Re: Universities and Course Management SystemsHarold,

Interesting perspective. During the heady days of the late 1990's we watched companies like Blackboard and WebCT fight for market territory with easy pricing models ($5000 course management systems, essentially) and we thought that, worst case, if they did not become profitable, they would be acquired by publishing companies as vehicles for publishing content.

But the landscape has changed in a surprising way. Both Blackboard and WebCT have become profitable at much higher annual licensing fees, and both offer their flagship products with powerful database (e.g., Oracle) support. Both companies have around 4000 clients and consortia.

Publisher ownership seems unlikely as Blackboard has filed a S-1 for a 75 million IPO, while WebCT is owned in part by SCT (Major Higher Ed SIS Admin System Vendor) who in turn is owned by the large market aggregator SunGard (who recently acquired my own ex-firm, Collegis)

But this question of "could $3.3 M be spent better at the institution" persists. Certainly that would buy a lot of support staff (instructional designers, faculty developers, system admins/engineers). We'll see if the annual licensing ever ends up on "budget bubbles" - the plentitude of freeware CMSes in existence that feature good database support and IMS compatibility may force the issue in the end.

Also watch for copycat interfaces to assauge faculty who may complain about changing horses midstream - ala Apple vs. Microsoft it's been shown that "look and feel" is hard to defend. CyberLearning Labs "ANGEL" system looks a heck of a lot like Blackboard out of the box ... switching over would cause minimal confusion for existing Blackboard users ...