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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."
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..
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).
Moodle, even if it's in it's current state of code should make for a very usable open-source platform for a long time to come.
It's not so much that clients are specifically avoiding Blackboard; schools and such are vastly under-funded, and given the choice between competent free software with smaller support costs and a proprietary LMS, why pay the premium? My university has been steadily moving courses from Blackboard to Moodle for that reason specifically.
So long as the services and prices of these companies remain the same, I don't think clients are going to care who the owner is.
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
To be honest, I have had better experiences with home-grown systems than with prepackaged software. My alma mater got rid of their home grown system in favor of Banner (by Sunguard) and it was a complete disaster, after having flirted with Blackboard (which was less of a disaster but still terribly annoying). My current school uses Sakai, and it is just awful compared to the CGI scripts that professors sometimes write.
Palm trees and 8
My favorite law firm name is Bogins Munns & Munns cause whenever I hear it, I think to myself Bogus Buns & Buns... lol
Looks like its time for someone to fork these projects!
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.
So, Blackboard acquired some firms supporting open source LMS. At most, they've inconvenienced the folks who have been using the services of the firms they purchased with needing to find new support. At least, they've acquired some new potential profit centers. And, if they do a poor job of managing them, or deliberately kill them, they will have succeeded in creating an opening for new firms supporting LMS. They can't impact the code or the knowledge base, and those people currently working for those firms always have the option of working elsewhere, like new start-ups. Come on people, a huge percentage of us got into this business, at least in part, because we didn't like how someone else was doing it, and knew we could do better ourselves. This is just another one of those opportunities ;-)
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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