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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'.
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
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.
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.