Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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 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 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
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.
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
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.