Ray Henderson

Free Hosted Online Courses from Bb. Really?

Today marks the official release of a new program we call CourseSites.  Put simply, it’s a free version of our latest learning management system for individual instructors.  And I mean fully free – no software license, no hosting fee, and no charge for support.  And if our beta program is an indicator of interest in this new program, it’s gonna be a barn-burner.  We’ve already seen participation from thousands of individual instructors.

As I’ve shared news of this offering in recent months reaction has been very positive, and some have expressed surprise about our approach.  Why would we – a commercial provider – create such a compelling offer and make it free?  There are three reasons.

First, there are still important emerging markets for us where the standard enterprise adoption model is an obstacle for our business.  Good examples of this are the K12 and pockets within the international Higher Ed market.  Both are areas with significant growth potential for LMS product adoption.  And in both, individual faculty advocates often play a leading role in bringing this technology into their institutions.  The open source model has historically had fewer hurdles to sampling activity for these markets.  And naturally, the first products used often become the first products adopted.  So we’ve taken inspiration from the open source model where an LMS can be downloaded and installed with no barrier of purchase, and taken it to its logical extreme.  Just sign up online at www.coursesites.com, and with no installation, nor concern about support, you can begin production use of our latest and greatest product.

Now, there are very real costs to us to support this activity.  But if we execute well on the idea it will be an expedient and efficient investment in marketing our product.  Those with need will find us.  And we can be sure that their experience is highly professional – with no barriers of learning technology or systems administration to achieve a very good result for teaching.  So rather than just spending on advertising and marketing, we’re also spending on the experience of education.  For an organization like ours that’s confident in our ability to execute, this variation on the “freemium” model (though CourseSites itself is totally free) can be a more productive allocation of capital than some traditional marketing models.  This hews to our mission to improve access to education, reflect the values of educators we serve, while also creating an enduring business. 

Secondly, in the mature markets we face a challenge of competing with our own legacy versions.  While approximately 40% of our clients have adopted our NG release – the most rapid version uptake in our history – there are still 60% on older versions.  While we’ve invested heavily in supporting experimentation with our latest versions, we still face the basic hurdle that our clients need to install and learn how to administer our new product before it can be used successfully.  These barriers too often lead to a situation where clients undergoing re-evaluation are considering new open source products with a legacy Blackboard version as their frame of reference.  CourseSites changes this. Client institutions have this new option in their arsenal for change management.  It’s an allocation of investment around direct experience, and I’m confident our clients will appreciate the added flexibility it gives them in involving faculty and instructional designers in evaluating our latest software.

Third, this arrangement allows us to provide a series of additional products and features that may not be available to sample otherwise.  Beyond our latest LMS version we’ve included additional platform and partner technologies including Blackboard Collaborate instant messaging, live conferencing and voice tools, Respondus assessment and locked browser tools and content authoring from SoftChalk.  This mix gives users a chance to try out learning technologies we’re investing in as a company but to which they might not otherwise obtain access.  And there’s more to come.  We’ve also created new course templates and themes.  These course templates (called “structures”) help instructors more quickly develop courses that align with their preferred teaching method and pedagogic goals.  The course themes are fun, with a myriad of new ways to personalize the look and feel of the platform at the course level, with 50 new prebuilt themes. 

I’m optimistic about the impact CourseSites can have in reducing barriers to inspection for our existing clients and prospects in the emerging markets for learning technology.  So whether you’re a Blackboard client or not, I encourage you to have a look and share your thoughts with us.  And of course I’ll encourage you to share this news with others who are considering their LMS alternatives.  As always, your input is welcome—please feel free to reach out to me with questions at ray@blackboard.com.

Cheers,

Ray

p.s.   And if you’re interested, please do check out our man John Fontaine’s blog on the topic here:  www.johnfontaine.com.

 

Blackboard’s Next Act: Opening the Lens on Our Vision for Education

It’s hard to believe my second year anniversary at Blackboard is near. And I’m already preparing what will be my third annual report card on our progress at BbWorld 2011. 

As I reflect on these two years I’m generally confident that our clients feel we’ve moved in the right direction. Our measures of client satisfaction continue to reflect steady improvement in our fundamentals. There are more messages of assurance from our clients that they’re feeling heard, and seeing positive change in how we conduct our business. Now, I hasten to say I still receive a steady stream of constructive criticism to help me remove our imperfections. But it’s pretty clear that most believe we’ve got a healthy focus on doing just that.

Meanwhile, our client dialog in recent months has focused on where they’d have us extend our reach and apply our skills and experience to help them. Consistent themes have emerged from these discussions, and our client advisors have challenged us to help them solve a broader range of problems. They’re all compelling opportunities, and they’ve all required us to widen the lens we’ve viewed education through, and think bigger about what we can become. In short, we’ve been challenged to think of ourselves as an education company, rather than as a learning management company. 

Our core focus on our fundamentals and on learning management will remain. But we’re now taking some bold new steps to expand and define the purpose of Blackboard. And that purpose is to serve education by attacking a broader set of problems that we are uniquely positioned to address. While some of these problems lie within the boundaries of “learning management,” they’re not exclusive to this area. We believe that to help build a better education experience we need to continue to expand our products and services in areas across the institution. I’ll highlight a couple of areas where we’ve expanded our vision in this way. Each are examples of a new form of innovation taking root in our organization. And I can tell you that these hard problems are inspiring our people deeply. They’re finding ways to leverage our skills and experience to help solve these problems, and to contribute fresh ideas to the educators we serve.

Blackboard Analytics: Educators face problems that are familiar to most business leaders who’ve struggled to gain perspective on enterprise performance. There are multitudes of systems and data, and a difficulty in refining that data into information and perspective that’s accurate and actionable. There’s growing pressure from accreditors and others to hold institutions accountable for generating improved outcomes and greater yield from their investments, but it remains difficult to generate the perspective needed. 

Our response: We’ve been investing R&D in analytics for some time, focusing on the part of the problem that most would expect of us—around performance in learning delivery. But our discussions during that period led us to the broader view that this would organize only a small part of the complex world institutional researchers and their leadership face. And so we undertook a search for partnership with a team that understood other dimensions of the problem, and how to build more comprehensive data warehousing applications that could synthesize information from all parts of educational institutions. 

We were led to the team at iStrategy Solutions. They built a reputation for rapidly creating data warehousing applications that could pull data from the most common sources of student information and campus enterprise systems. We found in them a partnership that was aligned with our thinking about the need for delivering data warehousing applications that were ready for use by educators without drawn out requirement gathering and software project lifecycles. We also found a common sensibility about the importance of mapping institutional progress vs. goals and key performance indicators for leaders in real-time. 

We’ve announced this week that we’ve acquired their technology and team. We’ve launched a new platform as Blackboard Analytics, and plan to use this platform to accelerate our path to market with even more innovative data warehousing applications designed to yield insight into the entire education enterprise. In doing so we aim to create greater understanding about student progression and historical performance of programs across the institution in line with how educators must look across all parts of their organization. (Interested parties: drop a note to Jim.Hermens@blackboard.com)

Blackboard Student Services: I’ve participated in many discussions with institutional leaders about creating a learning outcomes driven institution or improving retention rates through improved learning delivery. My frame of reference for this has typically begun with the stage in the student lifecycle where learning delivery is underway. But institutional leaders have reminded me many times now that there are no learning outcomes if the earlier stages of this lifecycle don’t succeed. Enrollment management and especially assisting the financial aid process are areas where institutions struggle to find appropriate support for students. These early steps in the student lifecycle figure in greatly to long term student success and retention. Even after they’ve entered the process you need to continue to provide a high level of touch and service to ensure they are retained and can complete their program.

Our response: In December we announced an acquisition of Presidium, the largest provider of end-user helpdesk services for online learners. They support hundreds of Blackboard Learn clients as well as students and faculty on other LMS and administrative systems. They are also the exclusive support firm for our Bb Collaborate platform. But one of the key reasons we pursued this acquisition was their growth in providing student lifecycle support for the critical areas of enrollment management, retention programs, and student financial aid assistance. They’ve brought impressive scale to precisely the area we’d been hearing so much about as a growing problem in education. We’ve rebranded their offerings Blackboard Student Services, and we’re investing heavily to improve the technology platform, quality of the product, and integration with our learning delivery services. (Interested parties: drop a note to Craig.Chanoff@blackboard.com)

In closing, 2011 is going to be a defining year at Blackboard. We’re intent on sustaining the positive trends in the fundamentals for our current products. Our approach to the market will continue to grow more transparent, more open, and more polished. We will improve our methods of listening to clients and organizing dialog about how to improve, and act deliberately to incrementally get better. But we’re also expanding our mission in some pretty important ways. We’re setting our sights on trying to solve a class of problems that’s well outside of the comfort zone of learning technology, although connected to it in meaningful ways. If we execute on them well, I’m confident this effort will help us further differentiate ourselves as a stronger partner to our clients. 

I look forward to input and reactions from our clients and the industry. Feel free to drop me a line at Ray@blackboard.com.

Cheers,

Ray