
Why Blackboard's Plan to Buy a Rival Sparked a Campus Uproar - crocus
http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i37/37a00102.htm
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madmanslitany
Blackboard started as two separate companies, one of which was called
CourseInfo. This is the part that forms the core of Blackboard's software
offering.

One of my professors at Cornell told us a bit about how CourseInfo came about;
if I remember correctly, it started as work one student was doing for a
particular professor to keep said professor's class website organized, and it
grew from there. At some point, Cornell's administrators deliberately chose
not to employ the student who was building what was evolving into CourseInfo
in order for him to legally keep all the rights to his creation. It's really
kind of a heartwarming story of higher education fostering entrepreneurship
right on its own campus.

Flash forward about a decade and my professor was telling us they were
concerned Blackboard was considering suing not just its competitors, but
universities who built their own educational software in-house for patent
infringement. Well, it was almost a heartwarming tale of student
entrepreneurship.

I would like to point out that the leadership of Blackboard now came from the
Blackboard side, not the CourseInfo side. Still, the Blackboard software
really is horrible. I used to complain all the time that our top rate CS
department students could definitely build a vastly superior system, and then
I found out that we actually did build the god damned thing. Oops.

At least the CS department at Cornell doesn't use Blackboard though;
<http://cornellsun.com/node/21160> We have something called CMS instead that's
worked on by Cornell undergrads and graduate students.

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markbao
Hmm. 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 perhaps a monolithic "all-in-one"
app isn't the best idea.

~~~
mahmud
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, try to keep yourself grounded on the side. Discover
spirituality or philosophy just to keep your sanity. On behalf of the rest of
humanity, let me say that "We" want you to do Good, since whatever you do you
will do it to perfection. You have the golden-touch, and with great power ..
comes great responsibility.

Regards.

~~~
ahoyhere
Thank you, Obi-Wan.

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tsally
Haven't read the article, but just a general observation about Blackboard:
from the perspective of a student and someone who is interested in education,
Blackboard's products are garbage. An introductory computer science course
could put something comparable together at the end of the term, and a
competent Rails/Django developer could blow them out of the water. Blackboard
is like the Internet Explorer of the education world.

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alanthonyc
I've taken a couple of classes that used Blackboard. It's terrible software.
I'm not surprised that they resort to suing competitors to gain an advantage.
They certainly seem incapable of coming up with a decent product.

I would participate in an open source project competitor to them just because
of my dislike for their product.

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ZeroGravitas
Blackboard 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.

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albertsun
Blackboard 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.

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vondur
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.

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philwelch
You can stitch together most of Blackboard out of Google's services. All
Google really needs is some secure site for posting grades, but in reality,
the old "web site with student ID number instead of name" is more widely used
at my school than Blackboard anyway, so perhaps not.

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ahoyhere
What 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.)

