Dear Commons Community,

Over the weekend, The Washington Post had an in-depth article regarding its relationship with the Kaplan chain of for-profit schools.   Kaplan is a multinational, multibillion-dollar enterprise with 70 campuses and nearly 100,000 students, many of them online, and many of them reliant on government aid.   In 2010, more than 90 percent of revenue at Kaplan’s biggest division and nearly a third of The Post Co.’s revenue overall came from the U.S. government via students receiving financial aid.  While Kaplan has been a profitable business, the Washington Post has struggled to remain profitable amid dramatic changes in the news industry and now calls itself “an education and media company” — no longer the other way around.   However, there may be a wobble in this relationship and the article questions The Post’s acquisition of Kaplan in light of a lot of  bad publicity that evolved from the federal government’s  expose last year of the fraudulent practices of a number of for-profit colleges including Kaplan.  Kaplan’s application rate is down 40% from last year.  Regardless I give The Washington Post credit for the candid nature of this article as well as several others it has published over the last few months on Kaplan.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just returned from the American Education Research Association’s Annual Conference in New Orleans.  I was especially proud of our graduate students and colleagues from around CUNY who shared their work and research with the AERA community.    I gave a presentation on Monday regarding online learning in K-12 education and while speaking with several individuals in the audience, they asked me about my views on Blackboard (CMS).  They had seen or heard about the “slam” I gave it at a plenary session two weeks earlier at the Sloan-C Blended Learning Conference.    During the plenary in response to a question about the future of LMSs, I criticized the monopolistic practices of Blackboard.   I commented about this on this blog last November.  As I said then:

“I resent Blackboard’s aggressive acquisition of other CMS providers. It is similar to the resentment that many people especially Mac users felt about Microsoft and IBM before Microsoft. We do not like monopolies and companies that try to control a market. For faculty, we might particularly resent that our craft of teaching will become standardized on one CMS product.”

Let me also say that my issue with Blackboard is not just some quirkiness on my part.  I just did a google search of “Blackboard CMS monopoly” and got 155,000 hits.  Also after my plenary at the Blended Learning Conference about seven people in the audience came up to me to say they agreed with my position.

I stand by my comment above and encourage those of us who teach online to not be wedded to the Blackboard platform.  Experimentation is good!

Tony