Blackboard merger may benefit users

The company that licenses the Blackboard course management system to Princeton expects regulatory approval of its acquisition of competitor WebCT by the end of the year.

Blackboard's acquisition of competitor WebCT, announced Oct. 12, sparked a flurry of debate in the higher education information technology community, but it won't have much of an effect on Blackboard services for over a year, University and Blackboard employees said.

"I would say that if there will be major changes, other than improvements and features that Blackboard already has planned, we won't see them for a year or so," said Dennis Hood, University manager of learning management systems. "[The acquisition] shouldn't threaten anyone who's afraid of changing services in the next year or two."

"What people will see in the next year or two is more and improved features, but I think we would see them without this merger," he added. Later on, Hood said, Blackboard will probably try to fuse its reputedly easy-to-learn system with WebCT's more complex, feature-rich system.

"For people who want to do more collaborative work in their teaching and research, I think [WebCT] facilitates that more easily," he said. "It's not a simple thing to learn how to do. I would say, for example, the learning curve for Blackboard is an hour as opposed to the full day to learn WebCT. I know that the WebCT folks say that WebCT is so much richer [in features]."

The acquisition's true impact, Hood said, is the way it might encourage a bigger Blackboard to make its course management system interoperable with competing programs, particularly the open-source Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment. If so, the University could borrow features from Sakai and integrate them into Blackboard.

Blackboard Public Relations Manager Melissa Chotiner also said a universal platform is emerging, likening the growing compatibility among course management systems to the current compatibility among word processing programs.

For now, Chotiner said, the acquisition will make Blackboard more attractive to universities. "We'll have so many more resources to work with and more tools to bring products to market faster," she said. "It will be easier and more effective for customers to collaborate down the road."

But John Baker, president and CEO of Desire2Learn — a company that designs online learning systems — said he expects a turbulent acquisition for his company's main competitor.

"I think the two companies are, in our experience, different in terms of culture, philosophy and their ways of building technology," Baker said. "Merging those two companies together is going to present them with a lot of challenges. The key for us is that there is going to be a lot of confusion in Blackboard and its client base."