Last week, Blackboard, the largest commercial provider of learning management systems to the education sector, purchased not one but two web conferencing providers that also have a strong educational heritage – Elluminate and Wimba. Now, although I have used Blackboard for five years or more now to deliver an online certificate for one of my clients, I certainly have no warm feelings for the company; firstly because I actually prefer Moodle, even though it’s essentially free, but even more because of Blackboard’s outrageous behaviour a year or two back in claiming it invented the LMS and going after its main competitors for extravagent royalties. It failed, I’m glad to say, and it will take Blackboard years of being terribly nice to repair its stinking reputation.
I don’t know Wimba, but I have an affinity for Elluminate, which the eLearning Network and ALT uses to run its joint public webinars. It is a capable web conferencing platform, with a number of features which make it especially suited to use as a virtual classroom (Onlignment’s Phil Green is a big fan). It’s possible that both Elluminate and Wimba would find it hard to survive on their own in the long run against the competition faced by the big IT and telecoms operators that are beginning to dominate web conferencing (Cisco, Microsoft, Adobe, AT&T, etc.). Whether Blackboard provides it with much protection is dubious. After all when Saba bought Centra, which was at the time one of the major corporate web conferencing platforms, its profile dropped enormously and now it is a speck in the market compared to WebEx.
In George Siemens’ posting about the takeover, he takes the position that Blackboard is making a sensible move because “synchronous tools represent the fastest growing technology segment in education, and the one with the greatest prospect for future growth.” At Onlignment, we like to think so. But I’m not sure that it really helps to integrate the LMS with web conferencing, particularly in the workplace, where the decisions to purchase these platforms are likely to originate from different places in the organisation: HR look after the LMS, and IT look after business communications, which includes web conferencing. And a good LMS should be able to integrate seamlessly with any web conferencing platform, just like it should do with any authoring tool or HR system.
No related posts.
Why am I such a big fan of Elluminate? Well the answer is simple – it is the dynamism of its whiteboard that I find so distinctive and attractive. Once you’ve placed an item onto a whiteboard in most other mainstream conferencing systems, it’s there to stay. In Elluminate’s whiteboard you can place objects and then group, regroup, ungroup, reposition, sequence, cluster, mask, unmask, associate, rank, animate and so on. From a whiteboard you can selectively copy and paste objects (images, words, media) to your own local storage or application. You can build and save a library of these wonderful versatile whiteboards and retain the same granular and editable qualities when you reuse them. In other words you can implement a whole range of basic pedagogical strategies that are all but impossible in other competing systems. I rest my case.
Thanks so much for your enthusiasm and endorsements, Clive and Phil! You are great examples of how Elluminate can be used so effectively for webinars and much more.
I was a Centra employee for years and experienced the Saba acquisition along with the “profile drop” you mention first hand. Like Elluminate, Centra had a great technical foundation, was a sound and scalable product, and had many loyal customers. So it saddened me to see others emerge to the forefront of the web conferencing market. Blackboard can avoid this situation by focusing not only on exceptional and innovative integration of its technologies for a seamless end-user experience, but also by continuing to invest in a standalone enterprise web conferencing experience that’s optimized for its primary audience – educators – yet meets IT requirements. These educators expect ease of use, a high degree of interaction, an engaging experience, and reach to ALL learners. A sophisticated whiteboard like the one Phil describes is just one example of how this done. Accessibility improvements for people with disabilities in the latest Elluminate release is yet another.
I am bullish on the growth for synchronous products like Elluminate. I believe Blackboard has made the right move in acquiring them and enabling the talent that supports the products and total customer experience to exist in a dedicated business unit (Blackboard Collaborate.) Let the innovation continue.