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January 16, 2014 08:30 pm GMT

Education Giant Blackboard Buys MyEdu To Help Refresh Its Brand And Reanimate Its User Experience

FotoFlexer_PhotoOver the years, Blackboard has become one of the most familiar brands in the world of education. Today, Blackboard’s learning management system (LMS) and educational tools are used in 75 percent of colleges and universities and more than half of K-12 districts in the U.S. With more than 20 million users across 20,000 organizations, the 16-year-old company remains the dominant player in the market, serving both professional and academic sectors. However, in spite of its long-standing dominance, Blackboard hasn’t always inspired songs of praise. Designed to be a utility in the ilk of productivity software, the learning management system focused on efficiency and solving workflow and organizational headaches for administrators and teachers. But for college students, Blackboard’s user experience and unwieldy interface became infamous as a part of academic life that was to be endured, not enjoyed. After years of ups and downs, the departure of its founders, declining brand image and the move from private company to public company back to private, the company is showing signs that its ready for a revamp, particularly of its core product: The LMS. That begins with the news this week that it has acquired MyEdu, a three-year-old startup and maker of a platform that aims to help students reduce the cost of a college education, plan their degree and find a job. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, though we do know that, as MyEdu and its team of 20 employees join Blackboard’s ranks, the startup will continue to work out of its headquarters in Austin. In terms of the acquisition’s effect on the end user? According to MyEdu Chief Project Officer Frank Lyman, aside from the gradual expansion of its career platform, the effects on current users will be minimal, and the platform will remain free for anyone to sign up. Since its founding in 2009, MyEdu has developed its platform to provide value to students in three key areas, all of which revolve around the core goal of helping young people to manage their academic careers in a way that improves their chances of getting a job. From the beginning, MyEdu has methodically hoovered up student and university data in an effort to identify patterns that lead to higher costs. Not only does it offer grading information and aggregate professor reviews, but it has worked to collect detailed public course data in an effort to make it easier

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