Update: Comments at the bottom of this post
I must admit that I was 100% surprised when I heard the news that Blackboard had acquired Angel Learning. I would have never even guessed that this would be Blackboard’s next move.
But then a moment later, the absolute brilliance of the idea overwhelmed the surprise. Angel Learning has strong customer growth when Blackboard is doing well in revenue but not gaining customers. Angel Learning has made some inroads into K12 – this is a hard market to crack and the first mover will have real advantages – particularly as sales folks make relationships.
My very next reaction was one of being a little bummed out about Sakai. I really wished that we had invested a bit more energy into improving the 2.x branch to give the market a stronger alternative (Sakai 3 is still a while away). While Sakai 2.x is a great LMS – Sakai historically has had trouble winning straight-up competitive bid situations. Most new Sakai adoptions are because of second-order reasons (all good) like community, controlling one’s own destiny, and seeing the importance of non-course use of a collaborative system like Sakai. All these are the reasons I am so happy my school runs Sakai – but they just don’t win those RFQs at LMS renewal time.
My next reaction was, “What about standards?”. Angel Learning has been a great supporter of standards efforts over the past few years. They shipped IMS Common Cartridge before the spec was completed – that is awesome commitment to supporting standards. Market #1 companies like Backboard naturally lag in adopting standards and Market #2 and #3 companies push for standards like crazy. So when the #2 is merged into the #1 – you expect to lose some momentum.
We shall see if this means that folks from Angel stop showing up to IMS meetings and Blackboard just sends one rep for all three of their products (Blackboard, Vista, and Angel). This is not an impossible situation – it just means that if this results in net fewer active participants – others will need to step up to the plate.
Next I started thinking about the Angel customers – I heard some talk about some spirited discussions in the Angel Learning lists and in the Educause forums. This is natural – some fraction of Angel customers chose “Anything but Blackboard” and now they feel like they have been “re-captured”. This is sad to me – I hope we pick our LMS based on what is best for our teachers and students – not for political reasons – and in particular I really dislike positions which are negatively formulated – in a sense they are inherently unjustifiable.
So what might be the real negative impact on current Angel Learning customers? I think that the most appealing aspect of Angel Learning is that they are a “porous” organization. They let large and responsible customers look at the source code and make changes to the source code. Angel Learning makes patches quickly and gives them to advanced customers very easily. When I talk to folks at large midwestern universities who have Angel – they pretty much tell me that “open source” is not a big deal for them (i.e. they don’t want to switch to Sakai) because with Angel – they have as much of the source as they need – and are happy not to be responsible for the “whole thing”. In a sense, these customers have the best of both worlds – particularly if the school is not interested in being a real developer in a worldwide community like Sakai which takes a lot of energy and commitment.
One of the great complaints about Blackboard is how they lock things down. The reason cited by Blackboard is one of tech support – Blackboard does not want customers breaking things and then blaming Blackboard – a reasonable statement on its face – but for really large sites – some flex is needed. At large sites, a software vendor often is not the expert in their own software as it is running at those sites. Working collaboratively is a great thing. Perhaps the real underlying issue is that Angel is better designed internally to be altered a bit here and there without breaking – Angel evolved in this environment where the vendor and customer work more collaboratively to insure success. For the Angel transition to be successful, Blackboard will have to resist changing Angel to use the “Blackboard way” when it comes to these strategic customer relationships.
The consequences of a mistake on Blackboard’s part would be pretty grave – generally these acquisitions work because very few (usually) small customers get mad and switch just to switch for switching sake. But usually large customers grumble for a while and then simply adapt to the new rules and the new landlord. But if Blackboard changes the nature of the relationship with large customers in a significant way – the large customers might start to switch – and if those schools start to switch – I bet they will switch to Sakai – and this will be a large influx of new developer talent for Sakai – and those developers will add Angel-like features to Sakai – making Sakai a better product. So – word to Blackboard – listen to these folks and keep these folks happy – because if you don’t, Sakai is always waiting.
For mid-tier customers who are going to switch for switching sake – or switching just to be “anything but Blackboard” – be careful how you think about this. First, don’t upend your faculty’s lives just because the IT department is steamed – I am a faculty member and I am telling you that this pisses us faculty members off. LMS transitions should not happen on a whim and they should not happen in a rush. Also, if you switch to some other for-profit company and that company experiences a ton of growth in their customer base – your new company might be purchased in a few years by Blackboard. If you set your LMS strategy based on who the shareholders of your software happen to be – you are making a mistake.
This does make an interesting point about the value of getting software from non-profit companies. Companies like Etudes(*) and CampusEAI are non-profit – if they gain a lot of customers – they cannot be purchased – because the “owners” of a non-profit do not get the proceeds. Sakai Foundation is a non-profit for this very reason – the Sakai Foundation holds the copyright on Sakai – but since it is non-profit we can trust that the Sakai Foundation won’t sell Sakai when it received some attractive offer.
While it sounds preposterous on the face of it – both rSmart and MoodleRooms *could* be purchased by Blackboard sometime in the future because they are for-profit and “have customers”. Often the goal in a take over is to acquire customers locked into contracts as much as it is to acquire intellectual property. So when you purchase open source software from a for-profit company you need to calculate your exit strategy. rSmart nicely provides you with the full source code of their software which you can download – so you could keep using the software and hire another company to give you support on rSmart’s Sakai distribution. This is a reasonable exit strategy – you might want to snag a copy of each of the rSmart source releases and keep it handy in case you need it someday. Just the fact that rSmart gives you this option makes rSmart less attractive (valuable) as a takeover target – and in my opinion the policy of releasing all source is good for rSmart’s customers since the rSmart version of Sakai is not the same as the Sakai Foundation version of Sakai.
I cannot comment on the extent to which MoodleRooms gives its customers an exit strategy because I simply don’t know much about MoodleRooms but it is something for MoodleRooms customers to contemplate. But even though Moodle itself is open source – MoodleRooms may not release *every* line of code necessary to replicate the MoodleRooms environment on your servers. Any non-open source magic glue bits make it harder for customers to switch vendors – and make those companies both more valuable and more susceptible to takeover. (I am not suggesting this is the case for MoodleRooms – just something to think about).
So what do I think we should all do about this acquisition:
(1) Be patient – my opinion is that Blackboard has learned a lot from its WebCT acquisition. If Blackboard avoids big mistakes and takes its time with any changes, this could end up better for customers.
(2) Keep an eye on Blackboard’s “opening up” initiatives – make sure that Blackboard continues to participate in standards and continues to encourages portable approach to software (IMS Learning Tools Interoperability) and portable content (IMS Common Cartridge). When these specs are ready – Blackboard needs to put these into their product and support them wholeheartedly. Since the specs are not yet 100% complete – this is still a bit of a wait and see. The market needs to hold Blackboard’s feet to the fire and also celebrate when Blackboard moves in the right direction. Behavior is best changed by a combination of positive and negative reinforcement.
(3) Support your local non-profit – if you have not done so everyone should join the Sakai Foundation and IMS *right now*. The market needs vital non-profit organizations to keep the market “fair” – think about how bad it would be right now if this happened and there were no Sakai and no IMS. For those who are not members – other folks have been footing the bill for your “insurance policy” / “safety net”. I am very disappointed in the level of University participation in IMS – this should change – we need the customer voice in standards – I know the meetings are tedious at times – but this is about supporting organizations that balance the market.
(4) Immediately install Sakai in addition to your current LMS – fully integrate it – add a logo and a skin and plug in your course roster data – let folks play with it – let adventurous faculty teach with it – use it for project sites for students and faculty – don’t train folks on it – let them learn on their own – give limited tech suport – Sakai was designed to be picked up without formal faculty training. If folks like it, usage will grow – if your users don’t like it, all you lost was a few servers and some disk for a few years. And if you get peeved at your for-profit vendor at some point in the future – viola – you are already several years into your LMS transition! Or perhaps we will get IMS LTI 2.0 really working and your faculty can teach using any tool from any LMS they like and we can combine Blackboard, Angel, Vista and Sakai tools together in one learning portal. Whatever the future holds – getting a Sakai up and running on your campus is a *good thing* and gives you options and amortizes transition costs.
All in all whenever something like this happens – we all need to look forward and find the opportunities that this makes possible. And in all we do and how we approach everything – remember that this is about teaching and learning and not about IT.
Comments welcome – send them to me via E-Mail and I will add them below. I am happy and eager to correct any factual errors herein that you bring to my attention.
(*) Disclaimer: I am a board member of the non-profit Etudes corporation (www.etudes.org)
Comment from Ian Dolphin
Re the above paragraph: