Where I work (Cal State Long Beach), they decided to switcy form Blackboard (called Beachboard here) over to Angel another competitor. A month or so later, Blackboard buys Angel. Gotta love it. I was hoping our school would select Moodle, which is open source and used by some very big Universities.
Why Blackboard's Plan to Buy a Rival Sparked a Campus Uproar
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Re: Why Blackboard's Plan to Buy a Rival Sparked a Campus Uproar
#12Blackboard is a classic example of a product with a long list of desirable features that looks great on paper and to the kind of bureaucrats who make purchasing decisions. Unfortunately all the features are implemented so terribly that it's a constant battle to actually use the thing and becomes almost worthless.
Re: Why Blackboard's Plan to Buy a Rival Sparked a Campus Uproar
#13Blackboard is the ultimate in enterprisey software for academia. You thought design-by-committee was bad, now you can experience design-by-committe when that committee knows the purchase decision will also be made by another committee. As long as all the little boxes get ticked then no-one cares about anything else.
Also, between mergers, acquisitions and plain old bankrupcy I can see this economic downturn being very good for "unkillable" open source alternatives in various markets.
Re: Why Blackboard's Plan to Buy a Rival Sparked a Campus Uproar
#14Hmm. One of my startups Classleaf ( http://classleaf.com/ ) is a semi-Blackboard competitor, which is based on the idea of a lighter learning management system. Since those that read this article might be familiar with the learning management scene, what could schools want to give them the push to use Classleaf's product? I'm going to side with the fact that many schools have existing grade management systems, and pe…
Mark, I just clicked on your profile and took a look at your work. I would have put you in 35-55 age bracket, considering what you have done and the image you have successfully projected. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw you were 16. Take this from me; you're destined to great things my friend. The sky is the limit. But don't let this get into your head; someone like you is obviously driven and very competent, t…
Thank you, Obi-Wan.
Re: Why Blackboard's Plan to Buy a Rival Sparked a Campus Uproar
#15What you guys are missing while you're arguing about how shitty Blackboard, is the sales process. The list of features, yeah... but the sales process is key to selling to any kind of institution, whether it's a big company or a big university. Or a school system.
It doesn't matter if a college class could build a better competitor by the end of a semester. Of course they could. A dedicated, lone programmer could.
But that wouldn't get anywhere without the sales process.
(As a interface auteur, I'd like to say something about how improving on something like Blackboard is not about the programming, it's about the design. But it could be the easiest thing in the world to use and still not sell at all to universities.)
Re: Why Blackboard's Plan to Buy a Rival Sparked a Campus Uproar
#16Hmm. One of my startups Classleaf ( http://classleaf.com/ ) is a semi-Blackboard competitor, which is based on the idea of a lighter learning management system. Since those that read this article might be familiar with the learning management scene, what could schools want to give them the push to use Classleaf's product? I'm going to side with the fact that many schools have existing grade management systems, and pe…
Just remember: It's one thing to get school faculty and students to want you to use your product. It's another thing entirely to make administrators want to buy it.
From what I remember of Blackboard, the biggest (usability) improvements would be things that let you integrate with existing university infrastructure: things like LDAP integration, e-mail integration (submit assignments through e-mail, post messages, etc), possibly pubcookie. Blackboard may well have improved since then.