Blackboard buys WebCT

I heard today that Blackboard is set to buy out WebCT.

Random selection of links to merger commentary by independent observers:

• Auricle Bath
• John Dale Warwick
• D'arcy Norman Calgary
• More roundup Stephen Downdes
  

There's a great discusssion on Slashdot where, guess what, both products get slagged off.
This being Slashdot, by people who claim to know a thing or two.  Admins and students are the
majority of the audience, but there's a few "professors" in there too. It's worth a giggle, if you
can stave off the feeling of here-we-go-again depresion.
I have some insight on this topic as a university professor. I've used
both systems, and I was on the Academic Technology Committee when it was
advising the CTO and CIO on purchasing decisions for such systems. We
wound up paying for both. As you say, they both suck, and I'm sure
whatever unholy combination is produced will suck even worse. At the
time - 1999 or 2000 I believe - "open source" was something my
colleagues on the committee had heard of but didn't know anything about,
and the CTO and CIO were computer-savvy but looked on open source with
disdain (this made sense as they were constantly wined and dined by
folks who represent closed source companies looking for big deals). I
was teaching summers at UCLA at the time and had the opportunity to use
ClassWeb [ucla.edu], an open source alternative to such tools. My
experience with the tool was exemplary; I thought it was easy to use, it
fulfilled the necessary functions and was not needlessly confusing for
students. It was also free. Best of all, the developer worked at UCLA so
when there were features I wanted I was able to ask him for them and
they were available in days. It was truly a classic case of the
superiority of the open source model working well. For much less the
price we paid for Blackboard and CT, which all the students complain
about, we could have hired programmers to handle coding issues on
classweb and had an open source solution that we could fine tune at
will. But when I made the suggestion, the feeling around the table
(particularly from the CTO and CIO) was, shut up hippie....

Another cycle

Having spent quite a bit of effort getting the e-learning horses into their harnesses last year and wondering whether all the trouble was worth it, this year could be the one where some furrows are usefully ploughed with less sweat on my part.

It has certainly been very liberating to simply direct students to the virtual store cupboard, without having to fill each of their baskets. Today's course material distribution takes ten seconds.

Me: "Log on to webCT, you'll see my course there, grab what you need"
Them: "er... great!"

Increasingly, students will expect more and more direct provision of on-line information. Here's a trendspotting survey in the Grauniad (spotted in Cutting Through). The conclusions talk about media buying habits of the youth, but these are trends that will probably affect student expectations in universities too. In not too many years' time, it has to be stressed. Next year's first tutorial could go like:

Them: "Hey grandad, I've looked for your RSS feed and course documents last week, where are they? I want my money back. I'm off."
Me: "er... wait!"