You remember Blackboard, don’t you? It’s that not-so-sleek site you used to submit assignments to your college professors—the one you cursed to death when it failed to save that paper on Plato’s Republic you spent hours working on.
Blackboard was at turns frustrating, migraine-inducing, and burdensome. Which isn’t to say Blackboard wasn’t innovative. It was, back in the day. Unfortunately, that day was around 2004. Since then, the overgrown education technology giant has somehow managed to infiltrate most of the nation’s colleges and about half its schools. Meanwhile, Blackboard Learn—the portal where students access and turn in assignments, find their grades, and communicate with teachers and fellow classmates—has stagnated.
This imbalance between growth and innovation has inspired much disdain for the company over the years, including hate posts like this gem. Many view Blackboard as the embodiment of everything wrong with education technology: it’s old-fashioned, it’s hard to use, and once a school system has bought into it, it’s even harder to get rid of.
Jay Bhatt, Blackboard’s CEO for the last two and a half years, knows this all too well. “Blackboard is a function of the system it served for many years,” he admits. “It was a startup company that came up with this fantastic idea in an innovative progressive way, but it just didn’t stay as innovative as it began.”
Which is why, since joining the company in 2012, Bhatt has vowed to refocus Blackboard’s products to serve the students who use them and not just the IT administrators who buy them. Now he's ready to show the world just how he plans to do that. Later today, Bhatt will take the stage at the company’s annual BbWorld Conference, where he will announce the launch of the company’s redesigned core products and the introduction of new ones, all of which aim to make Blackboard a service that its 100 million existing users actually want to use.
"Blackboard wasn’t always thought of as a business that had to retain the consumer," he says. "But in the world we live in today, even though education doesn’t think of itself that way, we really do need to retain that consumer and meet the consumer in the way the consumer wants to be met."
Bhatt is right to worry about retention. Today, the education technology space is more crowded and competitive than ever. Last year, according to CB Insights, the industry received $1.87 billion in venture funding, a massive leap from the $385 million it received in 2009. And as investor interest in the space has grown, smaller, slicker startups like Edmodo and Instructure have sprouted, costing Blackboard precious market share.
Now, according to Glenda Morgan, a Gartner analyst specializing in education, Blackboard must find a way to "stop the slide," one she says has everything to do with how archaic Blackboard feels to young users raised with apps and iOS. "I've done thousands and thousands of interviews with faculty and students, starting in 2002, and when I talk to them about learning management systems, and particularly Blackboard, I always wait for the 'clunky' word to come," she says.
That's because Blackboard's traditional setup was designed around individual courses. One teacher might organize her class's Blackboard page completely differently than another; until now, it's been up to students to navigate to those differences. Meanwhile, Blackboard has kept products like its video conferencing tool, Collaborate, separate from the Blackboard Learn product, meaning students would have to move between products on a single assignment. The more products Blackboard added or acquired, the more unmanageable it became.
"It hadn't changed. It had only grown," says Jon Kolko, Blackboard's vice president of design. He joined the company a little over a year ago as part of Blackboard's acquisition of the startup, myEdu. He's since been tasked with helping lead the turnaround—a job he was not entirely thrilled to land. "I'm used to working at tiny companies and moving really fast and doing high quality work, and frankly Blackboard was known for the opposite of that," he says. "It's been a low quality product that moves very slowly and does poor quality work."
And so, with Bhatt's blessing, Kolko and his team spent hundreds of hours watching students interact with Blackboard in their natural habitats—their dorm rooms. That experiment taught them that students, already stressed and time-strapped, want a system that can proactively tell them what they should be working on, allow them to work on it in as few clicks as possible, and follow them wherever they need to go. With its redesign, Blackboard set out to accomplish all three.
For starters, when students log into Blackboard Learn, instead of seeing a list of courses, they'll see important assignments automatically surfaced based on their due dates. When students click on an assignment, a pop-up box appears where they can start the assignment, drag and drop a document, or chat with their classmates. They can also video-conference with their fellow students and teachers with the click of a button using Collaborate tool, a process that used to require a separate download altogether. Now that all of these products are integrated, Blackboard says it can also collect data on student behavior and use it to predict a student's outcome in any given class.
The new Blackboard also has added a few new things. Bb Student, launched to a limited number of customers earlier this year, is the company's first student-focused mobile app, allowing them to access many of the same tools they use in Learn. Meanwhile, the digital résumé tool myEdu lets students showcase projects and portfolios within the résumé.
For Bhatt and other Blackboard executives, these changes are revelatory. But for the millions of students and teachers who use it every day, it remains to be seen whether the new Blackboard will be new enough to convince students to like it—or at least not hate it anymore. And schools will have the option to stick with the older version of the products, if they want. In some ways, the subtlety of these changes is intentional. When you're a company as big as Blackboard, you can't completely pull the rug out from under your users, even if it would be best for the product. "When 100 million students and a huge number of teachers are already using your technology, you can't just punch them in the face and kick them in the stomach," Bhatt says. For evidence of this, look no further than the old Digg's post-redesign downfall.
But when your company already has a significant reputation problem like Blackboard's, sometimes tearing down the house is the only way to rebuild it. (Look no further than Digg's post-acquisition reinvention.) For users past and present, the new Blackboard will feel familiar. That may or may not be a good thing.
And yet, while Blackboard's system may not be getting a complete renovation, the company is at least doing the important work of catching up to the competition. That's worth something when you're operating at Blackboard's scale. As Morgan says, "They're still the biggest on the market by orders of magnitude." That means that when Blackboard makes a change, millions of students feel that change, too. As long as those changes are for the better, even marginal advances are a good place to start.
