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Blackboard Buys Moodlerooms and Netspot

Posted by timothy on from the cutting-the-ropes-instead-of-boring-the-hull dept.

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."

3 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. they can continue for now... by captbob2002 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Blackboard's modus operandi is to purchase and kill. I expect they will do the same here. Try to kill-off support for Moodle since they can't kill Moodle directly..

  2. "Learning management systems" by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have experienced three of these systems -- Blackboard, Sakai, and Banner -- and I have to say, I am not particularly impressed. Each one came with a phenomenal set of headaches, both for students and for professors/TAs.

    Ugly as they were, simple CGI scripts rolled by professors worked just as well and did not induce any further headaches (and usually had fewer issues). At my alma mater, they had a less aesthetically pleasing system for entering and viewing grades, but it worked -- you never had to go more than two levels of links deep to find what you wanted. Yet schools seem to constantly get rid of these home-grown solutions in favor of Blackboard 'n pals...why?

    --
    Palm trees and 8
  3. Both true by pavon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Blackboard is one of those products where the idea is great but the execution is horrible. Compared to having to maintain a website themselves, it is a huge step forward for teachers and students. It enables them to do things that most education IT departments didn't support before, like discussion forums and per-student access permission (for grades, feedback etc). Compared to just about any other popular webapp however, it is complete shit. It is like all those horrible intranet applications sold to business that are completely dependent on plugins just serve static content, require 7 clicks to do something that should require 2, have poor browser support, break when you do normal things like click the back button, and seems to get worse with each new release.