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Blackboard Buys Moodlerooms and Netspot
crumley writes "Blackboard, the proprietary giant in the learning management software market, has purchased two companies, Moodlerooms and Netspot, that sell support for their open source competitor Moodle. Blackboard said that they plan to allow Moodlerooms and Netspot to continue operating with their current leadership. It will be interesting to see if this move leads to an exodus from Moodlerooms and Netspot, since many of their clients were intentionally trying to avoid doing business with Blackboard."
Every time our college escapes Blackboard and their horrendous technical support and technical staff they buy the company we moved to. Likewise, every time they buy the company we moved to, the technical support takes a noticeable nosedive. Our support people notice it, our staff notices it, it's just that obvious when it happens. We have to almost fight with them to get things done sometimes and the only thing they can manage to do with reasonable turnaround time is notify you of outages (caused, the majority of the time, at least for us, by their mistakes).
Which is rather unfortunate, since I can say without exaggeration that Blackboard is probably the worst piece of modern software I've ever had to use. Moodle's certainly not perfect, but I've found it absolutely fine in general day-to-day use; Blackboard is slow, buggy, and has a web interface which manages to disable such revolutionary new browser features as 'the back button', and 'middle click'.
No need to. Blackboard only bought two companies that provided Moodle hosting.
The code is fine. The Moodle organization is fine. The only thing that is happening is that schools are learning yet again why it's better to host it yourself than to outsource.
"Yet schools seem to constantly get rid of these home-grown solutions in favor of Blackboard 'n pals...why?"
Because of CYA support contracts. Executive university ITS staff hate the thought of having the buck stop with their department. By paying outrageous fees to these big players, they always have an out when things don't work - they can yell at someone at Blackboard.
The linked article only mentions Moodle, but Blackboard also announced yesterday that they have hired Charles Severence, one of the founding architects of the Sakai project, in the role of "Chief Sakai Strategist", and also announced that they will provide hosted Moodle and Sakai installations. This is a major foray into the Open Source LMS world, and it's still to be seen whether it is an opportunity to keep relationships with non-Bb schools, or a razed-earth invasion of the OS support arena.
As a side note, technically Banner isn't an LMS, it is a Student Information System (SIS): it goes rather deeper into the registration process than an LMS, and also acts as the HR system at most institutions that use it.
I would be laughing at this comment if I had not been in that war myself. Unfortunately, I am now forever unclean.
And it's not just Blackboard Learn. It's every piece of software they've ever written (I have a great deal of experience extending and supporting BBTS at every level, there were massive gaps in middleware that they didn't provide that I had to write myself). I'm quite convinced they design the software to be intentionally bad to secure service contracts (that are enormously expensive, indeed). Even something as simple as monitoring their services was a nightmare. The tools they provided almost always hung when opened. I had to reverse engineer the protocol they were using and write an app that would detect when a service was having problems and auto-restart it. One service would just kill itself if it got too many errors (as I was told by one of their engineers, it maintains a count of failed actions, if that count gets too high, the process either hangs or exits), and these errors were internal, not really "errors," and happened at a very rapid rate. I just can't comprehend that level of bad. Don't even get me started on the DB structure, the backup methods, nor the interfaces between the individual components and their 3rd-party bindings (which weren't well maintained). Holy shit, man. Holy shit.
There were some bright people working there, unfortunately they have to support a monumental failure. I feel their pain.
As a professor, I HATE blackboard. I use it to enter grades and post basic texts, and that's it. For every other use, it is absolutely awful. Example: I have a directory of files I want my students to have. I should be able to upload the directory itself, like every other ftp app has been able to do since the 1980s. But Blackboard? Nooooo. I have to create a directory, name it and check its attributes, and then set it into the Blackboard system, and then load each file to it individually. Or, I have to go and zip the files together, which assumes my students have unzipping software and that I have the time to zip the stuff up (As if I don't already have enough to keep me busy with bullshit). When I enter grades, out of 200+ students, at least one or two grades somehow get "undone". Its ugly, its clunky and completely retarded. I'm sure you are a nice guy, but I want your company to go out of business. Now.
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