Comments on: Blackboard Inc http://www.stephenp.net/2004/12/21/blackboard-inc/ A specialist in inquiry-based, work-focussed, online supported learning Wed, 07 Jan 2009 04:09:26 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.5 By: glen http://www.stephenp.net/2004/12/21/blackboard-inc/#comment-307 glen Thu, 13 Jan 2005 03:53:54 +0000 http://69.89.27.211/~stephep6/blog/2004/12/21/blackboard-inc/#comment-307 >I am reminded by a song by the Jam (Going >Underground) with a clever switch between two >lines ‘the public gets what the public wants’ "Well good morning Smithers Jones, how's the wife at home - did you get the car you've been looking for..." >Firstly, the creation of a powerful e-Learning >environment with an appropriate philosophical >standpoint is not inherently complex. I agree with this, the problem is not in developing the environments, but in finding a large enough market of tertiary educationalists that want to do something other than dump a pile of course notes online in order to get the return on investment. Until tertiary education institutions make a major paradigm shift from the traditional centralised qualification/course/lecturer/student models to more distributed models of learning, then nothing exciting or different is going to come out of the commercial lms market. The only real innovation in the short term is going to happen in the open source arena where shareholders and ROI is not the driving force. >I am reminded by a song by the Jam (Going >Underground) with a clever switch between two
>lines ‘the public gets what the public wants’

“Well good morning Smithers Jones, how’s the wife at home - did you get the car you’ve been looking for…”

>Firstly, the creation of a powerful e-Learning
>environment with an appropriate philosophical
>standpoint is not inherently complex.

I agree with this, the problem is not in developing the environments, but in finding a large enough market of tertiary educationalists that want to do something other than dump a pile of course notes online in order to get the return on investment.

Until tertiary education institutions make a major paradigm shift from the traditional centralised qualification/course/lecturer/student models to more distributed models of learning, then nothing exciting or different is going to come out of the commercial lms market. The only real innovation in the short term is going to happen in the open source arena where shareholders and ROI is not the driving force.

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