2019: The year that Blackboard Learn Ultra is fully in production

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As I was planning my conference time for this summer’s LMS user conferences, something struck me with the BbWorld19 agenda that needs to be stated publicly and explicitly. Our five-year journey of Learn Ultra is coming / Learn Ultra is late / when will it be ready is finally over. 2019 is the year where Learn Ultra is fully in production, with Base Navigation and Course View deployed institution-wide as the primary LMS.

Wait – didn’t Blackboard 1Disclosure: Blackboard is a subscriber to our LMS Market Analysis service. make BbWorld18 largely about Learn Ultra and claim dozens of implementations? Yes, but they were playing word games as described last year. Learn Ultra was always planned to include changes down to the Course View, and last year we heard about institution-wide deployments of Base Navigation, with only pilots or partial implementations of the Course View. Put bluntly, I didn’t believe Blackboard’s claims in 2016 or even 2018.

But this year is different for a few reasons:

  • IESB in Brazil completed its migration in March 2019.
  • The University of Phoenix has completed its migration – as of April 2019 – from its Homegrown Classroom system to Learn Ultra.
  • Several schools, including Northumbria University and Merrimack College, are completing their full migrations such that Learn Ultra (navigation and course view) will be the primary system as of Fall 2019.
  • While there are details to verify at the conference (and let me know in comments or private message if you have different information than presented above), I have heard about the above migrations from several sources and not just from Blackboard.

Blackboard still has a lot of work to do, converting a meaningful percentage of its client base not just to Learn SaaS (cloud-hosted LMS), not just to Learn Ultra Base Navigation (add in some of the user experience of Ultra), but also to the Course View. It will be interesting to hear schools talk about their experiences and get a better feel for likely impact on the overall LMS market. Are current Blackboard schools waiting for feature parity with Learn Original Experience, or is Ultra as it exists this year enough to win over old and new clients?

In my opinion, Learn Ultra is now ready and in production, without qualifications. And after five years of coverage on this topic, that milestone is worth noting. You can check out the coverage both Michael and I have had over the years on this topic in this interactive timeline:

Sample image from interactive timeline

Disclosure: Blackboard is a subscriber to our LMS Market Analysis service.