Blackboard Unveils Blackboard Beyond Initiative: Financial News – Yahoo!
Finance
Stephen Downes is very optimistic in his OLDaily comments
“… And maybe the 2.0 thing is buzzword bingo. On the other hand, though, maybe the right push at this point of time will see the words result in product. And that would be a good thing. I think we can do a lot of good if we try to help and nudge Blackboard in the right direction, and that includes nodding positively when they say the right things. “
James Farmer is much less impressed and I tend to be on his side in this instance.
I see Blackboard’s “initiative” as a blatant and deliberate continuation of a specific marketing strategy, already seen to good effect with the Blackboard Content System. The perceived need for content management of LMS content is high on the agenda at many academic institutions. So Blackboard puts out a product called a Content System to supplement their Learning System. It sounds like it is a tailored solution to the problem, so it easy to convince institution management to buy on name alone without too much examination of specific functionality. The Content System and Learning System are obviously integrated if they come from the same company, aren’t they? Once a “solution” has been purchased, institutions are very reluctant to change. Blackboard deliberately brought to market an immature content system to ensure that they were “in the space” early with a “solution” – they figured that by the time institutions noticed the staggering degree of immaturity of the product, they would have had the time to backfill the system and make it work.
The more recent buzzwords in eLearning are things like: Community of Practice, Networked Learning Environments, Social Networks, Collaboration. Institution managers will be hearing these terms and how their institutions need to adapt to the learning needs of “digital natives” entering our universities … and Blackboard is talking the talk and sounding like they have the solutions already to go. They are the leading eLearning vendor, and they are right up there with the latest stuff.
Of course, a cursory examination of the underlying course-based architecture of the Blackboard Learning System would make one wonder exactly how Blackboard will be able to graft the community-of-practice and social-network concepts of learning onto an architecture designed specifically to restrict access to courses based on enrolment, to allow guest and observer access to resources but not interactive tools, and to deny all that is not expressly permitted (rather than restrict only where necessary).
I suspect that it will be enough for most institutional administrators that Blackboard executives can talk the community / collaborative talk with great earnestness and enthusiasm, and have tools with plausibly community-minded collaborative names, without actually needing to transform their products to allow the full eLearning 2.0 experience (whatever that really means … something to do with student-centered learning, learners creating content, online communities etc … blogs, wikis, aggregation, personal identity, etc – basically using internet technology to support social networs of learning). In fact, I can’t really see why you would ever need an LMS for eLearning 2.0.
And as for the marketing power of product names: insofar as the Blackboard Content System was an example of marketing genius (allowing the name to imply functionality that is glaringly absent), by the same token, the Blackboard Portal System was a marketing disaster – many institutions already had plans for portals, so despite the fact that Blackboard Portal provided significant extra functionality specific to Blackboard, it was often overlooked for purchase. It has since been renamed the Blackboard Community System, which is much more desirable, despite the same functionality …
(first posted to lwise.edublogs.org)