The jokes began orbiting the Internet almost immediately after Blackboard Inc. announced its plan to buy yet another competitor in the course-management software market this month. This time the target was Angel Learning, which had lured away dozens of Blackboard clients in recent years with a friendly, approachable corporate culture that stood in stark contrast to Blackboard’s reputation for pushiness.
One college administrator said the company should now be called “Dark Angel.” Another said a better name would be “Blackborg.”
The Star Trek reference to characters who seek to assimilate everyone into a collective “borg” rang true for several college leaders, who had chosen to work with Angel in part because it was not Blackboard but found themselves right back in the larger company’s gravitational pull.
“Shocked, dismayed, and betrayed” was how Travis Souza, a technology coordinator at one Angel client, Truckee Meadows Community College, in Reno, Nev., said he felt when he first heard about the deal, adding that he would rather quit his job than work with Blackboard’s software. Strong sentiment, considering the topic is merely which software will run the administrative aspects of the college’s teaching process, like the course discussions and the online grade book.
Outsiders might ask, Why all the fuss?
The answer is that course-management software has become a new kind of campus building—a virtual one where online classes are held and new kinds of “hybrid” courses take place. The unsettled question is who controls what these classrooms look like and how stable their foundations are.
Colleges don’t want to just buy these online classrooms out of a catalog. They want to feel like partners in the design process.
Angel apparently got that part right, offering customers unusual responsiveness and access to much of its source code.
Blackboard, meanwhile, has developed a reputation for doing things its way, gobbling up competitors (this is its third acquisition of a competing course-management system) and suing rivals (it has filed multiple patent-infringement lawsuits against one competitor). That might make good business sense, but it casts the company as a hostile force in higher education.
Blackboard’s latest purchase has further lowered its repute among some college leaders, who have been blogging and Twittering their displeasure.
Has Blackboard pushed too far? Some experts predict that more colleges will now turn to open-source alternatives that give them greater control over their own destinies (but which often require more effort by campus employees to run). Others maintain that more professors will just use free, general-purpose Web 2.0 tools to run course blogs and discussions to avoid Blackboard, bringing an eventual death to the concept of course-management systems.
Still others believe that the move will solidify Blackboard’s dominance, and that, emotions aside, colleges will benefit from having a strong, stable company selling them online classrooms.
Appealing to Skeptics
Blackboard leaders argue that customers of both Blackboard and Angel will win in the long run. The company says it plans to incorporate the best aspects of Angel—including its acclaimed customer service—into Blackboard’s popular platform. And Angel’s leaders contend that Blackboard’s deep pockets (it bought Angel for $95-million, mostly in cash) make it better able to build the complex systems that colleges now need to keep up with growing demand for distance learning and online support for traditional courses.
That’s the case made by both companies' executive teams to skeptical customers during a keynote session at Angel Learning’s annual user conference, held in Chicago this week. The Chronicle was not allowed to attend the session, but those in the room described it on Twitter, and one attendee streamed live video of the event to a Web site.
Some experienced an unpleasant sense of déjà vu. Many of their colleges ran software from WebCT back in 2006, when Blackboard bought that company, and they say development and technical support for the product declined drastically under Blackboard’s stewardship. To show their preference for Angel and dislike for Blackboard, some wore blue-and-black ribbons—the colors of Angel’s logo—to the Chicago meeting.
“Dr. Phil says the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior,” said Nancy Edwards, director of eLearning at State College of Florida-Manatee and Sarasota Counties, referring to the television relationship expert, in an interview before the session. “So many people who have Angel, have Angel because they went through the bad experience with WebCT, where a lot of things were promised and they were not delivered.” Ms. Edwards made the ribbons and gave them out to colleagues, but she says she is willing to hear Blackboard out and give it a chance.
Blackboard’s president and chief executive, Michael L. Chasen, said the company had learned from the WebCT acquisition and promised that this time would be different. To try to prove the point, he announced last week that Blackboard would keep Angel Learning’s customer-service team intact. “One of the mistakes we made in the WebCT merger was we tried to merge the support for the two organizations too soon,” he told The Chronicle.
And since Angel customers express warm feelings for Angel officials, Blackboard emphasized that it has named Ray Henderson, who had been the No. 2 employee at Angel Learning, to lead product development for both Blackboard and Angel course-management software.
Angel customers mainly want to know how long they will get to keep the software before Blackboard combines it with Blackboard’s existing course-management system. For one thing, switching platforms is a difficult and expensive process for colleges, many of which had only recently started using Angel.
“Your course-management system, that’s your classroom—that’s like taking your school and blowing it up, almost, and having to build whole new structures,” said Ms. Edwards. Every professor on a campus interacts with the software, and changes can require extensive training.
Mr. Chasen pledged to honor all Angel contract commitments and to release two more versions of the software, a previously planned Version 7.4 and a Version 8 that would serve as a bridge to an eventual Blackboard product that incorporates Angel features.
Market Dominance
Even if Blackboard can soothe Angel customers, it has eliminated a vibrant commercial challenger, reducing choice in the marketplace.
About 7 percent of colleges with campuswide course-management systems use Angel software, according to the 2008 Campus Computing Survey of college information-technology leaders. The survey found that about 57 percent run Blackboard.
The next-largest commercial provider is Desire2Learn, which Blackboard has sued for patent infringement. (Blackboard asserts it is simply protecting its intellectual property, but many college leaders say that the patent had been granted in error because other colleges and companies had already invented such course-management processes before Blackboard filed its patent.)
Desire2Learn’s leaders say they are winning customers from Blackboard despite the legal clouds hanging overhead. Last week John Baker, Desire2Learn’s president, posted a note on Twitter proclaiming: “We are here to stay. We are also interested in talking with Angel clients.”
But colleges concerned about Blackboard’s behavior appear more interested in open-source alternatives, mainly Moodle and Sakai, which promise more control.
“It’s going to probably push some people off the fence on the whole open-source question,” said Nicole Engelbert, lead analyst for education technology at the consulting firm Datamonitor. She believes that it is possible for Blackboard to improve as a result of its purchase of Angel. “Some people are going to say, ‘That’s it, I’m going to definitely invest in Moodle or Sakai.’”
One of them is Alan Shapiro, an instructional technologist at St. Petersburg College. In the past, he said, he felt that Sakai was not as easy to customize as he would like, but that if more community-college programmers got involved, perhaps they could add what they are looking for.
A Change of Tone?
I asked Blackboard's Mr. Chasen what he thought of the negative chatter about his company’s purchase of Angel, and about the “Blackborg” moniker.
“I don’t like that nomenclature,” he said, “but I think people just try to add a little bit of humor to any kind of a big change in their environment.”
He argued that critics represented a “small subset” of customers, while happy customers don’t post clever messages.
In the end, he said, colleges will choose Blackboard over open-source options because buying software works better for most colleges than being part of a do-it-yourself project, which he said takes more staff time to customize. “I really don’t believe it makes sense,” he said.
Besides, he said, Blackboard essentially has more programmers devoted full time to its software than open-source projects do. His basic message: We’ll win because we’re better.
Mr. Henderson, the Angel official who is joining Blackboard, struck a different chord in answering the same question. “Open source is an alternative, and it’s getting better every year,” he said. “So if there was ever a time to make certain of the things that really distinguish us from open-source options, now is that time. And that really starts with the service side.”
In other words, the new, combined company must win hearts and minds by being more responsive. It was a softer message, one that many college officials are likely to be pleased to hear.
Ms. Edwards, of State College of Florida-Manatee and Sarasota Counties, said in an interview just after the session that she was pleased with what she had heard from Blackboard leaders at the conference. “Probably the best thing they could have done to reassure us is making Ray Henderson the president of their learning division,” she said.
Mr. Souza, of Truckee Meadows Community College, remained wary.
“We will definitely be looking” to switch to other software, he said, adding that he planned to start running a test server with Sakai and Moodle. “I’m not going to be caught with my pants down and believe everything they say.”
