Posts

Instructure Considering Sale Options

, /0 Comments/by

Instructure, maker of the popular Canvas LMS, announced this morning that they are “reviewing strategic alternatives”.

Instructure (NYSE: INST) today announced that in response to interest received from multiple third parties, its board of directors, supported by management, has commenced a process to explore strategic alternatives in order to maximize shareholder value. These alternatives may include continuing as a standalone public company, going private, or being purchased by a strategic partner. The board has retained J.P. Morgan as its financial advisor and Cooley LLP as its legal advisor in connection with the review.

“Consistent with its duties and in response to interest from several parties, our board of directors has determined that it is prudent to undertake a review of alternatives to identify the best way to maximize shareholder value,” said Josh Coates, Chairman of the Board at Instructure. “As the board conducts its review, we remain focused on executing our strategy with an increased focus on the education market as well as the previously-announced strategic review of Bridge.”

This news comes on the heels of several articles about investor pressure being applied on the company.

  • April 2019 – Activist investor Praesidium takes 5+% stake in Instructure and pushes thesis that Instructure would be more valuable by selling off Bridge (corporate learning market) and concentrating on Canvas (academic market).
  • Early October 2019 – Instructure announces investor day on December 3rd where “management team will describe the company’s new strategy and operating model, key decisions about future financial goals, and the plan for focused capital allocation”. (couldn’t find direct link anymore, so using Google cache)
  • Late October 2019 – Activist investor Sachem Head takes a stake in Instructure and pushes company “to explore alternatives, including selling itself, two people familiar with the matter said”.
  • November 2019 – Praesidium joins Sachem Head in call for Instructure to explore a sale.
  • Today – Jana joins activist investor pool.

As part of today’s announcement [emphasis added]:

The company has not set a formal timetable for this exploration, nor has it made any decisions related to strategic alternatives at this time. While Instructure is pursuing opportunities, there is no assurance that the process will result in a transaction. The company does not expect to make additional public comment regarding these matters until the board approves a specific action or otherwise concludes the process.

The previously scheduled financial analyst day on December 3 has been canceled to allow management and the board to explore these strategic alternatives for the company.

Disclosure: I will note more prominently than usual that Instructure is a subscriber to the MindWires LMS Market Analysis data service (as are many of their competitors), and that we have a number of investment firms who are also subscribers to the service and pay for in-depth market data and research.

There will be more analysis coming in the future, but I would note several items to set context, especially for academic readers:

  • Bridge is a corporate learning LMS created by Instructure (not a corporate acquisition) starting in 2015, the same year that Instructure went public. This additional product line, with its larger available market, was a key part of Instructure’s IPO story.
  • When Blackboard went through a similar process and actually went private (i.e. a private equity firm acquired the company, taking them off of the public stock market), the process lasted from early summer 2011 until October 2011. That should give some sense of the timeframe of these decisions.
  • Blackboard also considered a sale in 2015 but did not actually change ownership – these processes do not always result in a sale.
  • At the risk of annoying some readers (again), I have pointed out that “there are strong arguments that company financial health in 2018 / 19 for the providers will continue to have an outsized impact on the future of LMS offerings”. Consider PowerSchool’s planned acquisition of Schoology and Blackboard’s recent debt ratings news (more on that in future post). This news is as much about the LMS market as it is about one company.
  • For academic community, it is worth noting that much of the investor-based pressure is for Instructure to focus more on supporting Canvas, not less. Instructure management has made it a point to say that they are increasing investment in Canvas, but today’s news puts even more emphasis on that need.

Keep watching – this should be interesting for the LMS market.

Update 11/14: Added note about Jana disclosing investment. Also added bullet about Bridge history.

Bb Learn Hosting Models: New global data for LMS market

, /0 Comments/by

Justin Menard from LISTedTECH (our partners in LMS market analysis service for higher ed and K-12) shared today that we now have the ability to track Blackboard’s Learn LMS hosting models. Self-hosting, Managed Hosting and SaaS Hosting (software-as-a-service, aka cloud hosting) are now captured in the data – globally for higher ed and in the US and Canada for K-12. This is a great addition, and to my knowledge we are the only ones to have this data in this scope. Head over to Justin’s blog to read more on the data additions. Also note that we will be validating and updating this new data over time, so treat this as our initial views. 1Disclosure: Blackboard, D2L, Instructure, and Moodle are subscribers to our LMS market analysis service.

Part of the reason this is so important is that Blackboard, their competitors, and many in the investment community agree that a client moving to SaaS hosting changes their likelihood of remaining with Blackboard, and not just due to the contract extensions involved in the SaaS move. The movement to Learn SaaS and then to the Ultra user experience remains the core of Blackboard’s corporate strategy.

We can now provide independent analysis of the global transition to Learn SaaS, whereas previously we tracked this transition based on public Blackboard statements.

Blackboard Learn SaaS deployments showing linear progression from fall 2016 to summer 2019, reaching 586 by BbWorld19.

Our data confirms that roughly 30% of clients have shifted to Learn SaaS:

Percentage of Blackboard Learn clients who are using self-hosting (44%), managed hosting (26%), and SaaS hosting (30%) globally

Recently Blackboard announced that they are making significant progress in moving many of their Middle East clients to Learn SaaS, which is impressive given the historical tendencies in this region to strongly favor self-hosting models. From the press release:

Blackboard, a leading education technology company for teaching, learning and student engagement, announced today that many of its clients across the Middle East continue to transition to the Software as a Service (SaaS) deployment of Blackboard Learn, the company’s flagship learning management system (LMS). [snip]

The benefits of moving to a cloud-based delivery model include continuous delivery of new features, zero-downtime updates and quicker delivery of fixes. Once institutions are on SaaS, they can enable Learn Ultra, Blackboard’s next-generation LMS, which offers educators and students a clean, modern interface and intuitive workflows.

Using our data, we see that the Middle East has indeed started a significant shift to Learn SaaS hosting models. In Justin’s post you can see that approximately 20% of Blackboard Learn clients are now on SaaS, and interestingly they shifted directly from self-hosting (i.e. there is no managed hosting usage in this region).

Percentage of Blackboard Learn clients running on Learn SaaS hosting model by country.

What is interesting is to look at the age of Blackboard Learn implementation for each of the current hosting models. In other words, for each hosting model of Learn, how long have those schools been Blackboard LMS clients.

Box and whisker chart of Bb Learn age (time of client on that LMS) for each hosting model. Broken out for global higher ed and North American K-12.

For higher ed clients, there is a broad range of ages moving to Learn SaaS, yet for K-12 there is a narrow range of mostly 4-6 year clients that have moved. Part of this is likely due to K-12’s smaller support staff and budgets for LMS, which also has lead to a smaller percentages on Learn SaaS than in North American higher ed (19% vs. 33%).

We expect this data addition to open new capabilities for us to analyze the LMS market and its underlying trends. Instructure’s Canvas was created designed on cloud hosting, and D2L’s Brightspace has recently completed its transition to the cloud. The story is broader than Blackboard.

Disclosure: Blackboard, D2L, Instructure, and Moodle are subscribers to our LMS market analysis service.

LMS Decommissions: A view of lost clients and campus closures

, /5 Comments/by

One theme of our coverage of the academic LMS market over the past 1 – 2 years, both at e-Literate and in this blog, continues to be worth watching:

there are strong arguments that company financial health in 2018 / 19 for the providers will continue to have an outsized impact on the future of LMS offerings.

Both posts linked above described the overall market slowdown – where there has been a significantly lower number of LMS switches – that we first described to our LMS market analysis subscribers just over a year ago and in the blog starting this year. Our updated data over the summer shows no signs of the slowdown ending.

Another issue to consider is not just who is winning and how often, but from the opposite side. Who is losing LMS clients? Let’s first look at the US and Canada for LMS switches since the beginning of 2017, from our report this summer. The left side shows the previous campus LMS, measured by number of institutions, and the right side shows the new LMS.

LMS migrations in North American higher education from 2017 - mid 2019, showing the previous LMS on left side and new LMS on right.

Blackboard Learn lost the largest number of campuses, followed by Pearson LearningStudio and Moodle, then by D2L Brightspace and Homegrown and Sakai.

When looking at company finances, however, it is important to expand this view. One expansion is to look at global regions beyond North America. Another expansion is to include campus closures as a source of losses in addition to switches. The following chart shows the percentage of decommissions each calendar year in North America, Europe, Latin America, and Oceania combined (but note that North American numbers are the largest portion of these numbers). Decommissions is a combination of switches and closures, and the percentage is calculated on a per-year basis.

LMS higher ed decommissions per year for combination of North America, Europe, Latin America, and Oceania.

We see that two LMS end-of-life situations created by Blackboard acquisitions (where bought their competitor and eventually cut off the product line) were huge factors through 2015. WebCT was acquired in 2006 and shut down by 2013. ANGEL was acquired in 2009 and shut down in 2016.

Blackboard Learn has consistently lost customers since mid 2000s, with roughly 27 – 36% of decommissions each year coming from this solution recently. While Blackboard is the primary beneficiary of the LMS market slowdown, and its improved performance is clearly one of the causes of that trend, when looking at the data it is clear that they are still a big source of LMS losses. Consider their recent loss of long-time clients Purdue University and Princeton University. They also are at risk from several high-enrollment systems expected to complete LMS evaluation processes this year and next.

One of the most remarkable stories in EdTech is that Instructure has not lost a single Canvas higher education client due to an LMS switch. 2In terms of primary systems available campus-wide in higher ed. They have lost two K-12 clients to Schoology. But Instructure has lost clients due to campus closures, particularly from Education Corporation of America (two systems shut down) and secondarily from DeVry University (several campuses closed), mostly in 2018.

D2L Brightspace has lost a relatively small number of clients over the years, but their LMS decommissions ramped up in 2018 and 2019, largely due to campus closures. They were particularly hard hit by the closure of Dream Center systems (Art Institutes, South University, and Argosy University, all acquired from the for-profit EDMC).

Moodle has lost a consistent number of clients over the years, particularly in North America, despite it having the largest installed base worldwide. We documented a broader look at the overall changes in Open Source systems recently.

Pearson LearningStudio, formerly known as eCollege, was popular with for-profit chains and with some nonprofit fully-online programs, but Pearson shut down that system by the end of 2017.

Sakai has slowly but steadily lost clients for years, and it continues to do so with recent decisions at the University of Rhode Island and UC Davis, and potentially with several other decisions expected within the next year.

Every LMS provider loses clients, and these losses are important to understand in terms of the organization’s financial health. If you’re interested in seeing more information on the data behind these charts, we have them available with our LMS Market Analysis service.

The Century Foundation on Online Education and OPMs: Position paper masquerading as a study

, /3 Comments/by

The Century Foundation (TCF), a public policy advocacy organization, released a new ‘study’ today about online education and the usage of for-profit service providers such as Online Program Management (OPM) companies. “Dear Colleges: Take Control of Your Online Courses” follows up from the 2017 report loosely based on public records requests for contracts from public colleges and universities. Its intent is clear from the title, as it is hardly a study but more of a position paper against the OPM market in general and tuition revenue-sharing agreements in particular.

As public and nonprofit colleges have sought to expand their online course offerings, a major industry has developed to help them with that task. These private, for-profit developers—including divisions of big publishers, like Wiley and Pearson, and firms like 2U, Academic Partnerships, and Bisk—are known as online program managers (OPMs). They operate on a contract basis, and on terms that endow them with enormous, and, at times, comprehensive control over the services offered in the contracting college’s name. There are downsides to handing over responsibilities to external, for-profit operators—downsides that make the convenience schools receive in return seem a bad bargain indeed.

The Positives

It is valuable that TCF did the legwork to obtain and share 79 new contracts between providers and public institutions, and you can follow links in the report to see a broad range of contracts. OPM, Online Program Enablement (OPE), 3OPM is for bundled service providers including marketing and enrollment services, course and curriculum design, student support, and tech / data infrastructure. OPE is a broader category of enablers that may do a subset of those jobs, often unbundled, but are still directly helping a school develop an online program.LMS, courseware, MOOCs, Continuing Education or Professional Development, and general EdTech – they have them all.

It is also valuable to see TCF’s positions laid out in five warnings to colleges and universities.

1. Don’t Buy Bundled Services

2. Don’t Bypass Your Own Faculty

3. Don’t Sign Lengthy, Unbreakable Contracts

4. Don’t “Share” Your Tuition Revenue

5. Don’t Facilitate Aggressive Recruiting

While items 1, 3, and 4 really just reword the title argument against the revenue-sharing OPM model, items 2 and 5 are worth reading. From item 5:

On average, the universities from whom we’ve acquired contracts share half of their tuition dollars with the partnering OPM, and when that OPM is a for-profit company, as most are, and is also tasked with recruiting, it is incentivized to get as many enrollments as possible. This scenario leads to the same predatory and aggressive recruiting tactics long used by for-profit colleges, but this time under the very different guise of a nonprofit or public university.25

The Negatives

It’s well and good for an advocacy organization to take a position, but for TCF to describe this report as a study is disingenuous. I’m fairly confident that the main points were written ahead of time and are consistent with plenty of TCF advocacy efforts. The data analysis is just there to backup their main arguments and to lend weight to the report and make it feel like an actual study. TCF’s Bob Shireman helped draft the California bills I described a few days ago, where one goal of the bills were to cripple revenue-sharing agreements. He has been a frequent critic of bundled OPM services, long-term contracts, and revenue-sharing. We get it. 4To be clear, I have no problem with his work in this area. I do have a problem when his advocacy leads to harm for the very students the bills are meant to protect and when TCF presents its positions as a study.

If you look at the contracts in the new batch of records released by the report, they are all over the map as described above and often are not directly related to online programs. The LMS category may be a necessary part of the infrastructure for online programs, but at most schools the larger mission is to support traditional face-to-face offerings. The same is true with courseware offerings. And several of the Continuing Education contracts listed have strong face-to-face components. It would have been far better to keep this report focused on the subject – OPMs, OPEs, and perhaps MOOCs and CE / PD companies. Those are the ones that could be argued are relevant to controlling a school’s online courses.

Furthermore, there is a misunderstanding of traditional per-student fixed fees that have long been used by courseware companies, many EdTech companies, and LMS companies (although they tend to use enrollment bands). Tuition revenue-sharing is different, basing itself directly on the revenue brought in by the school with a percentage basis going to the provider.

The TCF report has Blackboard’s contract with Eastern Kentucky University listed as revenue-sharing, but the contract is a standard LMS model. Fixed fees per year based on estimated enrollment bands. The TCF also has courseware contracts with Cengage, MindEdge, Red Shelf, and The College Network listed as revenue-sharing when they are standard courseware versions – fixed fees per student. Two OPE contracts – Smart Sparrow and 352 – are likewise fixed fee per student and not true revenue-sharing. I suspect there are even more cases of false revenue-sharing positives, but I have only have had time for spot checking on this point.

To their credit, the report attempts to focus on those product categories tied to online offerings.

As of August 2019, we received seventy-nine contracts, and of these, forty-one are directly relevant to the management of online courses. These forty-one do not include contracts that only address access to software like learning management systems. Of the relevant contracts, over half (53 percent) entitle the provider to a share of the school’s tuition.

There are two problems here.

  • One is that TCF does not list in their summary spreadsheet which contracts they consider “directly relevant to the management of online courses”. By my hand-coding, I get 14 OPMs, 10 OPEs, 2 MOOCs (and these are not the more-recent MOOC-as-OPM version), and 17 CE / PD, for a total of 43. I’m guessing that my list is fairly close, but who knows.
  • More importantly, these data points are mostly arbitrary, depending on which schools they asked and how successful they were in obtaining public records. Yes, they claim to have targeted schools with large online enrollments, but the data are mixed up between face-to-face and online programs, degree-based and non-degree based programs and courses, and contract years from 2002 to 2019. As a public listing this approach is fine. But to make constant percentage-based claims (53% of contracts, 68% of contracts, etc) implies statistical relevance and is misleading.

There is also a misreading of other reporting, particularly with the story of USC and its School of Social Work. The TCF report states:

Since USC had given over so much control to 2U, it had little control over how the program recruited, or who it enrolled: as revealed by the Los Angeles Times earlier this year, the online social work program admitted students that it was not prepared to provide with a quality education, charging them more than $100,000 for their degree in the process. All the while, USC reportedly lost money on the program, because so much of the tuition went to 2U.

This story is problematic for USC, but the argument made by TCF that the loss of money was “because so much of the tuition went to 2U” is not supported by the source LA Times article.

The university, which has contracted with the company through 2030, said the factors that led to the school’s budget crunch were “much broader” than its relationship with 2U.

“Generally, this partner relationship has been positive,” the university said in a statement. [snip]

There is much to the USC story that deserves further scrutiny, but this claim by TCF is inaccurate or at least unsupported.

Online education and OPM relationships should have greater accountability and transparency, and it is good that TCF has done the legwork to bring contracts into the public view. But it is a mistake to treat this report as anything other than a position paper from an advocacy organization, and a rather poor one at that.

State of Higher Ed LMS Market for US and Canada: 2019 Mid-Year Edition

, /12 Comments/by

It has been nearly a dozen years of sharing the LMS Market share graphic, commonly known as the squid diagram. This past year we at MindWires shifted our LMS Market Analysis reports from Spring / Fall to Mid-Year / End-of-Year to better allow analysis of entire years. With the release of our mid-year 2019 report this week to subscribers, it’s time for us to look at updates on the institutional LMS market for North America (US and Canada) higher education. Note that our coverage for the market analysis includes Europe, Latin America, Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, and surrounding island countries) as well as emerging coverage of the Middle East.

We present the following data “by institutions”, with market share as a percentage of the total number of institutions using each LMS as a primary system, and “by enrollments”, where we scale the institutions by its total enrollment. The latter better captures the business of the LMS market, since most licensing deals are based the number of students.

But first, let’s look at an updated LMS market share graphic for US and Canadian higher education. The original idea remains – to give a picture of the LMS market in one page, highlighting the story of the market over time. The key to the graphic is that the width of each band represents the percentage of institutions using a particular LMS as its primary system.

North American Higher Ed LMS Market share for mid 2019, based on number of institutions using each solution as primary system.

In the past five years, the LMS Market for North American higher education has become increasingly dominated by “the Big Four” (Instructure Canvas, Blackboard Learn, D2L Brightspace, Moodle) 5Disclosure: Instructure, Blackboard, D2L, Moodle, and Schoology are all subscribers to our LMS Market Analysis service. for institution-wide adoptions; the aggregate market share of year’s top four systems moving from 80% to 95% in past five years. Beyond North America, we are seeing the same trends in Europe, Latin America, and Australia / New Zealand.

Consolidation of North American Higher Ed LMS Market in Big Four of Canvas, Blackboard, D2L, and Moodle, moving from 76% combined share in 2012 to 95% today.

We recently described the overall market activity slowdown in that there are fewer LMS formal evaluations taking place since mid 2018, with data pointing to a 20 – 25% drop from a year earlier. This slowdown seems to be a type of plateau rather than a continuing trend, and we are watching to see if it is temporary or not. We have seen some increased activity this summer, but we are not ready yet to say if the trend has reversed.

In addition, last summer we shared the symbolic passing of the torch where Canvas surpassed Blackboard in US market share, which was the first time Blackboard was not the top system since the market emerged two decades ago. Despite several counter-forces (the market slowdown, University of Phoenix finishing its Learn Ultra implementation, and closure of for-profit chain and dozens of campuses using Canvas), Canvas has extended its North American lead – 28% vs. 27% based on count of institutions, and 35% vs. 31% in terms of student enrollments at those schools.

North American Higher Ed LMS market share by enrollment, with Canvas at 35%, Blackboard at 31%, Brightspace at 14%, and Moodle at 12%.

While D2L’s market share with Brightspace actually decreased slightly largely due to the closure of for-profit clients, they have picked up some impressive wins lately, including Purdue University, the University of the Sciences, University of Rhode Island, and nearly a dozen others (not all of which are publicly announced yet).

Moodle declined slightly – less than 1% in terms of institutions – over the past year. We have added Jenzabar to our main graphic, based on its somewhat persistent market share.

We have a broader set of data as part of our LMS Market Analysis service, and we will share more information on regions outside of North America this fall.

Update 8/16: Adding Disclosure – Instructure, Blackboard, D2L, Moodle, and Schoology are all subscribers to our LMS Market Analysis service.

BbWorld 2019: Multiple signs of progress but questionable results

, /by

Ignoring cause and effect, if there is one LMS company that has improved its market trends more than any other during the current market slowdown, that company is Blackboard. They are losing fewer customers, they won a big international account with dozens of schools, they finally have Learn Ultra truly in production at the course level, and their corporate financials improved significantly with the sale of the Transact business unit. As a result, this year’s BbWorld users conference had a much more positive tone than last year’s conference, both in company presentations and from customer sentiment. 6Disclosure: Blackboard is a subscriber to our LMS Market Analysis service.

The question is whether these improvements matter or not, and so far the market results are questionable. Better than before, but I do not see a turnaround yet.

Company Postion

From a corporate perspective, Blackboard emphasized its broad portfolio of teaching and learning products (Learn, Collaborate, Ally as the core) and more importantly the simplification of the company. According to executives, with the Transact sale and changes in product lines, Blackboard “has its most complex days behind it”, a point referencing the corporate financial challenges of the past year as well as the removal of non teaching and learning product lines. During an executive analyst session, CEO Bill Ballhaus was even more clear that this simplification trend shows them moving in the opposite direction of Instructure.

I found the BbWorld message quite consistent with what I described back in February at e-Literate.

Ballhaus said that Blackboard’s efforts to simplify the business were paying off and leading to greater focus on their core teaching and learning businesses. While the company was built as an enterprise software amalgamation based on 20+ corporate acquisitions, Ballhaus described how management is looking forward to becoming a Software as a Service (SaaS) business with a simpler focus. While the executives declined to comment on current M&A activity, Blackboard appears to be trying to sell its CashNet and Transact products that are part of the same business line focused on campus ID and payment processing, for up to $800 million and $720 million respectively2. Remembering that Blackboard reportedly tried but failed to sell the entire company for ~$3 billion in 2015, there is no guarantee that they will actually sell either unit or get the desired prices. [Update 3/7: Blackboard did end up selling entire Transact business unit , including CashNet, to PE firm Reverence Capital for a reported $720m.] But if they do succeed, the profits from either sale will help the company pay down and manage its debt. And it will back up the claims of focusing the company on core teaching and learning business.

Learn SaaS and Learn Ultra

From an LMS perspective, Blackboard continues to push Learn SaaS (the cloud deployment of Learn, both Original and Ultra, on AWS) and Learn Ultra (the new user experience design only available on SaaS). The company’s Learn SaaS deployment continues in its remarkably linear fashion.

Blackboard Learn SaaS deployments showing linear progression from fall 2016 to summer 2019, reaching 586 by BbWorld19.

As for Ultra news, I covered that situation before the conference:

Wait – didn’t Blackboard 1 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.

Conversations at BbWorld confirmed my understanding with a few details added in. What I did not hear this year with any consistency is the past concern of “Ultra is just not ready yet”. Schools that want Ultra and see the value in its user design are moving that direction, although not in droves. Of the approximately 173 Learn Ultra clients as of the beginning of BbWorld19, roughly half are just using Base Navigation, one quarter are using a mix of Original View and Ultra View at the course level, and one quarter are fully moving to Learn Ultra at the course level.7Please read this post to understand terminology for Blackboard Learn. This latter number is somewhat aspirational, as several clients listed as full Ultra are starting institution-wide Ultra usage this fall or at the end of the calendar year, but the point remains that Ultra is fully in production.

BbWorld keynote presenting Learn Ultra adoption - half of 173 on Base Navigation only, quarter mixing Ultra and Original Courses, quarter on Ultra Courses.

One of those clients going full Learn Ultra is Galileo Global Education, as described in my February post:

Early in February Blackboard announced what could be their biggest LMS win since we broke the news of University of Phoenix selecting Blackboard Learn Ultra in late 2015 (a migration that is scheduled to be complete by this summer). From the press release about Galileo Global and their 100,000+ student system. [snip]

On the surface, this is a big win for Blackboard, but the story comes with a caveat regarding its relevance to the LMS market. What was not shared during our call with Blackboard executives is that they share their private equity owner (Providence) with Galileo as described in late 2017.

Galileo continues to represent a big victory for Blackboard, but I did not pick up signs at the conference that it is the beginning of a new set of new-client wins.

Blackboard Data

The biggest product development is Blackboard Data, despite a keynote announcement that felt like a timeshare pitch. We’ve got a really exciting free visit for you . . . which we’ll describe in a few minutes. No, really. Just a few more minutes. Oh, look, the keynote is almost over – Rachel, come on out and describe what they get. Looking under the hood, however, the Canonical Data Model and user interface access of the underlying Data Dictionary is significant and impressive. This data model is abstracted out of the LMS, and using Blackboard’s various SaaS products, presents a T&L suite data approach, with agnostic models for the LMS, video conferencing, student information system, and other tools. It also appears that this Canonical Data Model is designed to improve the notoriously weak signal-to-noise ratio of EdTech data analytics.

Eventually, the in-line data analytics – those presented in the LMS workflow (their word, not mine) – will also come from the Blackboard Data infrastructure. The first release of Blackboard Data stack will be Reporting, with no additional charge to customers. The Blackboard Data release to date appears to be a first step in a solid design, which is different than a productized suite. For example, the UI doesn’t connect the data dictionary to actual data extraction, leaving it as a live set of documentation. Like Instructure’s Dig initiative, this one deserves further analysis in a future post.

Does it matter?

Given these improvements, it is worth asking if there are signs that the market is buying what Blackboard is selling. At one level the answer is yes. The company’s losses are slowing and they picked up a big system in Galileo. At another level, however, it is clear that Blackboard has a long road ahead of it in a market with a long memory. Two examples help to clarify the disconnect between company / product improvements and market results.

The first example came during the executive listening session at the end of the conference, where it was obvious that Blackboard as a company really wants its customers to move to Learn SaaS and Learn Ultra of their own accord. There is no better way to further simplify the company than to move to one code base and one deployment option, in other words to start reaping more of the promised benefits of cloud computing. But they just can’t say that customers need to move. The closest the executives got at the conference was to say that they’ll know a lot more by next year on how long non-SaaS and non-Ultra will be available, but that customers will have plenty of time to migrate. They did not say that non-SaaS and non-Ultra will be available indefinitely, and this quite honestly makes sense.

The first audience question, however, led to a very long discussion about long-term self-hosted customers who just don’t have the resources to migrate. They might buy the idea of SaaS and Ultra, but that doesn’t mean they are ready to move. One challenge Blackboard faces is that with their market losses over the years, this conservative type is a greater and greater percentage of their remaining customer base. By the way, kudos to the Blackboard executive team for taking the time to discuss this problem so openly at the conference.

The second example came after the conference when yet another long-term client announced their decision to migrate away from Blackboard. Purdue University – including Purdue Global (the artist formerly known as Kaplan) and all Purdue campuses – was a key customer for Blackboard. They were a long-term WebCT client, even using WebCT Vista, and they could rightly be called a power user university. Purdue chose to move to D2L Brightspace, choosing that LMS over Blackboard Learn and Instructure Canvas. This is a big loss for Blackboard, and it comes in spite of all of the improvements listed above.

In the end, there are definitely improvements happening at Blackboard, but a lot of their big challenges remain in terms of market results.

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

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

, /by

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 8Disclosure: 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.