Blackboard and WebCT merge

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."

Classroom software is CRUCIAL these days

[Work Account]

Having web sites for each class using Blackboard(tm) or WebCT(tm) which are now one and the same thanks to this merger means that students are always able to check out their course website multiple times a day while they're procrasting by browsing websites such as this one (Slashdot) or Fark.

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:Wow

[rovingeyes]

Yup I'm privy to some of those horror stories, even though I'm just a backup sysadmin for Blackboard. No wonder universities got together for an alternate [sakaiproject.org]. It's not ready for primetime but if Bb doesn't get its act together I wouldn't be surprised to see Sakai gain momentum.

Being that its Slashdot and all...

[Deslok]

Why pay for their service when you can go open source for free?

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).

Blast from the past ...

[TapestryDude]

This is interesting to me, because I worked at WebCT before I left to become an independent consultant.

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 ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong - Blackboard uses Apache/Tomcat/ModPerl on either Windows,Linux or Solaris. They did apparently make a full port to .NET as MS have a shareholding but it's never been released...

Re:Being that its Slashdot and all...

[Anonymous Coward]

Teachers don't care if it is free.

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 ones are just enjoying tenure(sp?). The good ones use all of the stuff provided as enhancements to already great classes. The others are just lazy asses.

Re:Blackboard doesn't know web standards

[suwain_2]

the only web browsers officially supported on OS X were Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator

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, how often does this actually cause problems? Here, at least, administrators are administrators, not students. You say that they can only self-enroll, so they can enroll. Maybe it'd be nice if they could be enrolled, but I'm not seeing how this is a big issue. (I could easily be missing something, though.)

I hope this gets rid of WebCT

[Quattro Vezina]

WebCT is an utterly horrible piece of crap.

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

[ageoffri]

My school uses WebCT and it is ok. The real problem is the number of teachers I've had who have no clue how to use it. I'm taking an online Geography class this semester and the teacher hadn't cleared out posts from last a year ago! This confused some of the other students who missed the 2004 on the post dates. Another problem is my current teacher couldn't figure out how to remove a link in one of her assignments, so we had a good link to a html document and a bad link to a word doc.

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.

Re:Wow

[LoadStar]

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.

Don't forget Sakai!

[EvilMagnus]

Moodle is only one of many!

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.

Re:Classroom software is CRUCIAL these days

[phlako66]

actually http://moodle.org/ [moodle.org] is the place to go if you want more info on Moodle. Moodle is a phenomenal Open Source casestudy. It has grown logarithmically over the past couple of years to accomodate almost every feature available from the proprietary offerings and more. The user/developer community of Moodle is one of the strongest of any open source project I have ever seen. Moodle is also designed from a particular pedagogical standpoint, which is I think one of it's strenghts and is incredibly simple for users (particularly teachers) to understand and use. brent. ---- eXe: http://exelearning.org/ [exelearning.org] ----

Open Source Options

[yorktimsson]

Several people have mentioned Moodle [moodle.org], a PHP-scripted system, but there is also Boddington [bodington.org], which is Java (no, I don't know whether it's J2EE). Oxford University [ox.ac.uk] has a Boddington instance that allows guest access. It's a totally different paradigm to the WebCT / Blackboard 'corse' one. Let's hope that both of these open source options grow and provide real competition for the single commercial product.

Actually met Murray Goldberg, founder webct

[jackbower]

Way back in 98, we were evaluating platforms for online learning. WebCt was still fairly small and Murray was the presenter to demo the product to us. Anyway, there were about 20 schools looking and we all met at a cabin to eat & drink. We invited Murray along and he came over, drank several beers with us and talked about how WebCt was started. As I remember it, he developed it for his classes to use then got a grant to develop it for the whole university (Canada somewhere). That lead to other universities using it and they spun WebCt of into a standalone corporation. Back then support was outstanding but as things grow and money gets involved, people figure out that having a tech answer the phone probably is not a good use of his/her time. Fast forward a few years and buy outs later, we dropped WebCt and developed our own in-house and have not looked back since then. At times I wish we still had a commercially supported product so I would not have to be the ass that says no to a feature request but announcements like this make me glad we developed our own. Wish everyone that uses WebCt or Blackboard well.

I've seen this on TV

[Alcimedes]

It's like where they put chocolate and peanut butter together. Only evil.

FanTAStic.

[Anonymous Coward]

So, a company that raises prices in mid-year, screws with features (SSL support in IIS, for example) so that the "basic" edition of their software can't be used securely, and has some serious problems (the original version of Blackboard 6 had gradebook problems, and there was an issue where students could take tests for other students) just bought the other heavy hitter in the course management software.

Blackboard is one of the most hated companies in higher ed. Nobody likes doing business with them. That's why so many large institutions are standing behind open source projects. The support sucks, too - they're really unwilling to try to duplicate problems on their systems, and upgrade procedures often go badly. They do things like release big updates just before the academic year starts, and then not support the previous version until you upgrade and risk breaking your system. Big database schema changes in minor point releases aren't unknown, either.

In defense of WebCT

[Iaughter]

Dear Slashbots,

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. Admittedly it's complicated, but that because it's designed for VL educational institutions.

WebCT Vista is a thoroughly engineered modern product. Those of you complaining about the UI aren't treating it fairly. One could literally write their own web UI by hooking into Vista without editing product code at all.

It's even pluggable. It's relatively easy to write multiple authentication/session modules. Does Sakai even have LDAP integration possibilities?

The last thing that I want to do is to disparage the f/oss efforts, but from reading the current posts one would question why anyone uses these real, enterprise-capable course management systems instead of these less functional, less capable and less proven f/oss packages.

Re:Saving paper

[toddestan]

Not to mention that the cheapest way to is still to photocopy. Laser printers cost a bit more per page, and inkjet printers cost a lot more per page. Whenever they say they post things online to save paper, they really mean they are just shifting costs over to students (though this is really only the case in universities that charge per page printed in the labs like mine did).

Re:Will Moodle or any OSS LMS scale?

[daveb]

I'm just someone who uses BB for teaching but trialed Moodle last year unofficially. Hopefully there will be better answers to your queries:

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 to integrate with your student managment system and anything else. Just try doing that with BB without breaching license.

How many staff do I need to hire that can provide the love and hugs that an OSS enterprise LMS needs?

That depends on whether you want them to run the LMS or extend it. The Sys-admin I worked with, who currently maintains the (hugly expensive to licence) Blackboard reckond that the maintenance and running costs of Moodle would be no more than Blackboard. But - if you want to extend the modules to do funky things then yes you will have to pay developers

Say I need three programmers and a sys-admin, that's ~$400K (cost to employ after super contributions and payroll tax etc.) to install run and keep the software current. Or I can spend ~$150K to pay the license and the sys-admin and stay with WebCT.

well if you want to pluck numbers out of the air to make sure that the migration won't work - then yeah. Why do you need 3 programmers? I was able to take the course material from BB and put it into Moodle without anyone changing one line of code. I'm not talking import - that's crap - but I was able to do the same or more with Moodle straight out of the box than I was able to do with BB.

I will have to retrain all the academics and staff that put courses online = 6 months of labor = 6 months opportunity cost. TCO is cheaper with WebCT and I get ~$12million in R&D and access to a vibrant powerlink developer community. I just don't think I can afford free software and if I can I'm not getting the same ROI I get from WebCT.

yeah yeah more fictitious $. Why did you say 6 months rather than 2 or 18?. Yes training is a very real and expensive issue. But you are talking $150k each and every year to licence Web-CT - isn't it worth figuring out just what the cost really is?

The LMS is as important as the bricks and mortar buildings.
Absolutly

I can't futz about with trying to get some OSS product to work, scale and migrate thousands of courses in an environment that is used 24/7.

sigh - isn't it sad that we are still hearing "no one got fired for buying IBM" rather than actually being interested in doing a solid investigation of the real issues. If you think that non-OSS is even slightly more workable, scalable and migratable then you have either been lucky or never tried to scale, work with or migrate proprietary systems. Those issues tend to become worse the more they cost ... NOT better

For my money - Moodle is becoming a pretty decent product - and I do not care that it's OSS. Let me say that again I do not care that it is open source. I want a good LMS that is NOT going to cost my students the earth each and every year.

However - the issues raised are very very large stumbling blocks. I was able to manually load all of my course material into Moodle which is currently on BB. A migration for an institution cannot be manual. I am also not happy about Moodle's quizes or ability to use resources that are supplied by publishers.

I'm not using Moodle now solely because of those last two issues. But most of the features that I use daily in Blackboard are available in Moodle. And usually those features are more advanced in Moodle (the discussion board stuff is light years ahead of BB). Our sys-admin also doesn't care whether the stuff he looks after is OSS or not - he just wants it to work without headaches or faculty yelling at him. He much prefered Moodle and was dissapointed that he couldn't migrate the institution

Re:Open Source Options

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using a system developed at Michigan State University, LON-CAPA http://www.lon-capa.org/ [lon-capa.org], for three years now. The software is open source, runs on linux servers, and it actually allows for free flow of information. I am free to make any of my course content freely available to anyone using LON-CAPA at any institution. Since all servers are interlinked, you simply access others' files on a virtual file system. I find it years ahead of WebCT and Desire2Learn (the system my campus has bought into) for writing homework problems involving equations and calculations. LON-CAPA was designed by engineers and scientists for engineering and science courses. Since they have no advertising budget, the only way to spread the word about LON-CAPA is by word of mouth. If you are a student of a teacher, support OSS, and think that information should be free, I suggest you check it out.