Okay, okay, when I blogged back on Sept. 20th about this interesting idea, I knew I was sliding into rumor-mongering. And I was a little uncomfortable posting lest such a label 'stick' to me. I don't want that. Yet the idea of Google buying Blackboard has such delicious overtones to it, I keep looking for others who might think so too. Tanya Carlson over at Motley Fool apparently thinks so…she explains why in her post yesterday, "Are Google and Blackboard an Item?"
Speaks Her Mind
Notre Dame’s LMS “Concourse” powered by Bb Vista- A Whole Lot of Blackboard Vista (Concourse at Notre Dame) Gradebook Tips
- Moving assessments between courses
- Granting access to Concourse/Blackboard
- Add a Section Description for Course
- Letter grades in Blackboard
- Adding content to Concourse
- Getting started with Concourse
- A New Year, A New Semester and New Courses
- End-of-semester Concourse wrapup
- Blackboard grading forms get a B-
I can’t see it happening. One of Google’s main challenges that they face with anything they buy or build is that it has to scale to an absurd degree. No LMS on the market today, including Blackboard, is likely to be able to meet their requirements, no matter how many development resources you throw at it. Today’s LMSs were just not architected with Google scale in mind. If Google were to enter the LMS market, they would probably need to build something from scratch.
If scaling is key to Google purchases, then they should not have bought Jaiku. Google ended up trying to rewrite it to make it work with their architecture. As a result, Jaiku was down for a couple months which sent all those users back to Twitter or Friendfeed.