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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."

12 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..

    1. Re:they can continue for now... by MoonBuggy · · Score: 5, Informative

      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'.

    2. Re:they can continue for now... by toadlife · · Score: 5, Funny

      Using Blackboard is bad enough, but to get the full effect, you should try administering it.

      --
      I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
    3. Re:they can continue for now... by MisterSquid · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This is 2012. I understand academia moves slowly but I certainly expect more of a services provider for education than horrendous table-based layout from 1997.

      While not the underlying technology, the landing page is the first thing potential (and, in many cases, existing) clients see and such antiquated structure would warn me away from such a provider. If companies like Netspot are the competition Blackboard can squash only through purchasing, Blackboard must be a really shitty company.

      --
      blog
    4. Re:they can continue for now... by jmerlin · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  2. This isn't even funny. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

    1. Re:This isn't even funny. by Seta · · Score: 3

      Sorry to dig up bad memories. If I recall some of the latest issues we've had with them... they like to add servers to our server pools without notification or copying customizations. They also occasionally try to mis-represent the amount of used disk space, sometimes by tens of gigabytes, to try to get us to renegotiate our contract. Bug reports generally go unanswered for days and sometimes can span for weeks at a time only to be closed with "it's not a bug, it's a feature that can sometimes be used maliciously to compromise the integrity of your database" (obviously paraphrasing a bit). Relatedly, what's even less funny, is that I forgot to log in before posting that. Pretty sad that the first +5 informative I get is when I post anonymously. :(

  3. "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
    1. Re:"Learning management systems" by Acheron · · Score: 4, Informative

      "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.

  4. Re:GRAB THE CODE! by fotbr · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. 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.

  6. Re:Not what I thought it would be by Ralph+Spoilsport · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.