Blackboard Collaborate Progress Report
To the Elluminate and Wimba Communities,
My name is Maurice Heiblum, and I’m the President of Blackboard Collaborate, the new division of Blackboard created by the acquisition of Wimba and Elluminate on July 7. (I’m hoping this isn’t the first that you’ve heard this news, but if it is, please click HERE for more details.)
Since that day, we’ve been hard at work on our three most important goals:
1. Customer experience – Ensuring that you continue to have the great client experience that Elluminate and Wimba have always provided, especially during this back to school time.
2. New team – Bringing Elluminate, Wimba and Blackboard teams together into a single, cohesive unit so we can carry that high standard of client care forward.
3. Roadmap – Creating a vision for how our collective solutions come together to help you better engage students, improve outcomes, and save time while trimming cost.
As we make progress on these goals, I want to make sure you receive frequent communications from me and our team. I’ll start today by providing an update on how the teams you interact with most have come together. I’m happy to say that the headline is very consistent with our vision going into this new stage. We thought we could build even stronger teams together than apart, with relatively limited change overall, particularly in the areas closest to delivering you a great customer experience. You’ll ultimately be the judge of whether we were right, but I’m feeling good about our first steps.
Customer Support – The people who supported you before will be the same ones who support you moving forward. Zemina Hasham will lead a combined Wimba and Elluminate support organization that continues unchanged.
Professional Services – Led by Aaron Bond, we stand ready to help you implement our solutions and provide training and certification programs on our products.
Sales and Customer Success – The combined Sales and Customer Success teams will also continue to be led by familiar faces – Paul Roberge, Kristian Photopoulos and Thomas Jepsen. While we have attempted to maintain consistent points of contact, there might be some change in your individual account teams. We’ll inform you of those in email within the next few days.
As excited as we are about the new organization, combining the Wimba and Elluminate teams under the Blackboard umbrella has not been easy. As is inevitable when joining similar companies, we’re losing some of our team members who have been like family and have helped build our companies. We are deeply grateful to each of them for their contributions and wish them all the very best. They will be missed.
Lastly, know that we’re also continuing to make progress on the longer term product strategy we committed to start sharing at Educause in October. The combined development organization for Blackboard Collaborate is of course bigger and stronger than either of our development organizations were on their own so we’re eager to start sharing our view of the road ahead for their work. The integrated product strategy and marketing teams, led by Annie Chechitelli, Mike Mabey, Steve Kann, Rajeev Arora and Valerie Schreiner are hard at work on roadmap and look forward to sharing more detail with you in October.
I’ve shared all the names above because of the personal relationships that many of you have built with our Sales, Support, Services, Products and Customer Success teams. We value these close relationships immensely, and I hope the continuity in our leadership team above will showcase our commitment to continue our philosophy of always putting our customers first.
If you attend the Educause conference, I hope to see you and talk to you there. If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to email me directly or the team at CollaborateLeadership@blackboard.com.
Thanks,
Maurice
Can Collaboration Help Change the World?
By Stace Wills, Founder and Global Coordinator, Fire and Ice
“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” - Helen Keller
Last week, I was asked to host a lunch-time webinar called Brown Bag Lunch, a monthly series for Elluminate employees located throughout North America. In the midst of summer, most minds are lingering towards holidays and sun, so choosing a gripping topic would be paramount to hold the attention of our 35-person online audience. Elluminate’s Fire and Ice program had been doing some work in East Africa earlier this year and during a business trip, I had the honour of meeting an amazing 26 year-old named Charles Mugabe who had a motivational story like none other. I asked Charles if he would tell his story — live and online – to our Brown Bag Lunch group.
Charles is a resident of Nyamata, a quiet village located in the picturesque but tiny east African nation of Rwanda. At the tender age of eight, during the height of the Rwandan Genocide in April 1994, Charles suffered an unimaginable tragedy. Extremist Hutus went on a killing rampage in Nyamata, targeting every Tutsi and moderate Hutu they could find. Charles, his parents, six siblings, and approximately 2000 others sought refuge in the Nyamata Church, believing they would be safe within the house of God. But that did not stop the extremists, who blasted their way into the church and the killing spree commenced. Machetes, hammers, clubs, and bayonets were the weapons of choice and the victims had nothing to defend themselves with. Early in the massacre, Charles’ eldest brother told Charles to hide on the floor, at the front of the church near the alter, under a pool of blood and dead bodies, and to pretend he was dead. The brother reassured Charles that he would return shortly, but he never did. Charles’ entire family perished, save for himself.
A few days later, Charles and seven others managed to escape the church to a nearby swamp, where they hid from the killers, up to their necks in water. From time to time, Charles escaped the swamp during nightfall in search for food and would return before dawn. After 31 days in hiding, Charles was finally rescued by Paul Kagame’s Tutsi-led RPF army and was sent to an orphanage. Four years later, Charles was discovered by his grandmother, who somehow managed to survive the genocide herself. Unfortunately, she died a few years later, leaving Charles with no remaining immediately family. Alone, Charles had to create a new life for himself while each day, having to deal with the terrible emotional scars from his tragedy.
I met Charles for the first time on a late Saturday afternoon in January 2010, just as the sun was setting. I had some spare time away from business meetings, so my friend and reliable driver, Innocent, suggested that we visit the Genocide Memorial Centre. Charles was hosting that day and since we were the only visitors, he gave us a private tour. I was so moved by his presentation that just prior to leaving, I asked him what I could do to help. Charles said “go back to Canada and tell everyone about this story, so that this tragedy shall never repeat itself”. I said that I would be honoured to do that, but suggested it might be even more powerful if Charles could somehow deliver the story himself, to an international audience, using Elluminate collaborative technology. I sensed nervousness but had a feeling that Charles would not let any challenge deter him. He said he liked the idea, and we exchanged email addresses.
Thanks to a generous group of donors and volunteers from Calgary, we supplied Charles with a refurbished laptop, webcam, computer headset, modem, and English DV’s to practice his English (not his native language). Local Rwandans such as Innocent played a valuable role in helping Charles test a high- speed mobile network offered by local provider, Rwandatel. Charles became a fast learner of Elluminate Live! and after practicing his PPT presentation a few times, he was soon ready to collaborate across borders, direct from the village where the story began.
His Brown Bag Lunch presentation last week was sensational. In the digital era, word travel fast because the Elluminate recording of the event has been in high demand ever since. For a link to the recording, contact me at stacew@elluminate.com or join Charles’ Facebook page, Survivors Voice.
Charles defines human resilience. In addition to the his work at the Genocide Memorial Center, he is enrolled as a student at a local college in the capital city of Kigali and is studying to work in the tourism industry. He has also initiated a non-profit project called Healing Through the Arts and Music, which brings together genocide survivors, their family members, and even the perpetrators of the heinous crimes from 16 years ago, to help come to terms with the tragedy through participating in theatre, dance, poetry and music performances. By joining his Facebook page, you can offer him words of encouragement and learn ways to support his cause, including booking Charles for a private speaking engagement using Elluminate Live! (a nominal speaker’s fee helps Charles finance his surprisingly expensive monthly internet costs).
Someone during the Brown Bag Lunch suggested that Elluminate needed a “virtual hug” emoticon to express their current feelings to Charles. I couldn’t agree more. Perhaps collaboration really CAN change the world …
What Educational Truths Do You Hold to Be Self-Evident?
I get to spend a lot of my time talking about education at my Elluminate-based FutureofEducation.com interview series–or, at least, I get to ask very interesting people questions about teaching and learning in the Internet Age. Lately I’ve been interested in how our “stories” about education are changing, most noticeably as I interviewed John Taylor Gatto this past May. Twenty years ago, when he wrote his famous diatribe, Dumbing Us Down, and cataloged the ills of compulsory factory-model schooling, his “story” was well out of the mainstream. But something has changed in those twenty years, since my interview with Mr. Gatto was not a whole lot different, in tenor, from my recent interviews with Sir Ken Robinson or Seth Godin–who are currently much more in the mainstream.
This has helped me to understand that the old stories and narratives of education that I grew up with (factory-model, top-down, compliance-driven) are breaking or are already broken. It is not that those stories ever really worked for all people, it’s just that they worked for enough people to have been generally accepted–even by those whom they were failing. However, the advent of Web 2.0–or the fulfillment of the Internet’s promise of broad participation–is releasing an intellectual energy from our latent desires as human beings to have a voice, to create, and to participate. Because of this we are in the midst of large power shifts away from institutional messaging and toward mass authentic communication. The building of new stories brings meaning to our lives, and we’re trying to build new stories about, and trying to give new meaning to, education.
These new, and often conflicting, stories are being told each week at FutureofEducation.com. We’re in a renewal phase, but it’s becoming clear that stories about education that don’t encompass many diverse and valuable perspectives are no longer going to be acceptable.
Ergo, the creation of EducationDeclarations.org, a website for submitting and voting on education “declarations” that my bring us a step or two closer toward creating a broader, healthy perspective on educational culture that reflects individual ideals. I hope you’ll join us there to view and vote on individual education declarations. Then declare your own strong beliefs about education, teaching, and learning.
The more ideas, the better the dialog!
Ruthless Focus on Quality
What makes Elluminate products so great? Gain insight from an interview with Elluminate’s Director of Quality Assurance (QA), Tamara Drake.
Q: How long have you been with Elluminate?
- A: I have been with Elluminate for 7 ½ years.
Q: What do you see is the main goal of your job? How do you know you’ve succeeded?
- A: I couldn’t possibly just have one, but I have managed to narrow it to three — ensuring that the QA department operates at the highest standards, that we satisfy the quality requirements that we have set for our department, and that my team is motivated and happy. As long as I have met the last one – the other two come naturally. We know we have succeeded when our customers are happy with the release.
Q: Customers often tell us that Elluminate is a good, solid, reliable product. To what do you attribute this?
- A: I think we have a very like-minded group of individuals here at Elluminate. We realize that quality is a company goal, not just that of one department. From Product Management to Development to QA, we have very high standards for what we want our customers to receive with each product release. These high standards have a direct impact on all our products.
Q: What are some of the core principles that drive your QA team’s actions each day?
- A: We are very user focused, we adhere to our processes, we stress communication in every aspect of the department, and we never stop trying to improve.
Q: Elluminate Live! is a software product, so there’s bound to be a large queue of outstanding bugs. How do you and the development team decide what to fix?
- A: It’s a combined effort between Product Management (driven by customer input), Development, and QA. During a release cycle, we have at least one bug review per week per product and look at each bug that has been entered in detail. Then we consider the severity of the bug, the functional impact, and the likelihood that customers will run into it. All in all, we are a very picky group!
Q: With such a focus on negative things such as problems, issues, and bugs, what keeps you coming to work each day?
- A: If I had to choose one thing – the people. As an organization, we are truly fortunate to have great people in each and every department that understand that we are all one team. As well, I have one of the most fantastic teams to work with. Despite the bugs, timelines, and pressures associated with each release, they keep coming up with new and innovative ways to test our products and always manage to have a great attitude!
Q: I’d imagine that for any product release, there comes a point where you must weigh quality against the need to declare availability for time-to-market and revenue reasons. Can you sleep at night with the decisions you’ve influenced?
- A: Sleep is always scarce around a product release, as you tend to worry that everything was covered! But in all the years I have been here at Elluminate, the quality of our products has always taken the highest priority. I can honestly say that I don’t believe we have ever released a product that wasn’t ready for market.
Q: The best thing about leading QA for Elluminate is….
- A: Each day is full of new experiences and challenges.
Thank you Tamara!
Thank You seems too small
It all began 13 months ago when I attended a webinar on an accessibility-related topic held in Elluminate. Some guy by the name of Hadi Rangin ripped apart the accessibility of the Elluminate Live platform. I was upset because we had worked hard to design with accessibility in mind but also determined to get to the bottom of why we were still coming up short.
Fast forward to yesterday and I just finished attending another Elluminate session led by none other than Hadi Rangin from the University of Illinois where Elluminate’s President Maurice Heiblum thanked the Elluminate Accessibility Taskforce for their tireless work over the last nine months helping us improve our Accessibility and confirmed a continued commitment to these Accessibility initiatives as we move forward as Blackboard Collaborate.
The Taskforce is comprised of Disabilities Services Coordinators, users with disabilities and others with a passion for Accessibility who all volunteered to help Elluminate understood where we fell short and identify how we could improve. The group’s user moderator, Hadi Rangin from the University of Illinois, is none other than the webinar speaker who had initially given us the less than stellar review. The group has been helping us work toward the goal of making all of our products, documentation, training, and web properties universally accessible. What a great group of tireless and dedicated educators! Some are our customers, some are users and some are simply interested in making sure than any technology used in education is genuinely accessible to and usable by all. So, Thank You – Hadi Rangin, Jon Gunderson, Tony Suttle and Marc Thompson of the University of Illinois, Debbie Faires of San Jose State University, Alice Anderson and Kitch Barnicle of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Michael Brooks of the Pennsylvania State University World Campus Learning Design, Derrick Cogburn of the American University School of International Service/COTELCO Center, Chetz Colwell of the Open University, Nolan Crabb and Ken Petri of Ohio State University, Christopher Dobson of Harper College, Lisa Fiedor, Beth Shepherd and Greg Kraus of North Carolina State University, ElizaBeth Pifer of Northern Arizona University, Carin Headrick an independent consultant, Blaine Morrow of CCC Confer, Cryssel Vera of CSU-Sacramento, Tom Babinszki of Even Grounds, Inc., and Jane Vincent of the Center for Accessible Technology.
This group started meeting every other week and eventually weekly to assess our current state and plan for improvements. It turns out that while we had previously done a nice job for users who are deaf or hard of hearing, our product was not fully accessible to users using a keyboard for navigation and especially for those using a screenreader. Elluminate Live! Version 10 was specifically designed to address the needs of these users and was launched to market in June only 7 months after the taskforce started. Our goal was usability and inclusion, not just compliance and we’re getting good feedback about what we were able to accomplish. However, we certainly understand that we have not arrived. It’s corny, but I have come to realize that Accessibility is definitely not a destination to arrive at but rather a journey we’ll be on as long as we’re designing and delivering products, websites and content.
That’s only one of the many lessons I, and we as an organization, have learned through this process. Along with the technical lessons about universal design and assistive technology, we’ve learned the tremendous value of engaging users with disabilities in the collaborative design, review and test processes. No amount of employee education, product testing or outside consulting provides an adequate substitute for real users trying to use the product in real ways. In short, investments in all of the education, testing and consulting are important (and expensive) but the interaction with users is paramount (priceless!)
My sincere thanks to each of the members of the Elluminate taskforce for the tremendous effort you have put forth to help us do better. You have been extremely committed to us and we remain committed to you and the goal of this team—educational tools that are Accessible to and Usable by all.
Confessions of a Virtual Worker
by Donna Christopher, Director of Marketing
There’s an age-old perception out there that if you’re working from home, you’re goofing off. You’re doing the laundry, watching Judge Judy, or spending hours at the gym. You are just not as productive as those in the office. You know, those folks who are truly working.
I have a confession. I really do work.
I am a virtual worker. I manage projects, lead a geographically-distributed team, participate in collaborative decision making, and reliably deliver the goods each and every day. I’m more productive in my home office than I’ve ever been in my career, despite no floor-to-ceiling window with an inspirational city view. And I’m just about 100% institutionalized to this approach.
What makes a remote, home-based employee more productive?
- No commute. Don’t tell anyone, but I only work 6 hours because if I commuted to work it would take an additional 2. How false this is. Give a remote employee challenging objectives and interesting projects, and those commuting hours “saved” – and then some – will be repurposed toward work.
- Tools to effectively communicate & collaborate. Anything you can do in a physical office, you can do online. With the right tools at hand, virtual workers are extremely productive. They need technology that enables real-time interaction with others, captures ideas on a whiteboard, enables others to join in on the fly, and facilitates document sharing. Tools like web and video conferencing and IM allow dynamic exchange and even let you see others for a personal connection. It’s as if you’re engaged across a conference room table.
- The melding of professional and personal. Work is always in a virtual employee’s environment. It has no separate place apart from home, making the melding of professional and personal highly likely. I take calls on my mobile phone in the evening while stir-frying chicken. I review emails while walking the dog. Technology makes it very easy to address just one more work thing, inching productivity up.
- Fewer unwelcome disruptions. A virtual environment mimics a traditional office setup in many ways, disruption included. There are IM bleeps, video conference call buzzes, and melodic ring tones. But there are fewer extended lunches, drinking invitations, and useless impromptu meetings that seemed like a great idea at the water cooler. Visits from the social guy who plants himself in a chair and won’t leave just don’t exist. Bad disruption is minimized, and that time is put toward work.
- Great job fit. Virtual workers are hired because they have specific skills and talents that fit the job that perhaps could not be found within a 10-mile radius of headquarters. A great match often results in low ramp-up time and a happier and more productive employee.
Not everyone makes for a good virtual employee. People amenable to this role are self motivated, disciplined, focused, resourceful, self-managed, and quick to learn. They can fulfill social and face-to-face needs outside of work. They put in extra effort to reach out to others to build relationships and work collaboratively for best performance, creative solutions, and a lot of engagement and fun.
I am a virtual worker at a healthy company where online collaboration is in our DNA. At Elluminate, we use our own products to run the company. We are our own best example that the technology – and telecommuting – works.
As a virtual worker, I’ve never been asked where I am. I’ve never been asked to prove that I’m working. And I’ve never had to report hours worked. But I am always expected to show results. I and other virtual workers like me can make a difference in a company’s success.
Our Culture
Originally posted on LearnCentral Blackboard Collaborate Group – July 13, 2010
By Maurice Heiblum, President
Today I was going to write about why I think the Wimba, Elluminate and Blackboard combination is going to be good for the educational community, but Valerie Schreiner, Elluminate’s Senior Director of Product Management did an awesome job already in her post.
I’ll just echo Valerie a bit by saying I also believe that, as a result of this combination, broader, more comprehensive, open, innovative solutions will be delivered to the market faster. The combined resources of Blackboard, Wimba, and Elluminate now provide us with the opportunity to do things we often wanted to do but didn’t have the resources to deliver.
I also want to share another thought about the common threads I’m learning more about each day between the organizations getting together here. The passion I’ve written about and that Val clearly shows in her post is part of the fabric of both Elluminate and Wimba. Check out Matt Wasowski’s recent post. While I haven’t worked closely with my soon to be colleagues at Wimba, if his thoughts are any indication, they share the same passion we do. (By the way, Matt, I live in South Florida, so thank you for LeBron!)
Yes, we get excited when we make our financial objectives, but what really gets us going–what gets us out of bed every day–are stories about homebound children being able to participate in class, or to prepare for the Special Olympics, or stories about nurses in rural Africa having access to professional development and saving lives. There are so many stories of lives being touched, thanks to the technologies we have built together. That’s why this is more than a job for us.
Elluminate and Wimba have not just been companies, they have been like families. If I thought for one second that this merger would change that, I wouldn’t have endorsed it. I actually look at it as an opportunity to do more, not less, with a bigger opportunity to impact lives and keep growing ourselves as professionals in education.
So as we head into this new stage, our “family” will now grow to include Elluminate, Wimba, and Blackboard. We all share the same commitment to be as focused as ever on over-delivering to our customers, nurturing and providing growth for our employees, helping improve education, oh and yes, on surprising some of the skeptics. For 10 years I’ve helped run Elluminate as a commercially sustainable company with a passionate focus on our customers, our employees and on improving education. That’s not going to change now that we are part of Blackboard.
5 Ways You Can Stay Connected
We’re just getting started, so now’s the time to tune in to what people are saying about the Blackboard acquisition. Along with following this blog, here are 5 ways you can stay connected.
1. Monitor the Blackboard + Elluminate + Wimba landing page on the Blackboard site.
2. Check out the posts by Blackboard’s Ray Henderson, who will be providing strategic guidance for the new division.
3. Add your voice to our LearnCentral Blackboard Connect group created by Steve Hargadon. Or at least lurk!
4. Follow Elluminate on Twitter. We have three accounts: News, Webinars, and Events.
5. Read Wimba blog posts by Matt Wasowski, Senior Director Customer Programs.
Got a question? Have an opinion? We welcome YOUR participation.
- Beth Gallob, Elluminate Goddess of Communication
Some Perspective or Why Does the True Enemy Get the Praise?
Originally posted on LearnCentral Blackboard Collaborate Group – July 10, 2010
By Valerie Schreiner, Senior Director of Product Management
I’ve been a little perplexed as I read some negative blog posts and twitter feeds regarding Elluminate and Wimba’s decisions to allow themselves to be acquired by Blackboard. The general comparison is made between dire predictions about what this acquisition will be like in the future in comparison to how Elluminate and Wimba were previously, or are right this at this particular second– as though the market were static and these two organizations could have continued as they were ad infinitum. Some of you have even said “Adobe and WebEx are looking better and better.”
The reality is that the market has been changing. I’ve been in the synchronous collaboration space for over 10 years with the last 5 of those years coming at Elluminate focusing on the educational sector, so I’ve had the opportunity to watch those changes in both the corporate and EDU settings. When I joined Elluminate, we competed for your business happily and vigorously against Wimba and open source solutions, knowing that we would win some and lose some but always with a healthy respect for what they had been able to accomplish (and I like to believe that they held equal regard for us as well).
But in the last few years, with the corporate market becoming more saturated with meeting-based web conferencing vendors, we’ve seen Web Ex and Adobe decide that the educational sector looks more and more attractive. With healthy dominance established there, they set out to see what they could do to capture your business as well. So they announced quick, minimalist integrations to a few LMS systems (only the largest) and made passing waves at becoming accessible to users with disabilities. Then they pursued aggressive pricing tactics in the sector (funded by their corporate revenue stream) to try to capture market share from the smaller edu-focused providers Wimba and Elluminate. The market responded by beginning to give them edu business saying “Look they have a Building Block, clearly they are committed to education” or “Look, they have closed captioning, clearly they care deeply about users with disabilities and equal access.”
Really?
· Do they have a full suite of integrations to all the major systems like Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai and D2L along with open API’s to allow you to integrate into whatever LMS or portal you choose?
· Is it WebEx who provides the free 3-seat rooms for educators, an educational network for teachers to connect, dozens of free webinars connecting teachers and leaders in the educational community and attempts to engage with you about what technology will help transform teaching and learning?
· Is the non-streaming captioning in teeny, tiny font found in WebEx actually usable by your users who are deaf and hard of hearing? Did they engage with users, students, teachers and administrators in your organizations to decide how to design and deliver those solutions?
· Is Adobe’s commitment that Connect Pro will work fully for keyboard users and screen reader users “sometime in the next three years” actually acceptable to your users who are blind?
You have to ask yourself—Why can’t these be answered positively? Both organizations are certainly more equipped from a resource perspective to do all this and more. The reality is because the educational sector is and always will be a minor portion of the business for the WebEx and Adobe web conferencing products. The oil companies and big pharmaceuticals that conduct meetings, webinars and demonstrations through their products will not drive those requirements to the forefront.
But the size of these sectors have driven Adobe and WebEx to produce some very exciting and cool things like mobile iPhone, iPad and Droid applications that neither Elluminate or Wimba have been able to produce as quickly. And you think those applications are interesting. I can tell by all the emails you send me and blogs you post. You know what? So do I! I would like nothing better than to see our organization provide some of those cool new applications for you–after engaging with you our client base to make sure that we design and deliver them in a way that is pedagogically appropriate and doesn’t interfere with core values like No User Left Behind.
I really believe that the combination of Blackboard, Elluminate and Wimba is going to allow us to do things like that in a timely manner to make sure that there is at least one educationally focused, pedagogically sound, accessibility-minded commercial vendor providing collaboration tools as an option to open source. Blackboard hasn’t squashed that. They’ve enabled it. The alternative wasn’t business as usual. The alternative was that over time, more and more edu institutions, captured by sexy mobile applications and cannibalistic pricing tactics by the corporate providers would have moved to those providers leaving you eventually with only a choice between open source and behemoth corporate providers with no EDU focus. I really believe it’s good for education that there be at least one financially solid commercial provider with an EDU focus. I hope you’ll let our combined organization be that provider or at least give us the chance to prove that we can be.
I am not really a blogger. My usual communication with all of you is in an Elluminate session! I love the collaboration space. I love hearing about where education is going and how we can help. I love engaging with you directly to figure out the best way to do that. I love the fact that trying to address the needs of users with disabilities is a real value here and not a marketing façade. I love Elluminate and my job more than anything I have ever done professionally. I love our customers and the tremendous loyalty you’ve shown us and the way you are selfless in your efforts to help use make the product better and as result be better able to meet the needs of more users. I sure hope you’ll be willing to continue with us and give us a chance to prove that the combined organization can be all that and more.
All I am saying is give peace a chance….
The combination of the incredible tools developed by Elluminate and Wimba and the backing of Blackboard will allow us to continue all those things while also helping to modernize and address the sexy things you’d like to have like mobile applications, more open API’s, flexible branding, content integrations, etc. Please don’t disengage with us. I want to hear from you. WE ALL want to hear from you. This is going to happen, so we ask you: How can we as a combined entity be the kind of provider you’d like to do business with? Please let us know.
Passionate Individuals Serving Education and True Community “Collaboration”
Originally posted on LearnCentral Blackboard Collaborate Group – July 10, 2010
By Maurice Heiblum, President
For me, the first few days post announcement of Elluminate plus Wimba plus Blackboard have been very fast moving and something of a mixed bag on the emotion front. On the one hand, I’m really excited about the possibilities for this new team moving forward. With the people and resources we’re talking about, as well as the client community relationships we’re fortunate to have, I think we’re better equipped to do some really meaningful things in collaboration than we were on our own.
At the same time, while I understand it, I’m still processing the inevitable range of reactions from a combination like this one. Some have been positive, seeing similar possibility as we do. Others are mixed with concern about how these parts will fit together and what could get lost in the process. And some are outright skeptical about our intent.
As new as some of this reaction is to me, I’m confident we can please our supporters and surprise some of the less sure. Why? A number of reasons I’ll share more thoughts on in the weeks to come. But it all starts with strong common threads I’ve seen within our three organizations, like a passion for Education. At Elluminate, and I know at Wimba as well, we’ve generally enjoyed very positive relationships with our customers built, at least in part, on a recognition from customers that we share their commitment to working in education. As proud of that as we are, we’re not alone in that commitment.
As President of Elluminate, I have met with and partnered with a large number of individuals from companies that provide excellent solutions for educators. Individuals from Pearson, eCollege, Fronter, Desire2Learn, Promethean, Tegrity, Wimba, Blackboard, and others. The common thread I’ve seen throughout these interactions is a passion for building and delivering the best possible solutions to the education marketplace that truly enhance teaching and learning globally.
That passion may be recognized more in some places than in others. And I know actions haven’t always been consistent with the commitment. It’s not an easy task to balance the needs for financial stability with the timelines and expectations of the educational world, and it’s arguably harder than operating in non-educational markets. The market and our customers help to correct us when we’re out of balance, and we also need to do a better job of telling the stories that drive us.
But the commitment is no less there, including at Blackboard, an organization and group of people I’ve come to know a lot better in recent months. These folks share our desire to serve education. I’ve chosen to sign on because I’ve seen it with my own eyes and feel this move can bring out the best in all three of our organizations.
An early example from my perspective, and something that’s worth reiterating, is the commitment to connection with other platforms. I know there is plenty of skepticism around whether Blackboard will maintain it’s pledge to be platform agnostic, and as we began discussions with Blackboard, I was one of those skeptics. But as I got to work with and know Ray and the team at Blackboard, it was obvious that they are as passionate (if not more so) about education than we are. They clearly understand the mistakes of the past and are working very hard to correct and change those mistakes. They are committed to doing the right thing for educators. I am no longer a skeptic. I believe it.
Collaboration, by definition means being open. You can’t collaborate with others when restricted to certain platforms or environments. Blackboard understands this and it is why a new, independent division is being crafted for future collaboration solutions. This will help ensure a platform-agnostic approach. I know it is hard to believe that Blackboard is interested in building and supporting products that integrate with D2L or Moodle. Who would have predicted that? But they are because we all understand that for collaborative solutions to work and make sense they must work and be accessible to everyone, regardless of platform.
I would not have endorsed the merger nor would I have accepted the position as President of Blackboard Collaborate if I did not believe that we would continue to support and provide innovative technologies to the Blackboard community as well as other open source and commercial platforms. I commit to you that, under my leadership, we will continue to support integration with non-Blackboard platforms.
