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