Blackboard is having some interesting trends that I think people
should be aware at the time of marketing dotLRN
Who uses it
It has 37% of market share in the USA (about 2500 licensees
worldwide), this includes all the Ivy league universities.
Products
- Learning management system. Their standard LMS product, competes
with webCT
- Portal system. *very* similar to dotLRN. They think its main
competitor is iPlanet (Sun)
- Transaction system. To be released first semester 2003
.
Their strategy is "to become the standard operating environment" and
get users to build their own applications (forums, calendars, etc)
In practice I think it means selling the core and getting others to
build the applications (sounds familiar 😊, think aD/Java). Their key
to this is complilcance with standards such as OKI
They don't have content management, in their own words they do not
plan to. Interesting because that means that, for example, their news
package in portal does not have revision control.
The applications are built by a community of developer, 40% of which
are distributed for free, and the rest are sold for a license fee.
Developers have to pay $1200/year to use the developer space
community, taht has documentation and sharing of resources.
They are trying to organize a certification program, where a 3rd party
company audits the quality of new package, so when it can have the
"blackboard certified" logo.
