by Kelly Hamilton
News for the ANGEL Community: Blackboard to Support Platform Indefinitely
Yesterday we made a series of company announcements that drew the attention of many across the education industry and beyond. But the news that we are going to continue to support the ANGEL platform indefinitely is an announcement I’d like to pause on for a moment – as this is an important announcement for the entire ANGEL community.
Blackboard acquired ANGEL back in 2009 and was planning to End of Life the platform in 2014. However, as announced yesterday by Ray Henderson, “We recognize that clients continue to be successful with ANGEL, and we want to support that work as part of our larger strategy to support multiple learning platforms.” Blackboard will continue to provide support and maintenance to the ANGEL Community indefinitely. While ANGEL won’t see the significant enhancements that Release 9.1 and the Moodlerooms platform Joule will see, we plan to provide regular service packs for ANGEL 8.0 along with select enhancements, on which more information will be shared at BbWorld in New Orleans this summer.
Commentary from the media, analyst and client community has been very favorable of this news:
Phil Hill, executive vice president of the Delta Initiative told Inside Higher Ed:
“The new message” encoded in Mondays announcements “is that it doesn’t matter what LMS you want, we’ll support them all,” Hill wrote in an e-mail. “That is the real message, in my opinion, more so than the open source angle. This is a huge change in strategy.”
You can read more his full blog post on e-Literate.
The reaction on Twitter has been positive too:
Blackboard acquired ANGEL back in 2009 and was planning to End of Life the platform in 2014. However, as announced yesterday by Ray Henderson, “We recognize that clients continue to be successful with ANGEL, and we want to support that work as part of our larger strategy to support multiple learning platforms.” Blackboard will continue to provide support and maintenance to the ANGEL Community indefinitely. While ANGEL won’t see the significant enhancements that Release 9.1 and the Moodlerooms platform Joule will see, we plan to provide regular service packs for ANGEL 8.0 along with select enhancements, on which more information will be shared at BbWorld in New Orleans this summer.
Commentary from the media, analyst and client community has been very favorable of this news:
Phil Hill, executive vice president of the Delta Initiative told Inside Higher Ed:
“The new message” encoded in Mondays announcements “is that it doesn’t matter what LMS you want, we’ll support them all,” Hill wrote in an e-mail. “That is the real message, in my opinion, more so than the open source angle. This is a huge change in strategy.”
You can read more his full blog post on e-Literate.
The reaction on Twitter has been positive too:
Lost in the shuffle of BlackBoard’s announcement is news that Angel lives on! Angel has excellent features that Bb never integrated. — Judy Brophy (@judybrophy) March 27, 2012
So Blackboard is keeping Angel, and now owns Moodlerooms and NetSpot… Big, big news in the LMS market — Kelley Cruse (@kelleycruse) March 27, 2012
Blackboard Extends Support for Angel LMS ‘Indefinitely’ t.co/idGKf7GR #edtech — T.H.E. Journal (@THE_Journal) March 27, 2012
It’s fun to read the different reactions to #Blackboard‘s announcements from today supporting Open Source and extending ANGEL’s support. — jj johnson (@jjjohnson01) March 26, 2012For more information about this announcement, we encourage you to read Ray Henderson’s blog post on Ray H Blog and attend the ANGEL Community webinar on April 10.
