Blackboard, Inc. is a massively successful academic technology company. Best known for its learning management system, Blackboard was purchased by a private equity firm in 2011. A new CEO, Jay Bhatt, took the helm in late 2012. Under his leadership Blackboard has been rethinking its mission, products, and strategy. I attended Blackboard World 2014 this…
Month: July 2014
Learning And Relearning
After a part of his lung was removed to save him from an invasive melanoma, Roger H. Martin, president of Randolph-Macon College, decided to take a sabbatical and return to college as a student. His memoir, Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again, recounts his semester at St. John’s College, a private institution committed to…
Ravitch’s World
Diane Ravitch is a force of nature and social media. Relentlessly energetic, this scholar of K-12 education is at the heart of a movement and counter-reformation in our school system. Ravitch’s aim is no less than to reshape the national debate on education. In Reign of Error, Ravitch employs her formidable polemical skills to discuss four…
Degrees of Inequality and the Failed Policyscape of Financial Aid
A consistent theme in American discourse today is that higher education is in crisis. The common refrain is that a college education is not worth the cost, with spiraling tuition costs pricing college out of the reach of middle class Americans and the result neither relevant or able to compensate for student debt. But what…