IUSM Educational Technology

ANGEL community at the House of Blues in Chicago

I was in Chicago on Thursday and Friday for the 6th and final AUC. It was interesting timing since the acquisition of ANGEL Learning by Blackboard had been finalized earlier that week. I have attended all of the ANGEL conferences, presented at one, maintained the web and registration pages for two of the conferences, and served on the planning committee for the second conference in Indianapolis.

I have a pretty good perspective on the establishment and growth of ANGEL, albeit somewhat of an outsiders view. IUSM was an early adopter of ANGEL, back in the days when Dave Mills, one of the founders, would visit our site in person to troubleshoot and market new features of ANGEL. These were also the days when a support call might end up being answered with a code snippet that could be used to modify an ASP file that had a bug or needed more functionality.

From that point, in the space of around 8 years, the company grew and was purchased for $95 million. ANGEL Learning had just been voted earlier in the month as one of the best companies to work for in Indiana, and it always showed in the attitude and motivation of ANGEL Learning employees. I don’t believe there was any shortage of people who wanted to join the organization. At the customer appreciation event at the House of Blues, I had a chance to talk to a few employees, as many of us did. Most of them were just coming to terms with the shock of learning their company had been purchased, and wondering if they would ever find such a wonderful environment in which to work in their continuing careers.

Beyond the personal stories, I went to the conference to learn about the future of the product and what would change in the coming year. IUSM’s contract with ANGEL lasts one more year, so in 6-9 months I will need to be very informed about alternatives in case a choice needs to be made. ANGEL 7.4 is out now, and I will be upgrading our system this summer. This version seems like it would provide for our needs for at least two years, and the CEO of Blackboard tried to assure the ANGEL community that pricing would remain consistent for the forseeable future.

Michael Chasen, CEO of Blackboard, made himself very available during the conference. He even posted his email and office phone and invited people to contact him. It felt to me that he was on a marketing mission the entire time. I don’t mean this in a negative way, he really had to try and assure the ANGEL community that important lessons had been learned from mistakes made in the past, especially in the area of user support. The feeling I went away with was that the community is optimistic and would like the ANGEL product to continue the established tradition of innovation and customer oriented development, but we don’t completely believe the hype coming from executives.

One of the toughest questions I saw the CEO face was on the subject of corporate culture. Someone expressed concern that the LMS they used was now owned by a company whose strategy of growth seems to be acquisition and litigation. The question was answered in a politely defensive manner, explaining why previous acquisitions had been made and admitting historical mistakes. Along with this explanation, I sensed that the CEO defended his actions by proclaiming that everything the company has done was with the best interests of the educational community in mind. Believing this was a stretch for me, knowing the corporate culture that seems to pervade today.

In all, my knowledge of the event is increased but my strategy has not changed. I am researching LMS offerings so that I can be an informed consultant for the choice that IUSM makes for the future, whatever that choice may be.

In the late afternoon of May 6th, I learned along with everyone else that Blackboard was planning to acquire ANGEL Learning. I immediately began to think about the future of the ANGEL LMS at IUSM. Others around the country were having the same thoughts, and the ANGEL-L listserv lit up with questions and concerns for the future. Most were not optimistic, especially in areas of pricing and support. Here at IUSM, we have 2 years left on our ANGEL license, so I don’t expect that changes in our system will be significant for some time. Still, any migration to a new system would be a big change for our faculty, so I need to be completely informed about competing products.

Sakai is a logical first step in the discovery process. It already powers Oncourse, which is used by the IUPUI campus. It doesn’t have the flexibility of ANGEL but I need to find out exactly what that means for our environment. I requested an Oncourse test account this week, and am working through recreating an IUSM course on Oncourse for demonstration. I don’t expect that IUSM would choose to use Oncourse, we would probably maintain our own installation of Sakai. Granted, a lot may change in the next two years that I will need to be ready for.

Another interesting product is Epsilen, and I am somewhat familiar with this product since I maintain an electronic portfolio using this tool. Epsilen is hosted, so this would offload all of the system administration and we would concentrate on course curriculum, development and support of faculty. Similar to Oncourse, I have created a test course in Epsilen so that we will have something that can be demonstrated real time.

Later this week is the ANGEL user conference, and Blackboard representatives will be there. A future roadmap for the ANGEL LMS will almost certainly be discussed, although at this point I would tend to believe that it will be rooted in marketing. I’m very curious to see how this will play out - many institutions that use ANGEL came from Blackboard and have no interest in returning. The mailing list is teaming with stories of how support from Blackboard fell off the cliff when WebCT was acquired by Blackboard, so Blackboard’s poor track record is on full display in that forum at least. As of now, this list has 1,172 subscribers.