I was deciding not to write anything about Blackboard's announcement that it had acquired the Indiana-based VLE and ePortfolio company Angel Learning when Stephen Downes's RSS feed popped up, with his short post describing the acquisition as "Another stunner in the e-learning marketplace". I'm not so sure. Obviously, takeovers like this come out of the blue for us on the outside. But whether or not welcome, they are normal; and it looks like Blackboard is simply carrying on with its existing strategy of buying competitor companies (just as Saba and SumTotal were doing 4 or 5 years ago in the in the corporate LMS market). Thus Blackboard's acquisition of ANGEL is in the same vein as its 2005 acquisition of WebCT, albeit on a smaller scale. At the same time the purchase looks like it gives Blackboard reach into a sector of the US market (community colleges, smaller universities, and secondary schools) that is reported to have been tending to switch from WebCT to ANGEL, with one of ANGEL's current selling points being ease of switching [30 kB PDF]. Dave Nagel summarises some US reaction in Campus Technology.
Previous rationalisation-related posts:
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