Blackboard Buys Another Rival, to Customers' Dismay

[C]ourse-management software has become a new kind of campus
building–a virtual one where online classes are held and new kinds of
“hybrid” courses take place. The unsettled question is who controls
what these classrooms look like and how stable their foundations are.

Colleges don’t want to just buy these online classrooms out of a catalog. They want to feel like partners in the design process.

Angel apparently got that part right, offering customers unusual responsiveness and access to much of its source code.

Blackboard, meanwhile, has developed a reputation for doing things
its way, gobbling up competitors (this is its third acquisition of a
competing course-management system) and suing rivals (it has filed
multiple patent-infringement lawsuits against one competitor). That
might make good business sense, but it casts the company as a hostile
force in higher education. — Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education

I’m not that happy with the course management system (CMS) product that we currently use, so I’m thrilled that our new IT director is a fan of open-source software. Here’s hoping we will be Moodling soon.