Tag Archives: LMS

Bb acquires two large Moodle consultancy firms and former head of Sakai

Well, I would admit to anyone that I didn’t see this one coming. Ray Henderson has just written that Bb has purchased Moodlerooms and and NetSpot. And they have hired Chuck Severance to be an official liason to the Sakai … Continue reading

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Social Network Analysis tool for LMS fora

SNAPP is an interesting browser bookmarklet that will analyse a forum and build a social graph of the participants, providing a way to model interactions of the forum participants. This is a neat project that feeds into the growing domain … Continue reading

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Apollo Group buys Carnegie Learning for $75M

Apollo Group runs the University of Phoenix, a for-profit that is taking huge growth in the US HE sector, has announced that it is paying $75 Million to Carnegie Mellon’s Carnegie Learning, formed by researchers at the university in 1998. … Continue reading

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Online students more likely to not complete than f2f students

The Chronicle writes about a study from the Community College Research Center at the Teachers College at Columbia University that finds that Community-college students enrolled in online courses fail and drop out more often than those whose coursework is classroom-based. … Continue reading

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McGraw-Hill makes moves to open to all platforms

Well, we saw last week major moves in the academic textbook industry where the other four major publishers wrapped it up with McGraw-Hill, who had announced a year ago, that Bb would have an integration point with their “learning platforms”. … Continue reading

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Blackboard making ties with all major academic textbook publishers

In a pre-calculated move, Blackboard has just released news that it is now making interoperability deals with remaining four of the big five of the US HE textbook market to wrap it all up in a single stance of corporate … Continue reading

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Bb is morphing Wimba and Elluminate into new version of Collaborate

Blackboard today announced a new version of its Collaborate software, designed to provide video- and audioconferencing for online classrooms. That means the beginning of the end for two services the company bought last year, Wimba and Elluminate. The company said … Continue reading

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Bb sold to Providence for $1.46B

Well, the bell just rang, and the deal is done. On Friday, Blackboard sold out for $1.46B to Providence Equity Partners. It was seen coming; as I said, after Bb announced they were courtable, it was a question of when … Continue reading

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Blackboard further into buyout talks with Equity

I wrote earlier about Bb looking like it was going to be purchased. Not a question of if, but, rather when. Well, more news from the Wall Street Journal. They are reporting that Providence Equity is in exclusive talks, they … Continue reading

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MOOCs still growing – Natural evolution of Open Courseware?

The first MOOC was created by Dave Comier and Bryan Alexander in 2008. Now there is a new MOOC coming from the University of Illinois – Springfield on the future of education that should be interesting to anyone interested in … Continue reading

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