Blackboard and WebCT merge 277
Acidangl writes "Blackboard and WebCT, leading providers of enterprise software and services to the education industry have announced plans to merge." From the article: "Under terms of the agreement, Blackboard will acquire WebCT in a cash transaction for $180 million, which values the offer at approximately $154 million, net of WebCT's August 31, 2005 cash balance of $26 million. The ultimate value of the offer will vary depending on WebCT's cash balance at closing."
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully someone can provide some sort of competition to this company.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:2)
Re:Wow (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
To clarify: the vulnerability that the Georgia Tech student [chronicle.com] found was in the Blackboard Commerce Suite [blackboard.com], not the Academic Suite [blackboard.com].
The Commerce Suite was a product line purchased from AT&T several years ago, and is mostly seperate from the Academic Suite. This merger mostly affects the Academic Suite.
I've seen this on TV (Score:2, Informative)
Open Source Competition (Score:2)
Re:Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:2)
Re:Wow (Score:2)
Hopefully someone can provide some sort of competition to this company.
Yes, somebody please do! It'd take about 2 hours for a PHP newbie to create a better system than WebCT.
It wasn't security issues (Score:2)
Re:Will Moodle or any OSS LMS scale? (Score:3, Informative)
What's the migration path to the new OSS product?
BB migration to Moodle - sucks (as far as I could figure). But apparently is getting better
Will it integrate with the library software, the student portal, the student system and all the other disparate systems on campus?
Probably - but it will be bespoke (so will integrating the proprietry one). At least you can code it t
Re:Will Moodle or any OSS LMS scale? (Score:2)
I can't talk from experience as we never used Blackboard, but at least California State University Humboldt and San Francisco State University have done the migration. There was quite a bit of discussion of their plans and
Possible rising costs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Possible rising costs (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now, one user simply clicking onto the main page, with no other connections to apache, is pushing an httpd process out to 21 meg of ram, and 19% of cpu. When someone actually does something, or when a whole class is connected, things go downhill a bit. No one's getting connection time outs that I know of, but I do worry about it.
I'm using the best hardware I can afford to run it but I still have to put the database server on another machine or it just gets too laggy to be useful. I can't afford to just throw more hardware at it, so my little school remains private with very limited enrollment.
I'm grateful that moodle is free and I love the software, but I'd love it even more if I could open my little school to the public and let anyone who wants to enroll, enroll.(grins)
P.S. - My school is free, no teachers are paid and no students are charged, so extra hardware really is _not_ an option... I just have to hope they'll optimize it a bit
Re:Possible rising costs (Score:2)
Re:Possible rising costs (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the problem with moodle/php is that is is rather easy for a non-programmer to change some functionality. But none of these enthousiasts are experienced programmers, and I get the impression that most of the people working at Martin Dougiamas' (the original author) company all have a pedagogy/education background. The end result is that the code will never be clean.
That will probably not make it any worse than BB or WebCT, a proprietary licence is by no means a guarantee for clean code, esp if you cannot see the code yourself.
PS: if you want visitors form
Re:Possible rising costs (Score:2)
Considering its recent security problems, I'd be very weary to use PHP, or any software written in PHP, for any serious task.
Re:Possible rising costs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Possible rising costs (Score:2)
I look forward to.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, it's often so hard to find where a professor has put the file you're tyring to find. With so many different places to put things, it just gets students confused. Not to mention all the trouble one has to go to in order to find a specific post, send an e-mail, etc..
I don't mean to troll, but both systems could stand to see quite a bit of tweaking.
two bad choices (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:two bad choices (Score:2, Interesting)
The old WebCT was cobbled together at UBC on some rainy FRiday afternoons. Their old architecture doesnt scale anymore, an indexed flat-file system causes all kinds of performance problems, backup and restore problems, and more often than not leaves you running out of inodes on your file systems. Campus Edition 6 was rewritten
Re:two bad choices (Score:2)
Re:I look forward to.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I look forward to.. (Score:2)
It was much more easily discoverable than the alternative, which was every professor having their own site, often stored in different locations on different web servers, with different layouts.
Classroom software is CRUCIAL these days (Score:3, Informative)
I have used this software for 5 courses online and it was great for getting the most recent problem sets and scanned in PDFs etc.
It's just so much easier to have professors use a simple web form to post things rather than worry about building an entirely different course web page for each class they teach.
Also, it's hush-hush in academia, but professors just aren't good with computers aside from those with MS.
Re:Classroom software is CRUCIAL these days (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Classroom software is CRUCIAL these days (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Saving paper (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Saving paper (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Classroom software is CRUCIAL these days (Score:2)
Re:Classroom software is CRUCIAL these days (Score:2, Insightful)
No kidding. I once had a professor come into class on the first day (he's about 60 years old) with a PDF he had generated on a Unix box. He used SSH to copy the file to the Windows desktop, double-clicked on it, and then stood there for a while. Eventually he left the room, returning with another professor.
This second professor used the mouse to show the first how to use the arrow buttons above and below the scrollbar. "I just usually click on these arrows to show m
From a UI Standpoint (Score:3, Insightful)
Usability on the products are horrible. We use WebCT where I work and we can't even get the professors to use it for the most basic tasks. The UI is horrible, and even after teachers are trained and start using it, they end up going back to a simple web page. We can't even get 15% of classes to use the system. I know CS professors who hate it and personally I do too. It is good for giving quizzes and posting things on the calendar, but beyond that NO ONE USES IT. I agree that the concept could be extr
Re:From a UI Standpoint (Score:2)
Being that its Slashdot and all... (Score:5, Informative)
Moodle [moodle.com]
The school I'm at made the shift and hasn't looked back(well, aside from the technophobe teachers who grumble about learning something new a few years after they started to grasp the old system).
Re:Being that its Slashdot and all... (Score:2, Informative)
AFAIK WebCT and Blackboard made inroads with the text book publishers. The publishers provide WebCT and Blackboard course materials with the teacher's edition. I do know that A LOT of faculty are not very technical and love to have someone else do the work for them.
The publishers provide the books, test banks, and the online course materials. It makes you wonder why we need teachers sometimes.
In all seriousness: you can tell which teachers are worth their salt and which on
Don't forget Sakai! (Score:3, Informative)
I am required to pimp the Sakai project [sakaiproject.org], an open source collaboration between a bunch of schools, including UMich, Indiana, MIT, Stanford and Berkeley. The biggest production install is UMich, with around 100,000 students using it.
Huh? (Score:2)
Last I heard they had about 27,000 on 27 servers [ucla.edu](!) and UI was going to be the scalability test [google.com] with 90k.
Other open source options (Score:2)
Better known than Dokeos and Moodle in the US is the Sakai project [sakaiproject.org] This is a big co
WebCT = Zero Innovation and that OneCard thing... (Score:2)
Geez, isn't that the truth? I've been using WebCT at Portland Community College for over four years. It's not a bad application, but is in dire need of some enhancements. For instance, whilst registering for classes, there isn't a way to look up the classes you're interested in, and selecting it to register. I need to
Re:WebCT = Zero Innovation and that OneCard thing. (Score:2)
Too late, already been done. [ua.edu] Note BB's response to the security issues- this is one of the major problems I have wit
Re:WebCT = Zero Innovation and that OneCard thing. (Score:2)
Re:WebCT = Zero Innovation and that OneCard thing. (Score:2)
Yes, but what happens if someone is able to obtain these numbers in the aforementioned "man-in-the-middle"-type attack, and uses easily obtained mag strip encoders to encode someone else's number onto their card? Sounds like one could go on a fine shopping spree with that at the bookstore, local merchants, etc.
Re:Being that its Slashdot and all... (Score:2)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mms-mle/ [sourceforge.net]
Although in it's current state, MMS is a little too tied into the University of St. Andrews' systems and methods. Does make good example code though, and we'd love to hear from anyone interested in working to adapt it for use in their university. Key features:
Ties directly into central data storage, to make importing students and assigning them to the correct modules essentially a single click operation.
Provides coursework upload, grading, per student file
Blast from the past ... (Score:3, Informative)
What's more interesting is that WebCT's Vista was out pacing Blackboard's product in terms of features (at least when I left in October 2003). Blackboard was, I believe, an ASP.NET product, WebCT's Vista is J2EE (and written in Struts and JSP, not Tapestry [apache.org], alas).
My guess is that one of the two product lines will be phased out. This could become an interesting competative case for .Net and J2EE.
Sorry, JEE. Cause Sun can't stand to stick with just one name for anything.
Re:Blast from the past ... (Score:2)
Blackboard started out in Perl and moved to Java. I interviewed with them back in the Perl days.
Re:Blast from the past ... (Score:2)
It all makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Or did I miss something?
Re:It all makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe my area isn't the norm, but we have a lot more private colleges here (midwest, specifically Iowa) than public ones (or were you thinking only of high schools--do some of them really use these systems?). My school [luther.edu] made the switch to Moodle this year after years of using Blackboard--although they *did* come up with their own name for it because they probably couldn't keep a straight face telling their students to go to Moodle (their name is Kaite, spelled with various degrees of capitalization and periods or with a lack thereof, for "Knowledge and Technology in Education" and a play on the fact that this is Luther College and Luther's wife was named Katie).
Granted, I was never here when they used Blackboard, but I don't think I've heard many complaints about Moodle.
Less innovation. (Score:4, Insightful)
It will be a challenge, but Moodle stands a great chance to out-think the combined WebCT/Blackboard group. What they MUST do effectively is reach out to districts - THIS is where the combined merger will find its force, in its broad reach.
~d
Great... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've used my fair share of Blackboard, and I've had some great experiences:
1) The ability to embed Flash and JavaScript into free response questions. 2) The time Blackboard's database started crashing, which caused it to take at least 5 tries to login. 3) And better yet, the 1 in 2 odds that when you finally logged it, it would be as someone else as the database switched your tokens. 4) Best of all, the 1 in 20 odds that person would be a teacher or professor.
And I've heard WebCT isn't much better...
Think that's bad, try IntraLearn (Score:2)
Well, not without a LOT of custom code by yours truly.
In 2004,they were STILL shipping a SQL Server based product without database indexes! Their lead developer had never HEARD of indexes!
Blind SQL writes, so if you try to add an identity column to the database, the program breaks. I never even knew you COULD write to a SQL table without specifying the columns, since it's such an incredibly bad idea to do so, but they did
Re:Think that's bad, try IntraLearn (Score:2)
Also not to make a mistake: it seems the market is just as ripe for non-OSS developers willing to do things better ("correctly" would be nice, but not required) for a reasonable ("cheap" or "free" would be nice, but not required) price. It's not a binary "bad closed source" vs. "good open source" question.
Re:Think that's bad, try IntraLearn (Score:2)
The market is ripe for any half witted twit who can code his or her way out of a paper bag. If you finished "Perl for Dummies" and understood the content, you already have the programming skills to run circles around most the current LMS vendors.
And trust me, writing a migration tool would make the sales process that much easier.
"Oh, you mean we won't have to enter all our course ware a second time? We can just let you do it and all the courses will just BE there?"
Trust me, this will blow the
Re:Great... (Score:2)
Where I study (the Technion), we used to use a system called Webcourse which was developed by a student in the CS faculty and was free to use for the institute (the institute gets it for free other than tiny prices for mentainance and the student uses it as a testbed).
It's an excellent system, very simple interfaces for both the user and the TAs/Professors (my brother is a TA and can attest to that).
After some power games (the Technion didn't want to pay the humble mentainance fee etc etc)
Re:Great... (Score:2)
Blackboard doesn't know web standards (Score:5, Interesting)
Blackboard is also a fan of frames, ugliness, and odd behaviors. It's impossible to enroll a system administrator in a course, no matter what. They can only self-enroll.
Re:Blackboard doesn't know web standards (Score:3, Informative)
It's lame to not support Safari (or Tiger at all), but I think the key word is official. I use Blackboard from Opera. I used to use it through Firefox. It works just as well in them as it does in IE.
Blackboard is also a fan of frames, ugliness, and odd behaviors.
Agreed. It's ugly.
It's impossible to enroll a system administrator in a course, no matter what. They can only self-enroll.
While this is probably a bug, h
Re:Blackboard doesn't know web standards (Score:2)
Sounds like WebCT. WebCT features abuse of both frames and JavaScript. Especially JavaScript. Every single link on WebCT puts its destination in JS onClick events instead of putting the destination in href="" where it belongs. Therefore, it's impossible to, say, copy and paste a link into a different tab, or anything else.
It also tends to randomly break Firefox. As in completely randomly. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.
Re:Blackboard doesn't know web standards (Score:2)
In other words (Score:2)
Re:In other words (Score:2)
I don't know if the scale problem is the DB, or the moodle code- but you're not tied to MySQL.
I hope this gets rid of WebCT (Score:3, Informative)
My school uses WebCT for all classes, so I have to deal with it daily (coincidentally, I'm posting this while sitting in one of my more WebCT-intensive classes). WebCT has the single worst interface of anything I have ever used in my life.
I really, really hope that this results in WebCT getting replaced globally.
It isn't the softwrae that bugs me (Score:3, Informative)
I've never had a problem with WebCT crashing and the one time I accidently closed my browser during a test, I logged back in and continued the test.
in other news, (Score:5, Funny)
My problem with Backboard (Score:4, Interesting)
As a result, some of us have resorted to posting course materials on "p2p" networks and we are aware that members of the administration are actively looking for us (with the goal of expelling/arresting the perpetrators). Ironic that we have to do this stuff to try to learn.
Re:My problem with Backboard (Score:2)
Re:My problem with Backboard (Score:2)
A student's thoughts (Score:3, Insightful)
Blackboard wasn't quite as bad (used it at a community colleg) The UI was sketchy but at least i can use it under firefox.
Re:A student's thoughts (Score:2)
The portal we use is labeled Sunguard SCT. ever had any experience with it?
Open Source Options (Score:2, Informative)
corporate culture - whose is better? (Score:2, Interesting)
Dealing with WebCT's management, unlike their technical folks, is an exercise in frustration. The d
Re:corporate culture - whose is better? (Score:2)
God damned Blackboard.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I am SO sick of professors who use Blackboard/WebCT as a way to get around ordering textbooks or reading packets. I've had professors scan in hundreds of pages from a book, put them on a web in PDF form (two pages to a screen, so you had to read sideways), and expect us to print them out and bring them to class as though they were textbooks. This was done in the name of "saving us money," but really it was just a cop-out for professors who were too lazy to plan their courses ahead of time, or didn't want to get caught in the act of mass copyright infringement. Most of the students spent far more on printer ink than they would have at the copy shop or the bookstore, not to mention the wonderful feeling you get when your ink runs out in the middle of printing your term paper.
If anyone reading this is teaching a class next semester and is even remotely thinking about digitizing their textbook, DON'T DO IT. It only stretches the students' time and resources thinner, and wastes reams of paper - info packets printed at home are lucky to survive an entire semester without getting water damaged, torn apart, or lost in a pile of identical papers from other classes. A good rule of thumb is, if it's more than ten pages, put it in the reading packet. If you absolutely have to put something big online, make sure the PDF is readable on the screen, and don't expect the students to lug stacks of printer paper to class with them. The Blackboard/WebCT isn't there to make the students do your work for you.
Re:God damned Blackboard.... (Score:2)
I worked for five years at a company that created real online content from classroom-based courses. Th
Re:God damned Blackboard.... (Score:2)
I am a professor but I have never used Blackboard. I have made PDF files of copyrighted material available to students. However, the agreement was usually that students buy the books when they became available. (My university does not have its own bookstore, if you can imagine such a thing, and ordering books can often be tricky). In other words, my bad both for ordering early enough and for breaking copyright (though in the end I considered such distribution backup/timeshifting before the fact of ownership
Why not switch OSS? (Score:4, Insightful)
I am a university student and several professors have been dilligently trying to upload files using WebCT for the better part of a week and its technical glitch after glitch and the stuff is not being posted up. This is a campus-wide issue. Shame to have wasted our tuition $$$'s on something I and a whole bunch of students rarely use.
I'm hopeful this with this merger, they decide to use an OSS management system. I could see a problem if the system was just a group of programmers getting together to make one. Since some systems have backing from Berkley and MIT, I would think that the university I attend would have used it.
I would be more in favor of separate systems. One to run quizzes, one for file transfers (hell there's something called FTP for that), another more secure one for grades (no grades are not on the WebCT thankfully). I can access most course-ountlines from other institutions from the WWW and using google searches and they're not on password protected servers. I don't see why institutions feel they should hide everything from others. A classroom discussion board would have been nice too.
Actually met Murray Goldberg, founder webct (Score:2, Informative)
Funny Story (Score:2, Interesting)
The university I went to decided to use blackboard as part of there student-teacher interactions. They (being the university administration) decided however that whatever material was put onto blackboard became property of the university, not the lecturers. Needless to say the adoption and use of blackboard by the faculty is almost zero.
So few positive comments... (Score:2)
My school has been using BB for several years now, and we are actually considering paying the money to upgrade to the Enterprise version. I think I need to forward this /. story on to those that pay the bills.
My experiences:
Re:So few positive comments... (Score:2)
Actually, this is available with the included snapshot tool (we've been experimenting with this feature locally for the past couple of months). However, it doesn't seem to work 100% correctly on our system: content is blown away from the Database, but it remains on the file system.
Re:So few positive comments... (Score:2)
This is good news! (Score:2)
WebCT and Blackboard merging? This is very good news. The resulting future product will be world-class, stable, and very usable. Consolidation can be a good thing when more effort can be put into fewer parts.
Sincerely,
Oracle and Peoplesoft
FanTAStic. (Score:2, Informative)
Blackboard is one of the most hated companies in higher ed. Nobody likes doing business with them. That
In defense of WebCT (Score:2, Informative)
Moodle and Sakai simply don't do the same things on the same scale as WebCT and presumably Blackboard. It's like comparing Dia to Visio, of course we'd all rather use Dia, but we go with the more functional product.
WebCT "Campus Edition" vs WebCT "Vista"
Campus Edition was this hacked together organically grown POS. I worked a little with the web services functionality of Vista and I must say that it's well-done. All of Vista's functionality is accessible through an Apache Axis layer. Ad
Re:In defense of WebCT (Score:2)
While you're right about Moodle, Sakai does do things at the same scale as BB and WebCT. UMich has a Sakai install with 27,000 users. Sakai works for big installs.
Sakai also has the best test-taking modules out there, period. It's still got some rough edges, but it's at least as functional as Web
Re:In defense of WebCT (Score:2)
Sakai also has far better test & quizzes than anything else out there. The pedagogy that's gone into it is astounding.
Both WebCT and BB sent reps to the last Sackai conference (SEPP in Baltimore). They see the product as a direct competitor, and are using it as an indicator for feature requests.
Used to use WebCT (Score:2)
Each course had its own email account. This meant that if I wanted to read an email from Course A and I was working on Course B, I had to open another window, log into Course A, then open the email. On Insight2Learn (my school just switched to it, it is a competitor to WebCT....or else custom built by the school, not sure which), it is one email account, so I could just click email in Course B and
Re:Used to use WebCT (Score:2)
Re:Used to use WebCT (Score:2)
Being just about to marry a teacher in a system where a switch was made from WebCT to Desire2Learn, and knowing what utter chaos D2L threw the school into, I've got some opinions based on the frustrations I've seen.
If you're an online teacher, paging features suck. I've seen how much of a workload online teaching involves, and this is just one more "ringing phone" that utterly destroys teacher productivity. It's too easy to use, and the student-to-teacher ratios for all courses (100:1), even though not ne
HTMLeZ (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yes, but (Score:5, Interesting)
Then I realized that if software this bad is the state of the art in the field, it probably means that there's no real money to be made in the field, so no one will bother. *sigh*
Open Source Opportunity, I suppose.
Re:Yes, but (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yes, but (Score:2)
Blackboard, for all intents and purposes, gets the job done for the teachers that use it. Yoou should see some of the alternatives.
One teacher (Ms. Cheung, a PhD candiate at Cal), has created a Yahoo! *e-mail* account for the purpose of sending files to it. She then gave every student in the class the login and password, so we can retreive files from it.
Another teacher (Human Sexualities prof., Sociology department) required that students buy a $16 remote (requiring a $
Easy... (Score:2)
Re:Something Better? (Score:2)
You have been to
1. Give away the product
2. Open the source
3. Sell support and services
which brings us to the obligatory
4. ???
5. Profit!
Re:United For The Common Cause.... (Score:2)
Hopefully this will change; the reason being that current prof's experiance differs so much from current students. The physics dept. where I TA right now has exactly the same issues. But all of the TA's realise what bullshit this is, and most of the prof's are sympathetic once they actually understand what's going on. I'd