidentally, I'm posting this while sitting in one of my more WebCT-intensive classes). WebCT has the single worst interface of anything I have ever used in my life.
I really, really hope that this results in WebCT getting replaced globally.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
I've never had a problem with WebCT crashing and the one time I accidently closed my browser during a test, I logged back in and continued the test.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
In related news, shares of WebCT were down $5 after news of the merger, although this is expected to rise by 20% at the end of the semester after the curve is applied.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Moodle is only one of many!
I am required to pimp the Sakai project, an open source collaboration between a bunch of schools, including UMich, Indiana, MIT, Stanford and Berkeley. The biggest production install is UMich, with around 100,000 students using it.
-EvilMagnus
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.
My university uses WebCT. It is a flaming piece of shit. I'm not sure if it's WebCT or just the entry/login portal, but I can't access webCT in anyhting other than IE because somehow cookies fail to set otherwise. It slows to a CRAWL under any kind of load. It's difficult to use, both for students and professors. The senior admin for my campus' network has basically admitted that the only reason we use it is because we're locked in for a time, and yes it does suck.
Blackboard wasn't quite as bad (used it at a community colleg) The UI was sketchy but at least i can use it under firefox.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Several people have mentioned Moodle, a PHP-scripted system, but there is also Boddington, which is Java (no, I don't know whether it's J2EE). Oxford University has a Boddington instance that allows guest access. It's a totally different paradigm to the WebCT / Blackboard 'corse' one. Let's hope that both of these open source options grow and provide real competition for the single commercial product.
We have been dealing with WebCT (the company) for quite some time now from the application and system administration standpoint. Our experience with the company is that the very few technical people they have are decent people who are pretty knowledgable. However, it is just about impossible to interface with them directly because nearly everything needs to pass through a minimum of one layer of management.
Dealing with WebCT's management, unlike their technical folks, is an exercise in frustration. The dominant behaviors I have noted from their management are:
- they are nothing but apologists (mouthpieces) for their company,
- they spend a great deal of their time protecting their technical people from customers (arguably, this is normally a good function but not when you have an LMS that is non-functional and campus is screaming at you), and
- they spend a great deal of time in CYA-based activities, i.e., they continually blame the customer for problems with the application in order to shirk responsibility for the poor performance of the product.
I'd like to hear from people who have dealt with the Blackboard management team. What is their corporate culture like? Do you think they will be more responsive to their customers than WebCT is?
I'm hoping that most of WebCT's current management team gets pink slips once the merger is complete.
This is a wide tangent, but...
I am SO sick of professors who use Blackboard/WebCT as a way to get around ordering textbooks or reading packets. I've had professors scan in hundreds of pages from a book, put them on a web in PDF form (two pages to a screen, so you had to read sideways), and expect us to print them out and bring them to class as though they were textbooks. This was done in the name of "saving us money," but really it was just a cop-out for professors who were too lazy to plan their courses ahead of time, or didn't want to get caught in the act of mass copyright infringement. Most of the students spent far more on printer ink than they would have at the copy shop or the bookstore, not to mention the wonderful feeling you get when your ink runs out in the middle of printing your term paper.
If anyone reading this is teaching a class next semester and is even remotely thinking about digitizing their textbook, DON'T DO IT. It only stretches the students' time and resources thinner, and wastes reams of paper - info packets printed at home are lucky to survive an entire semester without getting water damaged, torn apart, or lost in a pile of identical papers from other classes. A good rule of thumb is, if it's more than ten pages, put it in the reading packet. If you absolutely have to put something big online, make sure the PDF is readable on the screen, and don't expect the students to lug stacks of printer paper to class with them. The Blackboard/WebCT isn't there to make the students do your work for you.
A strain of paranoid prevention can be worse than the disease, whate'er the intention.
Are you from an institution considering Blackboad or WebCT? Don't. It is the worst software that students and faculty can use. Don't believe me? Read all the other comments on /. and do a Google search.
I am a university student and several professors have been dilligently trying to upload files using WebCT for the better part of a week and its technical glitch after glitch and the stuff is not being posted up. This is a campus-wide issue. Shame to have wasted our tuition $$$'s on something I and a whole bunch of students rarely use.
I'm hopeful this with this merger, they decide to use an OSS management system. I could see a problem if the system was just a group of programmers getting together to make one. Since some systems have backing from Berkley and MIT, I would think that the university I attend would have used it.
I would be more in favor of separate systems. One to run quizzes, one for file transfers (hell there's something called FTP for that), another more secure one for grades (no grades are not on the WebCT thankfully). I can access most course-ountlines from other institutions from the WWW and using google searches and they're not on password protected servers. I don't see why institutions feel they should hide everything from others. A classroom discussion board would have been nice too.
Way back in 98, we were evaluating platforms for online learning. WebCt was still fairly small and Murray was the presenter to demo the product to us. Anyway, there were about 20 schools looking and we all met at a cabin to eat & drink. We invited Murray along and he came over, drank several beers with us and talked about how WebCt was started. As I remember it, he developed it for his classes to use then got a grant to develop it for the whole university (Canada somewhere). That lead to other universities using it and they spun WebCt of into a standalone corporation. Back then support was outstanding but as things grow and money gets involved, people figure out that having a tech answer the phone probably is not a good use of his/her time. Fast forward a few years and buy outs later, we dropped WebCt and developed our own in-house and have not looked back since then. At times I wish we still had a commercially supported product so I would not have to be the ass that says no to a feature request but announcements like this make me glad we developed our own. Wish everyone that uses WebCt or Blackboard well.
It's like where they put chocolate and peanut butter together. Only evil.
The university I went to decided to use blackboard as part of there student-teacher interactions. They (being the university administration) decided however that whatever material was put onto blackboard became property of the university, not the lecturers. Needless to say the adoption and use of blackboard by the faculty is almost zero.
GCS/S d-x s+(+): a C++++$ UL+$ P+ L++$ !E--- W++@ N++>$ !o !K-- w++$ !O !M !V PS++>$ PE !Y PGP+ t+ 5++ X++ R tv b
Blackboard is one of the most hated companies in higher ed. Nobody likes doing business with them. That's why so many large institutions are standing behind open source projects. The support sucks, too - they're really unwilling to try to duplicate problems on their systems, and upgrade procedures often go badly. They do things like release big updates just before the academic year starts, and then not support the previous version until you upgrade and risk breaking your system. Big database schema changes in minor point releases aren't unknown, either.
I have serious doubts about online class managment systems saving paper. From what I have seen, most students print anything posted to Blackboard or WebCT. Then they loose it, and print it again. I hear from computer lab assistants that many students leave printed syllabi and assignments sitting on the printer. They print it, then they leave and don't even bother to pick it up, because they know they can always get it again online.
AccountKiller
Moodle and Sakai simply don't do the same things on the same scale as WebCT and presumably Blackboard. It's like comparing Dia to Visio, of course we'd all rather use Dia, but we go with the more functional product.
WebCT "Campus Edition" vs WebCT "Vista"
Campus Edition was this hacked together organically grown POS. I worked a little with the web services functionality of Vista and I must say that it's well-done. All of Vista's functionality is accessible through an Apache Axis layer. Admittedly it's complicated, but that because it's designed for VL educational institutions.
WebCT Vista is a thoroughly engineered modern product. Those of you complaining about the UI aren't treating it fairly. One could literally write their own web UI by hooking into Vista without editing product code at all.
It's even pluggable. It's relatively easy to write multiple authentication/session modules. Does Sakai even have LDAP integration possibilities?
The last thing that I want to do is to disparage the f/oss efforts, but from reading the current posts one would question why anyone uses these real, enterprise-capable course management systems instead of these less functional, less capable and less proven f/oss packages.
Not to mention that the cheapest way to is still to photocopy. Laser printers cost a bit more per page, and inkjet printers cost a lot more per page. Whenever they say they post things online to save paper, they really mean they are just shifting costs over to students (though this is really only the case in universities that charge per page printed in the labs like mine did).
I'm just someone who uses BB for teaching but trialed Moodle last year unofficially. Hopefully there will be better answers to your queries:
... NOT better
What's the migration path to the new OSS product?
BB migration to Moodle - sucks (as far as I could figure). But apparently is getting better
Will it integrate with the library software, the student portal, the student system and all the other disparate systems on campus?
Probably - but it will be bespoke (so will integrating the proprietry one). At least you can code it to integrate with your student managment system and anything else. Just try doing that with BB without breaching license.
How many staff do I need to hire that can provide the love and hugs that an OSS enterprise LMS needs?
That depends on whether you want them to run the LMS or extend it. The Sys-admin I worked with, who currently maintains the (hugly expensive to licence) Blackboard reckond that the maintenance and running costs of Moodle would be no more than Blackboard. But - if you want to extend the modules to do funky things then yes you will have to pay developers
Say I need three programmers and a sys-admin, that's ~$400K (cost to employ after super contributions and payroll tax etc.) to install run and keep the software current. Or I can spend ~$150K to pay the license and the sys-admin and stay with WebCT.
well if you want to pluck numbers out of the air to make sure that the migration won't work - then yeah. Why do you need 3 programmers? I was able to take the course material from BB and put it into Moodle without anyone changing one line of code. I'm not talking import - that's crap - but I was able to do the same or more with Moodle straight out of the box than I was able to do with BB.
I will have to retrain all the academics and staff that put courses online = 6 months of labor = 6 months opportunity cost. TCO is cheaper with WebCT and I get ~$12million in R&D and access to a vibrant powerlink developer community. I just don't think I can afford free software and if I can I'm not getting the same ROI I get from WebCT.
yeah yeah more fictitious $. Why did you say 6 months rather than 2 or 18?. Yes training is a very real and expensive issue. But you are talking $150k each and every year to licence Web-CT - isn't it worth figuring out just what the cost really is?
The LMS is as important as the bricks and mortar buildings.
Absolutly
I can't futz about with trying to get some OSS product to work, scale and migrate thousands of courses in an environment that is used 24/7.
sigh - isn't it sad that we are still hearing "no one got fired for buying IBM" rather than actually being interested in doing a solid investigation of the real issues. If you think that non-OSS is even slightly more workable, scalable and migratable then you have either been lucky or never tried to scale, work with or migrate proprietary systems. Those issues tend to become worse the more they cost
For my money - Moodle is becoming a pretty decent product - and I do not care that it's OSS. Let me say that again I do not care that it is open source. I want a good LMS that is NOT going to cost my students the earth each and every year.
However - the issues raised are very very large stumbling blocks. I was able to manually load all of my course material into Moodle which is currently on BB. A migration for an institution cannot be manual. I am also not happy about Moodle's quizes or ability to use resources that are supplied by publishers.
I'm not using Moodle now solely because of those last two issues. But most of the features that I use daily in Blackboard are available in Moodle. And usually those features are more advanced in Moodle (the discussion board stuff is light years ahead of BB). Our sys-admin also doesn't care whether the stuff he looks after is OSS or not - he just wants it to work without headaches or faculty yelling at him. He much prefered Moodle and was dissapointed that he couldn't migrate the institution
You think Blackboard is bad? Yikes.
::bangs head on desk::
...
Blackboard, for all intents and purposes, gets the job done for the teachers that use it. Yoou should see some of the alternatives.
One teacher (Ms. Cheung, a PhD candiate at Cal), has created a Yahoo! *e-mail* account for the purpose of sending files to it. She then gave every student in the class the login and password, so we can retreive files from it.
Another teacher (Human Sexualities prof., Sociology department) required that students buy a $16 remote (requiring a $12.50/semester subscription) to track our comings and goings, take our asinine multiple choice tests on, etc. Said remote works with einstruction.com to allow us to check our grade and such. It's got perhaps the most craptastic interface I've ever seen. It fucking WISHES it was as good as WebCT or Blackboard (and yes, I've used both).
Now, said teacher (*cough*Carrington*cough*) could have used Blackboard to distribute course materials, like most of the other Uni professors I have do. He could use the craptastic eInstruction interface. No, he wants to be different. He sends out e-mails to the 450+ students in the class.
That wouldn't be so evil (nah.. it would.. who fucking uses e-mail to distribute files to a large audience!?), if it worked reliably. Instead he wasted a good 5 minutes of each class for the first month of instruction dealing with administrivia. He sunk so far as to announce that GMail was blackholing his e-mail. His solution? Encourage students to pay for a Hotmail or Yahoo! account. Hell, even the school's e-mail server is flagging his messages as "possibly spam".
Blackboard, I can live with that.
--
alex
The revolution will be mocked
My undergraduate university's Aerospace department has a product that competes directly with Blackboard, called HTMLeZ. The main college has Blackboard, while the Aerospace college (which includes the Computer Science department I graduated from) uses HTMLeZ. Students who have to use both (most anyone at some point) vastly prefer HTMLeZ. There are other competing products out there, so this doesn't give Blackboard a monopoly on the market - it just gives them a better cornering of the market for crap.