Just after I posted yesterday about the knee jerk reaction, and I started to get hits from a number of sources (thanks to an OLDaily link), the bubbling that I referred to started to get going, and after the lighter thoughts had left, I was left with something odd at the bottom of my brain… maybe that knee jerk reaction has more to do with the impression that many people in the education world have of never having enough funds. It certainly seems to be the case with public institutions, as I don’t know many private educational organizations that are complaining too loudly about the actions of BB. In fact, they might see it as a net gain as they can essentially outsource even more functions to a single trusted corporation. But public education seems different.
In the public education world, people are happy with “negative zero” budgets – happy that they have a job and trying to make due with budgets that never really grow at any rate fast enough to keep up with anything, much less get ahead (if they even come on a regular cycle). Public education leverages open source – as D’Arcy mentioned today – to save those pennies (spending time over money, increasing that intangible worth of the organization) and when they do spend money, it tends to get spent on those smaller solutions (like Elluminate once was) that are kindred and sensitive to the plight of the education sector. Education doesn’t have a lot of money, so don’t expect us to pay very much for things (it’s a sad lament and an even worse comment on our educational priorities).
But then when a smart company comes by and starts to assimilate all those little dollars into larger sums, public education seems to take notice all of the sudden. But here is the catch, a smart company sucking up all those little line items into a larger one (plus a handsome little buffer for the convenience of a single bill), doesn’t fit into public education’s world of changing budgets and it’s ethos of growing small ideas into larger solutions. One large bill means that if you can’t make the payment one year, you may or may not be able to provide service that year. A number of smaller bills means that you can pick and choose what you want to pay. Perhaps not the smartest way of doing things, but that seems to be the case for public education. Public education likes to be “cheap”. It seems to revel in it’s ability to make do in spite of what the world thinks is “real”.
So maybe that reaction to Collaborate was because of the money angle. The assimilation of all those line items and the individualization that comes from having those options evaporated when the “suits” decided that all those little items were to be assimilated. We’ll have to see what happens over the next few months and years to see if we were just doing a Chicken Little or if there was something real to be concerned about. But in the mean time, I think this does move education one step further into one of two camps – one open and one closed. Determined not by the haves and have nots, but by how individual one chooses/desires to be.
I know I’m guilty of this myself, but I caught myself wondering while I was out for a run this morning… is the edtech-sphere disliking the BB Collaborate announcement because of some real concerns with regards to BB and how they do things to those systems that they acquire, or is it something more “religious”?
Part of me thinks that it might be more the later. The religion in Higher Ed at least seems to be one that sees “large corporate” as something that doesn’t really understand Education. We (edtech) will take the offerings from those corporations that are not directly within the Education market and use them for all their worth (MS Office anyone?), but when it comes to the Education market proper, it seems that we like the “little shops”. We like the local, the agile and the ones that really understand the ultra narrow niche that each of us find ourselves in. So maybe that is why, when an 800lb gorilla like Blackboard shows up and starts to climb the towers, we start to react the way we do. “How can that gorilla understand us?” we ask, “we aren’t the same as that other institution down the hall/road/river/planet, we can’t use the same tools”. I don’t know if this is right or not, but I think it is certainly something that I’ve thought myself on occasion.
The other part certainly seems there being kernels of truth in the former. BB, as a corporation will make choices that are designed to improve it’s own operations and deliver profit to the shareholders on an annual cycle. So this means that as the company grows, things that are not moving the the proper direction are going to get left behind. It also means that it gets harder to get to your “go to people” that were able to get answers from when the acquired company was smaller.
Is this a good thing? I don’t know, but I know that like any reflex, it is not likely going to get any better. After the reaction is set off, reminding us that there is a process there, these events do a couple things really well. They remind us that it might be time to think about what we really need when we are using system x or y and if we are willing to give whatever that is up, and they also remind us that it’s good to have options and that if you stay still for any given amount of time, you will get swallowed.
Well, if you are not on Twitter, you can be forgiven (perhaps) for not seeing the flood of “OMG BB bought both Wimba and Elluminate!” tweets as Blackboard averse edtechers start to run for the hills as the franken system to be known as Blackboard Collaborate rises.
So for those who are not already sitting firmly in one camp or another, I will offer some ideas as to what I think of this deal. First, I think it was only a matter of time before one of the two synchronous solutions got sucked up by either Adobe or Cisco. Why those two? Well, it seemed to me that even though they both have solid solutions in Enterprise, they might want to pick up some cheap technology from one of these two education centric companies. Elluminate was starting to get long in the tooth in terms of looks (though, it did what it needed to do well and could do so on almost any screen and on any pipe). Wimba, though I had limited experience with it seemed to be wanting to do more than the virtual classroom through its suite of collaboration tools. BB, well to say that it has collaboration tools is to be well… (waiting for the BB lawyers to pop up) wearing special spectacles.
Feeling that something like this was imminent, am I surprised with the BB take over? Well yes in that I didn’t think that they would have beat anyone else to the punch (or maybe I was wrong in thinking that Adobe et al wanted to buy up some IP), but no in another way. That way being that BB is a ever increasing monolith in the edtech space and as competition from the likes of Moodle grow in the traditional asynchronous tool space, the synchronous space was one where many institutions were sitting quite happy, some perhaps even thinking of dropping the static component of their LMS in favour of the dynamic. This is what I think might have scared BB into action.
BB has announced over the past year that many of it’s acquired “projects” will EOL within the next few years (Vista Jan 2013, Campus Oct 2012), so institutions are looking at their options as to staying in the BB family or going elsewhere like Desire2Learn or Moodle. Very few of these organizations are considering similar moves within the same time frame with respect to their collaboration/synchronous systems. So BB might have really just been buying some time and money to recoup some losses on the LMS front. And even more interesting is that Collaborate will sit as a standalone product (though for how long?) that will continue to connect with other systems. It seems that the rumblings that were about with regards to BBNextGen being an OS for the LMS may indeed come to light…
Please remember that these are thoughts from the sideline and are about as informed as the next blogger out there who also sits on the sides and watches the ebb and flow of technology. I may be right, but I may be wrong, either way, I think we are in for another interesting round of BB apologetics. And, I do wonder how long it will be before BB buys into the Sakai Foundation and starts playing some cards in the Open Source world (’cause you know, they can host Moodle and the like already). Maybe they will go just nuts and buy up WordPress while they are at it… now where is that bigbluebutton I was looking for…
Thanks to a colleague on campus for this heads up – BB has posted a teaser for Next Gen.
Thanks to an on campus colleague for the pointer to this – BB has a wiki with many of the answers regarding the new sync tool, framing it as part of the Scholar and BB Beyond initiatives that were announced last year.
Well, Facebook has been well “finger wagged” and Blackboard has been given the same treatment in the education sphere with regards to it’s “patented” system for teaching, so when the two come together, what happens? This, Blackboard Sync. As of this writing 44% of Facebook users are using it (gives you some idea of the user base now doesn’t it), and while it seems in adspeak world, that this is a great idea, I’ve got one question… what about privacy? Institutions (and I hope this includes all those in Canada) can block the application, so this seems to be mute issue, but what if this is not the case?
Will Facebook, who already has all the information it needs to sell you a consumer/material version of you to yourself through it’s Beacon program be able to stop “sponsors” from gaining academic information from those institutions who allow the connection to happen? If this expands with Facebook Connect being able to pull out and host a student’s portfolio, will that not also become fair game to advertisers and anyone else who might want to mine data?
Facebook (with regard to sync) says no:
When it was still open only to college students, Facebook profiles often featured users’ course schedules with links to their classmates. Sync offers similar functionality, but within the private space of the application itself. In other words, it doesn’t show up on profiles at all.
“It’s a private application, so there’s sensitive information there that you wouldn’t want published to all your friends,” Gage said. Still, she said Blackboard hopes that students will use the application to connect with classmates and form study groups in what Michael L. Chasen, Blackboard’s president and CEO, referred to as “a new kind of social learning community” in the company’s announcement.
While I hope this is the case, I am thinking that with so many dollars in play and FB being a much larger corporation than BB, Facebook might very well do whatever it wants with that data once it is in the system – private or not… maybe I’m just being paranoid, or maybe I’m just needing to get back to my Scrabulous game… it’s it cool that students will be able to see their marks along side their tiles now?
I knew this was coming – a plugin to BB or FB that allow information to move between the two. Coursefeed will really start to play with the minds of instructors who are already treading into uncharted waters that bring school content into a personal/social space.Having played with it, you can seemingly peek into any course and see some basic information. Not overly useful for me, but where I see this really taking off is for those students who have to deal with more than one institution or CMS on a campus. This could be a real boon for them.
Ok, it always seems to be the case that when I mention Blackboard, I get all manner of hits from their office, so here we go again.
I was in a webinar this morning taking a look at the potential new features of the “new LMS product to be named in July”. There was no non disclosure, but I’ll still try to generalize what was talked about. Nothing there was set in stone and in the end, whatever NexGen turns out to be may be nothing like what I’ve written (clipped from an internal email).
Now the potential features:
- This system will integrate other LMS and function more as an OS than anything else as it will handle login across platforms as well as dealing with content sharing between IMS/SCORM aware applications. This means that if you are on Moodle/Sakai or what have you, BB will handle the login and the student who is taking courses in CS, Anthro and Extension has only one place to log on and get access to their courses. It also means for the instructors – if you build on one system, you can move to the other if there is a feature that you like there as much of your content will carry over.
- Learning tools are built around the community learning/constructivist model with users being able to select local “networks” (think Facebook or Flickr) to join to gather expert resources. This will be augmented by a world wide Blackboard institution based network as well – so our students will be able to share with students in UBC or other BB/WebCT installs through a common website. This means that if you have research groups set up as a course in the system, you will have the same benefit of community.
- A system for tracking of every element of learning, research or admin processes – goals, outcomes and curriculum/project plans if they are in the system. This can allow supervisors/advisors to see what their students are doing in terms of completing objectives in their course planning, it will allow researchers to identify goals in the same manner and allow departments to see how curricular objectives are being met. This is the “Cadillac” SIS (Student Information System) that has been built hundreds of times on campus and many times in the faculty to do all manner of reporting.
- It is mobile friendly – it will work well with mobile web technologies that are becoming increasingly important.
- Standards based, open APIs to allow for custom applications to be built to extract data or perform other tasks such as integrating with other systems.
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D’Arcy Norman
Raj Boora
Themocracy