Blackboard acquires WebCT: Clash of the titans?

By Stephen L. Arnold

October’s announcement of the acquisition of WebCT by Blackboard got me thinking: Since when has the merger of the two biggest players in any industry gone smoothly, especially for customers? This could easily turn out to be more like Godzilla meets Goliath than two friendly giants merging their personal fortunes.

Personal experience with several technology company acquisitions (mostly working for the company being acquired) leads me to believe that corporate culture clash will most likely mean the loss of several key individuals and potentially customers as well. The culture of the company being assimilated rarely survives, and the same fate usually awaits its home-grown technology (in spite of press releases to the contrary). Although such turmoil around industry leaders is often painful for customers, it also offers opportunities for both smaller vendors and university IT groups—and the users they serve.

In 25 years of practice, I’ve also found commercial software to be mostly a big disappointment. The higher the cost, the bigger the letdown seems to be.

Open source offers an alternative
I’ve been using GNU/Linux and other open source tools for years now at both home and work, supporting my own classroom instruction and online course components. I use Open
Office to write documents, track grades and generate PDF documents for distribution, as well as my own Web server to host my class materials. It gives me the freedom to try almost anything that comes to mind, technology-wise, and has a positive impact on both my course components and student scores.

The philosophy of open source software, specifically the GNU General Public License (there are many similar open source licensing schemes), seems like a perfect fit with public education. Think “Public software for public education.” The tools are developed and tested in a collaborative community atmosphere, they’re free for anyone to distribute and modify, and any improvements are shared with the community.

One promising new open source technology is the H2O project from Harvard University. Released under the moniker of “code—community—ideas,” the H2O project is intended to go beyond the current generation of educational software platforms, both commercial and open source, as well as to test the concept of community-based development of educational software.

The basic idea behind the H20 project and its associated software components is that current systems, still mostly unproven in their efficacy, continually reinvent the wheel and don’t seem very driven to stretch the online dimension into new areas. As an example, one of the first H2O components to be implemented (called the Rotisserie) is intended to enhance and improve the classic threaded discussion forum by imposing structure on both the timing and flow of the discussion. It may not sound like much, but it does address most criticisms of typical online discussion forums, i.e., that discussion quality is low, that participants post quickly rather than thoughtfully, and that participation is uneven (the majority of posts come from just a few subscribers).

So what will the real impact of this merger be on faculty and their institutions? That all depends on where they are now, and where they’re headed from an organizational standpoint.

If your institution already uses one of the commercial platforms in this merger, then you’re in for a bit of a bumpy road in the near future. Users of WebCT will most likely be forced to migrate both software and content at some point, so it may be time to think about migrating in a different direction, i.e., from a costly proprietary system to a more free and open alternative.