Back in pre-history there was a really good live conferencing platform called Elluminate. We used it to offer live sessions in some of our MOOCs from 2008 and on. It was acquired by Blackboard, renamed Collaborate, and vanished from the public view (so did our pioneering Elluminate recordings, which were in a proprietary format, and lost forever). Until the pandemic we lurched along with bad tech like Adobe Connect and Google Hangouts. Then came Zoom and we had a good way to do live sessions again. Former Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen even launched a Zoom-based addon called Class. And now he's acquiring Collaborate, which I assume will allow him to free Class from being wholly dependent on Zoom. Phil Hill, in his analysis, suggests "that does go against Blackboard's strategy of providing a common data service based on shared platforms from the company." But I don't see why it would - it seems likely Class would share data with Blackboard (and, indeed, other partner LMSs), and (if well executed) could collect data form any number of videoconferencing platforms - Zoom, Collaborate, Teams, Jitsi, whatever.
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