Ray Henderson

Big Problem, New Solution

The most satisfying part of my job is seeing progress in attacking “big problems” in education. It’s when we take on these bigger challenges that we arrive at breakthrough thinking and innovation that matters. Today we’ve shipped a new feature for our Learn platform that I think fits that bill—a new feature called “Retention Center.”

The big problem: inability to track student performance and take action before it’s too late. There’s been much ink spilled in the industry about big data and analytics, and we’ve developed an entire product line focused on mining data to create institution-wide perspective. But academic research has shown that one doesn’t need “big data” solutions to yield meaningful insight at the grass roots, course level. There’s insight in patterns of student behavior, and in relative performance through course progression that can be very valuable to both instructors and the institution.

There’s a clear tie between the institutional level goal of student retention and the astute instructor’s early awareness of behaviors or results that suggest underperformance. Our new Retention Center is offered to help gather every piece of information about this area we can, using the power of technology to create insight, perspective and opportunities for instructors to take immediate action. Our hope is that it can help bring insight to instructors so they can intervene earlier than they might otherwise be able to, and to help them prioritize their increasingly limited time.

What does it do?

The Retention Center gives critical insight on learning and activity gaps to instructors, within the LMS, that helps them quickly diagnose students that are falling behind. Pre-configured and automatic so they don’t have to hunt for it. No set-up: it automatically calls out students that are at risk while instructors still have time and space to do something about it. With the feature instructors can see:

• Who’s logging in: this is a simple but powerful predictor of student success. Instructors see how long it’s been since students have logged in to the course and how many have been away for five days or more. And not by fishing through student profiles or reports but in an automatic view complete with red flags where they’re needed.
• Whether they’re engaged: which students have had low levels of course activity, at 20 percent or below the average in the last week.
• Whose grades are suffering: which students are currently trending at 25 percent or more below the course average so they can target extra help to where it’s most needed – even when it isn’t asked for.
• Who has missed deadlines: instructors might know this anecdotally or on a case-by-case basis, but now they can get a real-time view of all students that have missed one or more deadline.

Student retention is a big problem, and it’s being addressed at lots of levels with a variety of approaches. But few of them give instructors as much actionable data that can be used immediately. Few of them offer instructors so much specific insight on areas to engage without requiring heaps of time that they don't have. That’s why we built this feature: to give instructors a leg up in tackling a tough education challenge right in their course.

 If you’re interested, take a quick peek at our new feature in this video.

 Cheers,

 Ray

Blackboard Learn: Built For You, By You

What may have been the worst kept secret at Blackboard is finally out. Today, we launched Blackboard Learn™ 9.1 Service Pack 10, which continues the evolution of our learning environment. Between our teaser video, Sneak Peak Webinars and my now famous “between SP9 and SP11” line at BbWorld12, we have communicated key themes and a vision for how the LMS is evolving.

Many of you have seen my Report Card at BbWorld and know that I’ve made a push to focus on the fundamentals since my first day as a member of Blackboard’s leadership team. This year at BbWorld, I introduced Innovation as the fifth fundamental to go along with client support, transparency, openness and quality. And what we are doing at Blackboard in terms of user experience is nothing short of innovative. We’ve designed new features that have made Blackboard more user-friendly, more focused on your needs and more modern -like the online experiences you’re used to outside of education.

The user interface and experience ultimately fosters more student engagement and helps educators become more efficient.  Consider what Mark Radcliffe of blendedschools.net wrote in his guest blog post:

“My Blackboard is my favorite SP10 feature. The first time I logged into SP10 as a teacher and saw that little red “1” in the top right hand corner of the screen, my interest was piqued. I found that without even making a click, Bb had told me that one of my students had submitted something. Within two clicks, I was grading that assessment. This same speed improvement affects students and is all achieved through a very contemporary look.”

Those of you who have followed me on this blog and on Twitter know my passion for design and improving the user experience. It’s for this reason that I elevated Stephanie Weeks to the position of Vice President for User Experience this summer, reporting directly to me. A self-described design-perfectionist who finds inspiration where others don’t, Stephanie was critical to building this release.

I’ve asked her to give you a behind the scenes look at how and why we designed SP10 the way we did, and what the early feedback has been. 

 From Stephanie Weeks, Vice President of User Experience:

My obsession with the user experience in Blackboard Learn is nearly a decade old. In my time at Blackboard I’ve witnessed the transformation made by turning the concept of “user research” from an interesting idea to a fundamental element of the product strategy. I’m frequently asked how it is that we understand what users want or need in the software experience, and my answer is simple: we watch them. What you’ll see in Service Pack 10 is a reaction to years of understanding how millions of educators and learners get through their day. We spend time with our users – not just asking them what they want, but observing how they do things, what tools they use, what processes they create, what habits they form – so that we can envision a simple solution for them.

When designing solutions, one would be a fool not to consider the most popular experiences being used today – Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and the like. Jakob Nielsen insists upon it.

But that doesn’t mean that teachers and students want Blackboard to BE those other applications. It means we must understand what is relevant to the experience, and incorporate it appropriately and meaningfully for Blackboard Learn users.  

The leading element of this release is a new, simple experience that restructures your teaching and learning information and activities to work for you; it’s called My Blackboard. My Blackboard is also the foundation for the new social elements being introduced this year throughout Learn. When we began discussions both internally and with customers about what this could be forstudents, the most common reference was to Facebook: “student expect Facebook,” “just make it like Facebook,” etc. But the reality is that Facebook serves a different purpose than what a teaching and learning system serves. We learned some great information by observing how people use Facebook, but we had to merge that with the habits, expectations and needs of students when they are faced with the demands of succeeding in their academic careers. This meant hundreds of research activities from focus groups to interviews to surveys to usability tests, and it meant being willing to iterate… a lot.

Our walls are plastered with ideas, and we had more designers involved in this project than any prior (even our CEO couldn’t help but be interested). We’ve obsessed about how to display the information and how the pages should feel. We’ve learned from the popular web experiences that people love and we’ve neither been afraid to reuse them nor afraid to deviate where it works well. Let me walk through just a few examples of how we designed a solution specifically for you.

One challenge students have is staying up to date with all of the information flying through multiple courses they are taking at once. Not only do they need to learn the concepts, but they have learn the behaviors of each of their instructors – where they post materials, how much online activity is expected, and more. Our challenge was clear: give students a “one stop shop” to help them stay in the know, but do so in a way that is organized for easy use, rather than information overload. And that’s what led us to the separation of the Posts and Updates pages in My Blackboard. 

The Posts page aggregates the conversations across discussion boards, blogs, journals, and wikis across all of your courses.

The Updates page is different; this is a place where you can really see a difference between something like a Twitter feed or a News Feed on Facebook, and Blackboard. In Blackboard, there are certain updates to your course that a student absolutely cannot miss, so they stay on the page until you dismiss them, and they aren’t muddled with other information.

The most commonly mentioned piece of information needed by students from Blackboard is... you guessed it, grades! The Grades page in My Blackboard got a lot of love. Students can see their grades coming in from all of their courses, one by one or can see the summary for each course.

We know that students invest time in building the right relationships to help them succeed. There is an invisible network of relationships built right into Blackboard – now exposed and useful. Creating a profile gives students a way to really present themselves, and the People tool in My Blackboard shows the connections that already exist – who is at your school? In your class? Now you can jump start those relationships to help you succeed.

All of this and more is only one click away. This focus on accessing the right information easily led to a change in the global navigation so that everyone knows that information is ready for them to review, and it’s all only a click away. It’s right up there by the logout button (sort of cute, isn’t it?). Go ahead, explore My Blackboard  or just hit Ctrl-Alt-M anytime, and experience the new, simply better Blackboard Learn.

See screenshots, videos and more for the latest release of Blackboard Learn here

 

News: Michael Chasen Steps Down

Today we’ve announced that Michael Chasen, the co-founder and CEO of Blackboard, will be leaving us at year-end. And thus ends a 15-year run on the frontline of educational technology and arguably the greatest display of entrepreneurial pluck in the short history of our industry.

A Brief Chronicle

Some of us remember the early days of Michael’s career. He formed an enduring and productive partnership with college friend Matt Pittinsky, the meditative and scholarly yin to his aggressively entrepreneurial yang. Together they assembled the platform of product, capital, and market vision needed to capture the imagination of educators trying to understand the future potential of the Internet in learning. 

One of Michael’s key influences on the early company was its agility. Not everything Blackboard created was beautiful, original, nor perfected. But it was often the first out, the most widely known, and packaged with enough of the services and company attributes needed to win against larger but slower companies. At a time when it was vogue to give away software with quixotic hopes of future value, it was Michael that established a business model driven by FTE based annual subscription. He found the balance of reasonable costs for clients (a fraction of textbook prices) but also the predictable revenues needed to build a business. This business model innovation has been adapted widely and is the financial bellwether for many decisions to add capital that’s funding startups in our growing industry.

Classically, Michael’s ambitious pursuit of the entrepreneurial dream sometimes led to controversy. As the leader in the space he faced many decisions before others. Concepts that were common in other software realms, like company acquisitions and aggressive tactics, were new to this quiet cove within the tech industry. Michael inevitably tested boundaries without fearing failure. The results included some memorable chapters in an education technology industry coming of age story, as it set its values, and clarified its expectations of company citizenship for the future.

To the surprise of many in the industry Michael recruited me, openly critical of Blackboard’s approach at the time, to join his leadership team. He’s continued this practice of bringing in fresh talent and perspective that counters whatever orthodoxy develops in the company. He does so because he’s self aware about what we need to learn, and for the energy this fracas produces in debates about our future. He constantly drills everyone around him with his conviction that only with continual change and adaptation can we keep our company relevant and retain our position as a leader.

Today, Blackboard is more open, more transparent, and has a healthier balance of ambition and humility. Its products are maturing rapidly in the face of market challenges, and a quality and performance discipline has greatly professionalized them. And yet we’re also capable of decisive investment and speed as witnessed by the position Michael has led us to in mobile learning, online collaboration and analytics. This better balance of forces has led to our strongest ever customer satisfaction. It’s also led us to another year of growth for the business despite a global recession, the new competition that aspires to disrupt us, or come what may.

Michael’s legacy is to leave us mildly paranoid but battle tested. And on behalf of all of us that will remain at our posts to continue the evolution of Blackboard, we sincerely thank him for his good challenges and the confidence he’s produced in us about taking on the future together.

A Few Words About the New CEO, Jay Bhatt

The road ahead for Blackboard presents a very different set of challenges than those Michael faced in our early days. Michael’s awareness of this was one of the drivers behind his pursuit of our current structure as a private company with the backing of Providence Equity Partners. Michael and our Board also recognized that Blackboard’s next phase would require a leader with experience, insight and passion to tackle these challenges, and that search has identified a uniquely qualified individual in Jay Bhatt, who will transition into the CEO role by year-end.

Jay combines deep product, sales and services insight as CEO of a public software company featuring a large product portfolio with strong financial and deal insight as a former Chief Financial Officer and M&A specialist. Jay is not an education industry veteran but has chosen this path because of the opportunity it presents to apply his skills and passion for solving education problems. He brings much transferrable insight and experience. In business terms he helped create a company that’s much larger than Blackboard, and more like what we’ll be in the next decade. He understands the demanding end-user that needs to get work done and whose productivity is greatly impacted by software UX and workflow design. Our hunch is that responding to the demands of architects, engineers and entertainment pros trying to design and communicate buildings and animations using 3D models will prove useful preparation for understanding instructional design and educational administration. 

Jay comes equipped for understanding an industry changed fundamentally by mobility, seeking online collaboration, and requiring new and more sophisticated content management applications. He’s directly experienced with the evolution we face at Blackboard, both in continual improvement of enterprise technology and in the expansion of our cloud offerings. And importantly, he understands the demands that come from a highly scaled global company in sustaining excellent performance on the fundamentals -- quality, support, transparency and innovation. Finally, he’s got a history of creating a rich dialog with the community and is ready to join the conversation in our industry directly.  

And so we undertake another chapter in the evolution and maturation of Blackboard. We’re all very much looking forward to what this change will bring, what new lessons we’ll learn, and continuing to evolve into an ever-better company for the clients and the community we serve.

Cheers,

Ray

Evolution Unbound: Blackboard embraces open source.

Evolution Unbound

Evolutionary biologists once widely believed that change in organisms occurred in a smooth arc of continuous change over time. In recent decades that notion was challenged by a new view that the natural record shows long periods of stasis interrupted by bursts of change.[i] I’m pleased to share that after years of modest but important change today we’re announcing a punctuated evolution at Blackboard.

Context for Our Evolution

Over the past two years we’ve updated our vision for education and our changing role within it. We’ve added a range of both software and services products to our portfolio that reflect a broadened focus—on the whole student lifecycle within the institutions we serve, rather than just online homework and related workflow. 

Blackboard Collaborate is now the leading platform for synchronous learning and collaboration. Blackboard Analytics provides the most robust enterprise business and academic intelligence offering in the market. Blackboard Mobile products have rapidly emerged and set the pace for both mobile learning and community products.  We’ve created the largest and most sophisticated education services organization in the industry, and provide a wide range of outsourced student services from enrollment to financial aid administration to 24x7 helpdesk. Combined with significant improvement in our fundamentals of client responsiveness and technological openness, these efforts are reinventing our image in the market. In the span of just a few years we’ve greatly diversified our products and revenues. I believe we’re now in our best position ever in fulfilling a vision of ourselves as an education solutions provider. We now possess a uniquely valuable collection of assets, skills, and an enviable record of success in delivering mission-critical education services.

As so it’s natural that as we focus more on institutional solutions, and our products and revenues diversify, that we’d re-examine our product offerings. And just as naturally we’d begin with our learning management system stack. This is both our historical strength and a key plank in the solution platform for most institutions.  Nearly every prognosticator has declared this is a market that’s undergoing a great deal of change. We agree. And more to the point, we believe the most important new dimension shaping the LMS market today is the growing acceptance of open source software.

While several commercial products have had impact at the margin, open source LMS platforms have had a dramatic impact on LMS adoption globally. Moodle in particular now has tens of thousands of adoptions, the great bulk of which are conversions of green-field institutions new to online learning. The community source Sakai initiative has had a disproportionate impact on research institutions, particularly in North America. 

Open source advocates argue the benefits in technology development model, risk management, community involvement, and avoiding license fees. As a commercial provider we’ve highlighted the benefits of an adaptation to the traditional proprietary model, with open standards and open APIs. A model where a well supported community provides direct input in product development but without the burden of execution, and which provides subsidized client support that’s more proficient and personalized to specific clients. Both models clearly work, but the choice about which is best depends on the goals defined by the institution. 

So bringing this together, our strategic shift towards a focus on the full student lifecycle rather than the LMS niche begs an important question: should we expand our offerings to include multiple LMS products, particularly the open source products that are now more widely adopted? Our answer is yes. The long game for Blackboard is to bring the full complement of our solutions across the student lifecycle to more institutions. So we’ll expand our product ladder to fit the breadth of our ambitions. And just like that, we’ll relegate the era of “one LMS choice only” to our adolescence. 

Blackboard Embraces Open Source

The headline above this paragraph may seem odd. But I assure you that what you’ll read next may sound stranger still. Ours is no mere dalliance with open source, but a very committed plunge into the pool.  

Moodle: I noted above that Moodle enjoys a large following around the globe. Some institutions that prefer Moodle have the infrastructure and staff to run it reliably on their own. Others do not, including many clients of Blackboard’s non-LMS products. A large number of services firms have risen to fill this niche in the market, and proceeds from their growth helps fund the organization that creates the Moodle product. Today we’ve announced the acquisition of two of these firms: Moodlerooms Inc., a leader in North America, and NetSpot Pty. Ltd., an international leader in Moodle services located in Australia. Both have strong records of delivering Moodle services with high client satisfaction. And in combination they immediately add a strong Moodle product and services offering to our lineup, and one that we will invest to extend globally.

But while these firms bring strong products our choice of partners for this endeavor was heavily weighted towards people. We acknowledge a need for trusted guides for this new territory, with people who can commit to helping us create a positive image as a helpful contributor but also a thriving business that is always part of a healthy open source ecology. We’re very pleased to share that the leadership of these organizations that will help us along our way include many well respected leaders from the Moodle community. NetSpot Managing Director Allan Christie joins us along with his top deputies Brett Buchel, Mark Drechsler, James Strong and Steve Watt. From Moodlerooms CEO Lou Pugliese and founder Tom Murdock have come aboard, and also my former ANGEL collaborators Dave Mills and Phill Miller.

The first act of this dream team of advisors was to provide an introduction to Moodle creator and founder, Martin Dougiamas. In fact I’m writing this as I return from a first meeting that Michael Chasen and the team and I held with him in Perth, Australia. I’m sure it was a bit surreal for all present, but our meetings were productive in outlining areas where Blackboard can best contribute to the Moodle project as we set out on a journey. Our new Moodle team now has a vision to execute against as we try to sustain and build upon the reputation of Moodlerooms and NetSpot within the Moodle community.

Sakai: I’ve noted the special place that the Sakai platform occupies amongst key research institutions. While fewer in number than Moodle adoptions the segment that Sakai occupies globally includes institutions of great strategic importance to us over the long term. As we considered who might best guide us in our strategy and acceptance within the Sakai community we immediately thought of Chuck Severance. Chuck was among the founders of the Sakai project and enjoys a well- earned reputation in ed-tech circles for both his technological insight and skills as a community organizer. I’m pleased to share that Chuck has joined us to lead our effort to develop a supportive relationship with the Sakai community, define how we can contribute to its future platform development, and assist us in building a services practice that’s well suited to the unique needs of this emerging community. You’ll be hearing more about Chuck’s role and initiatives in the coming weeks. 

Our Multi-Platform Product Ladder, and Investment in Bb Learn

So clearly, our LMS product ladder has become significantly broader. We have an immediate offering in the products offered by Moodlerooms and NetSpot, and commitment to create an offering that caters to the unique needs of the Sakai community. In combination this will significantly broaden the number of institutions that we can serve with the rest of our portfolio, adding stronger offerings to the value tier and others designed to support the needs of the research driven institution.

These new platforms join our core Blackboard Learn platform in the product ladder.  Learn remains our fully featured flagship product. It continues to enjoy growth in both the number of users it supports globally and its importance in providing a mission critical platform. Our clientele have migrated rapidly to our latest platform, Blackboard Learn 9.1, as its reputation for stability and quality have drawn our clients to adopt it more rapidly than any previous LMS version we’ve produced. And as we’ve marked our renaissance in usability with 9.1 SP8 – “The Ocho” – adoption has gained even greater speed. The large majority of our Learn clients have now adopted our latest product. I’m quite pleased to note that our client satisfaction is now setting all time highs, and we’re seeing the strongest outside interest from those on competing platforms that we’ve seen in years. Our message to our clients on Learn is quite simple: the renaissance in this platform that’s underway with Ocho will continue apace. And while I’ll drop no hints here, I’m confident that what we’ll unveil at BbWorld 2012 in New Orleans will confirm for all that investment in this platform is accelerating, and in a way that will delight our community.

Special Announcements for our ANGEL Clients: Our ANGEL platform has many strong supporters, and it continues to serve many institutions very well. Today we’re announcing further investments for the benefit of this community and their future choices of LMS platform. First, we’ve had a large number of clients ask that we extend the life of the platform and today we’ve announced that we’ll do so. We’ll extend support and maintenance at the same level our ANGEL clients enjoy today. And once again I’ll hint that there are special announcements related to ANGEL that we’ll share in New Orleans. Second, I’ll reiterate that ANGEL-inspired features are being developed into our 9.1 product at an even more rapid pace. But our ANGEL clients can expect a new twist: we will also deliver ANGEL-inspired features on the Moodle platform as a part of our new product laddering. We’re determined to make sure that our product ladder offers the best range of choice to our ANGEL clients for their future needs.

Our First Words within New Communities

We understand that our announcements today may generate a mix of reactions. Longtime participants in the open and community source communities may be concerned about our corporate intentions, and how we’ll conduct ourselves given that we are governed by an interest in business growth. Similarly for those who are clients of the firms we’ve acquired, there will naturally be concerns about our entrance to the community and our execution against the commitments made to them by companies and people that have now joined forces with us. 

Put simply, our position vis-à-vis the open source community is not unlike what I first faced when I was a new voice at Blackboard in 2009. At the time, I was hoping to convince a skeptical audience that we would undergo a pivot towards greater openness in our platform and further to become a key industry leader in implementing open industry standards. I was also trying to convince a skeptical audience that we’d learn from past lessons about continuing traditions of great customer care. Not only would we sustain the high service levels at ANGEL, I committed, but we’d rebuild Blackboard’s service reputation to bring it inline with the model we developed at ANGEL. Many in the industry have confirmed our good faith to these commitments. And as the deeds have arrived the skeptics are yielding. And so we start the cycle again with some words about commitment.

For the Communities that support Moodle and Sakai: Our announcements today are motivated by a belief that we can contribute positively to these projects in the eyes of the community, while still building viable businesses around them. That recognition has driven us to acquire guides who know their respective bylaws and maxims, and who will faithfully guide our corporate conduct and preserve their reputations in the process. We know that our good standing requires both financial support and in-kind contribution, and we’re prepared to execute on both. We’re already seeking input from the leadership of these organizations about what contributions would be most valuable to the community.

Clients of Moodlerooms and NetSpot: Our first imperative to you is your sustained positive experience. We know that we’re entering an all-important time for first impressions. Know that we’ve begun by doing our best to retain the people that have attracted you with their ideas and service in the first place. And know that your leaders will be actively assisting ours in confirming our steps in this new direction. We’re underway together to define a next chapter for Blackboard that’s influenced by ideas within their cultures that appealed to educators and helped them thrive. And just as we’ve adopted traditions from ANGEL, we look forward to this positive challenge to our ways and the positive energy it will bring us to solve educator problems. 

Conclusion: Things Will be Different, but Better for the Market.

There’s been much said about disruption in the LMS market, citing shifts at the margin in LMS marketshare. Our own vision of disruption is less about what happens within the LMS market and more about what happens across the educational landscape writ large. The extension of our LMS product ladder allows a larger number of institutions to consider Blackboard as a key partner in reaching their strategic technology vision, whether for traditional learning, hybrid or pure online programs. 

I think it’s important to consider what the market gets from this evolution at Blackboard. Rather than another LMS-oriented company, it gets a firm focused on helping institutions to solve the hardest problems in education, comprehensively. The range of technologies that must be pulled together to create a solution for institutions today is both more comprehensive and more complex than ever before. Rather than presenting obstacles by imposing a limitation on which products we support, we’re showing our commitment to institutional partnership by broadening our coverage, expanding options and reducing the requirements to change that show we’ve listened to our constituency about what they need from their partners. 

I’ll leave you with a first anecdote that clarifies that this transition is real and also shares some of the strangeness of headlines you’ll see about how our business changes in the coming years. Recently, the University of California sought a partner to help them create a comprehensive online initiative for UC for the first time. They needed services across the lifecycle, from helping them establish an online brand to student marketing, enrollment, and end user support on both the Sakai and Moodle platforms. The breadth of this request was well beyond what a traditional LMS firm could do, and more typical fare for program outsourcers who demand decade long contracts and a percentage of tuition—something UC hoped to avoid. Anticipating this change we designed a solution that took full advantage of our new direction, orienting it around platforms other than our own, and giving UC the flexibility to outsource some functions they lacked without onerous commitments of time or future tuition as they developed their program. And so it happened that the University of California selected Blackboard to build and support their online courses to be delivered on Sakai and Moodle.  

We’re looking forward to other unconventional headlines in the coming year. And we invite everyone to reconsider the caricature of Blackboard they may have written to firmware from prior years. Here’s to “thinking different” about our place in the education marketplace.

Cheers,

Ray

Ray Henderson
CTO and President, Academic Platforms

Blackboard Inc.

ray@blackboard.com

twitter: @readmeray

 

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[i] Specifically the theory of “punctuated equilibrium” was developed by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge. Wikipedia has a useful summary of the idea here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium

 

A Letter to Our Clients

Over the course of the year, I enjoy a large quantity of anecdotal feedback on how we’re doing – emails, client meetings, Tweets, etc. – but it’s our client satisfaction surveys that give me the best overall view of our progress. These are the numbers I look at to see how well we’re doing. In the spirit of 2011 review, I’ll share news of the direction in those surveys, alongside a couple of key milestones we reached this year in the digital content and open education areas. I’ll also preview some of the news you can expect from us in early 2012.

Improving the Experience

Since I arrived at Blackboard we’ve made the improvement of our product and service quality a tremendous focus. We needed to be much better in these areas, and we committed a great deal to the effort with more staff, resources and new programs. By far, this has been the biggest priority for us as a company during my time at Blackboard.

The latest results from our independent surveys show dramatic progress. Client satisfaction levels have continued an upward trajectory. In nearly all areas we survey it rose sharply in 2011, and now rests at the highest levels we’ve seen since our measures began. These include our responsiveness as a services organization, the transparency of our business dealings, the stability and quality of our products, and the total value we provide to the institutions we serve. 

Hearteningly, the sharpest rise was in the number of clients that would recommend us to a colleague. While we’re not yet reaching the absolute goal I’ve set for these marks, this is a welcomed affirmation that our clients are witnessing the benefits of our improved focus on fundamentals and execution in doing what we say we’re going to do.  It’s no surprise that the curve showing the percentage of clients renewing their relationships with us is trending positively as well. Both buoy the spirits of our team as we embrace 2012, and ready for market further expressions of what’s been seen in recent years.

Our next step in openness – The “Share Button”

Openness is a tricky term in ed tech these days. Some think it’s over-worked by marketers eager to align with a positive meme. We’re pleased to be judged by the facts about what we’re becoming, and what we’re enabling for our clients and in the industry relative to what’s been done previously by any firm. We’ve shown consistent and energetic support for open education standards, for opening of our platform and the data that resides within it, and for interoperability with other platforms whether commercial or open source. 

In the final quarter of the year we unveiled our latest direction under this heading of openness. At EDUCAUSE we made news about openness in two ways. First, we demonstrated native support for Open Educational Resources (OER) in our CourseSites learning platform and laid out a vision for how this would reach to all instances of the Blackboard Learn platform. Second, we retroactively modified licensing terms to ensure our clients greater latitude in using their investment in our platforms to expand their reach into their learning communities, however they define them. 

Neither of these moves had immediate financial gain for Blackboard. In fact they will have some negative financial impact on our licensing revenues. But what attracted us to both of these moves was that they could better align us with the mission of the educators we serve. One of my mentors, Tim O’Reilly, left a most lasting impression on me with his advice that building a great company is about “creating more value than you capture.” I hope that these investments in openness and others to come will be viewed as examples of that spirit growing within Blackboard.

Learning Platform & Learning Content:  Better together.

In 2010 we made a bold statement about our desire to innovate in the use of learning content within learning management systems. Our initial partnership with McGraw-Hill won lots of attention, and this year we’ve expanded the effort in partnership with all of the major publishers in the education space. In 2011, we also delivered in the form of a real solution, at scale: over 700 institutions have activated a Building Block that lets instructors and students access McGraw-Hill tools and titles inside Blackboard Learn. The effort brings a fundamental change to an area that hasn’t changed in a decade. It’s the most elegant form of integration between platform and content in our industry, and we’ve done it across hundreds of titles and with highly used products like McGraw-Hill’s Connect™.

This month brought our first wave of external feedback in the form of a user survey showing that 95 percent of participants in our field trials found the integration to represent a “significant improvement” in their experience with this product. In a world where consumers expect their tweets to magically appear on their Facebook pages, it’s easy to understand the expectation that their learning content be blended into their learning platform experience. It’s also a mark of achievement for industry partnership around educator needs and collaboration to implement using open standards for content and systems integration.

The Year of Mobile

We’ve had lots going on in the LMS space, but 2011 was also a transitional year from a product standpoint. It’s been a long time since Blackboard could be viewed as just an LMS company. But this year the concept of Blackboard as leading provider of a multitude of products and services across the institution was strengthened through a number of examples. New versions of our Blackboard Connect and Blackboard Collaborate products saw significant adoption. And we introduced major new capabilities with Blackboard Analytics and Blackboard Student Services.

But the most striking example is in the mobile arena. I think our work in mobile is the most innovative and thought provoking that we produced during the year. And it’s a great example of a new product set that was delivered rapidly, but with solid execution in scale, quality and support.  It’s not surprising to see the strong adoption as the market for mobile learning and mobile services applications take shape. Or to see the Campus Computing survey confirm some of these strong gains in share as experimentation in the field shifts to real use.

Peeking at 2012: Learning Analytics, and a New Look for Blackboard Learn

Going forward, we won’t let up on our efforts to continually improve our fundamentals. But this year we’ll also open a new focus on innovation in some important areas. We’re working on a number of items in the social/mobile/analytical realms that you’ll see from us in 2012, but I’ll preview here two important items we’ll be rolling out in the first few months of the year:

• A comprehensive new design for Blackboard Learn: We’ve accepted what I think is fair criticism for product design that hasn’t evolved rapidly in recent years. In a market with increasingly sophisticated consumers of user interface, this matters greatly.  News of a major modernization effort for our UI has been leaking out of our beta program, and demand is high for the reveal. Our most beautiful new product release ever is about to appear. Nicknamed “The Ocho” by our team, Blackboard 9.1 Service Pack 8 is nigh. Its curves and conventions are all conceived for 2012.  But importantly, while the surface will sizzle, the underlying metaphors will remain familiar to the many millions that use our product daily. It’ll be available for all this quarter after some final tuning based on beta feedback.

• A new product for analytics: We’ve just concluded a fantastic year of growth for our analytics product line, and now have over 150 clients using our product in production. The native interest in a pre-packaged application with out-of-the-box integration with SIS frameworks proved to be just as intriguing to our community as we’d hoped. Participation in our beta program for our latest module for the analytics suite, Blackboard Analytics for Learn, has been robust. We’ve confirmed that this product is providing learning leaders an unprecedented view of learning activity, and that it’s making it easier for them to set and measure learning goals at enterprise scale. The general availability of this product will be announced shortly.

Hopefully this note gives you a sense for how we’re doing, and what’s to come in the year ahead. There’s much we’re not ready to mention yet. But suffice it to say that I think it’s gearing up to be our best year of delivering innovations in the products and services that we offer, and sustained development of the openness and transparency that you’ve come to expect from the Blackboard that we are becoming. As always your comments and perspective are welcome—drop me a line at ray@blackboard.com.

Cheers,

Ray

Statements regarding our product development initiatives, including new products and future product upgrades, updates or enhancements represent our current intentions, but may be modified, delayed or abandoned without prior notice and there is no assurance that such offering, upgrades, updates or functionality will become available unless and until they have been made generally available to our customers.