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."

Possible rising costs

[ZerocarboN]

IS this the big break for Moodle?

Great...

[sH4RD]

So when does either company provide technology which can actually scale to user load, is actually powered by modern technology, and generally isn't a Piece of Shit (tm)?

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...

Blackboard doesn't know web standards

[sockonafish]

Until just a few months ago when an upgrade was rolled out at my university, the only web browsers officially supported on OS X were Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Tiger, which had been out for a few months at the time, was not officially supported.

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:Yes, but

[dgatwood]

My initial thought was "Wow, so two of the worst pieces of software I've ever had the misfortune of dealing with will now be under one roof. Maybe this will spark some competition that's actually worth using."

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:Classroom software is CRUCIAL these days

[kebes]

I agree that having this kind of software is a must for any modern university. It's easier for the students, and in many cases easier for administrators. I've used WebCT from the teacher end, and it is certainly a savings in time and money to be able to post material online, which students can print (or not) depending on what suits them. The savings in paper are significant, and most importantly we can implement fixes to lab manuals (for instance) immediately, instead of students using a lab manual that was printed in the summer and whose errors cannot be fixed until next semester.

Overall these kinds of software help alot. That having been said, WebCT is not a very well designed piece of software, and frankly it is frustrating to use at times (for students and teachers alike). I certainly hope this merger means that they will develop a new piece of software, that pulls together the best parts of both packages. As is, WebCT is useable, but it has to become much much better if universities are going to modernize their teaching.

I'm definately interested in learning more about Moodle [moodle.com] (which other posters have mentioned), since it's possible it may evolve to fill the needs of institutes faster than commercial offerings.

Re:Yes, but

[phlako66]

I'd say that this merger is directly in response to an LMS market that is increasingly becoming dominated by excellent Open Source offerings, ie. Moodle and Sakai. There's becoming fewer and fewer reasons to pay the high prices for licensing either of these products, especially as the Open Source ones are so good and getting better and better. The developers community for Moodle for example is phenomenal.

Re:Possible rising costs

[Anonymous Coward]

I love moodle, I really do... I use it to run a small, private, online school and it runs very nicely. The BIG break for moodle however, will be when they clean up the code so that it runs faster and uses less cpu.

        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:Wow

[b17bmbr]

I used WebCT last year for an online class. I really didn't like it. Perhaps it is because I have been doing web development for years, I found the whole interface and page creation process totally distracting and useless. I also didn't like its test and quiz creation features. My district was part of a statewide testing program and we have settled on WebCT but I'd rather give teachers a choice or some more freedom. WebCT forced things to be a certain way far too much for my tastes. I imagine for someone with no experience designing web pages, then maybe it'll be helpful. But, it's just too confusing to create links, topics, etc. Overall I'd give it a C-. But then again, I was a little jaded. Also, the kids didn't like it too much either. They had trouble with some of the features and it was confusig for them.

My problem with Backboard

[Anonymous Coward]

My principle problem with blackboard isn't usability or UI issues (I agree it stinks but I can tolerate lousy UI). What grinds my gears is that Blackboard is used to EXCLUDE students from online course content! Maybe I'm old fashioned but I thought that the purpose of schools were to educate fools like me. Unless I'm registered for a class, I can't take a look at handouts or problem sets! How are we supposed to "try out" classes at the beginning of the quarter/semester/term? Not all of us can afford to register for 10-15 classes at the beginning of the term.

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:It all makes sense

[R.Mo_Robert]

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.

Re:Possible rising costs

[iamlucky13]

Always hard to say. My school just went through a really long discussion and evaluation period on the three (Blackboard, WebCT, and Moodle) and determined that a TCO analysis slightly favored Moodle (open source), but the ultimate decision was to go with Blackboard based on the fact half the faculty who wanted course management software were already familiar with it due to their trial licenses. If things stagnate while they figure out how best to accomplish their merger and promote their products, then things look good for Moodle. From the discussion we had, I think had Blackboard been in a position of change like this, we very well may have gone with Moodle. It honestly came down to, "Well, Blackboard costs a little bit more, but the nursing faculty already know how to use it." Institutions in a similar position could now might say, "Our experience with Blackboard has been good, but who knows what their next move will be."

corporate culture - whose is better?

[arachnia]

We have been dealing with WebCT (the company) for quite some time now from the application and system administration standpoint. Our experience with the company is that the very few technical people they have are decent people who are pretty knowledgable. However, it is just about impossible to interface with them directly because nearly everything needs to pass through a minimum of one layer of management.

Dealing with WebCT's management, unlike their technical folks, is an exercise in frustration. The dominant behaviors I have noted from their management are:
- they are nothing but apologists (mouthpieces) for their company,
- they spend a great deal of their time protecting their technical people from customers (arguably, this is normally a good function but not when you have an LMS that is non-functional and campus is screaming at you), and
- they spend a great deal of time in CYA-based activities, i.e., they continually blame the customer for problems with the application in order to shirk responsibility for the poor performance of the product.

I'd like to hear from people who have dealt with the Blackboard management team. What is their corporate culture like? Do you think they will be more responsive to their customers than WebCT is?

I'm hoping that most of WebCT's current management team gets pink slips once the merger is complete.

Re:Wow

[kat11v]

Horror stories happen everywhere and having known someone who worked at WebCT tech support, I can tell you that a significant portion of them start with the sys admin working for the university. No, this is not meant to be a troll on sys admins, there are some very smart and competent people out there. But you can't help but giggle when you hear of one guy who hot-swapped the network cards and then was puzzled as to why the server went down, oracle crashed and students couldn't connect. I suspect what happens is that some of the smaller universities don't have the budget to hire people with a lot of experience and so you end up having someone on the job that doesn't always know what they're doing but trying to learn it as they go along.

My personal experience with the product interface is mixed. Older versions were not too bad, then newer ones got worse and the very latest one (Vista) is supposed to be much better. So it totally depends on which university you go to and which version they happen to be using at the time.

Incidentally, while Blackboard is a publicly traded company, WebCT is not so concerning the stock options owned by employees and owners, rumours have it that there will be a cash out rather than a stock swap. Will be interesting to see how it goes.

Funny Story

[crawly]

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.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever noticed that on multiple choice questions with checkboxes for multiple answers on WebCT, you can mark all the answers and get the question 100% correct. If it says pick 2 and you're debating about 3 of them, mark all 3 and you'll get it right

Re:two bad choices

[haggisman]

Having endured 3 major releases of Campus Edition of WebCT, this poor sysadmin just about barfed when I saw this news today. Just when were migrating from CE 4 to CE 6, THIS happens.

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 from the ground up as a J2EE application using an Oracle backend. Now we have a 505Mb download instead of 90Mb.

I sure hope whatever happens to BB/WebCT results in a slimmer easier to administer product. Good luck to them both.

HTMLeZ

[ari_j]

My undergraduate university [und.edu]'s Aerospace department [und.edu] has a product that competes directly with Blackboard, called HTMLeZ [und.edu]. The main college has Blackboard, while the Aerospace college (which includes the Computer Science department I graduated from) uses HTMLeZ. Students who have to use both (most anyone at some point) vastly prefer HTMLeZ. There are other competing products out there, so this doesn't give Blackboard a monopoly on the market - it just gives them a better cornering of the market for crap.