{"id":6746,"date":"2007-05-16T10:25:40","date_gmt":"2007-05-16T10:25:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/16\/for-477-million\/"},"modified":"2007-05-16T10:25:40","modified_gmt":"2007-05-16T10:25:40","slug":"for-477-million","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/16\/for-477-million\/","title":{"rendered":"For $477 Million"},"content":{"rendered":"\u23f3 Approximate reading time: <\/span> 2<\/span> mins<\/span><\/span>

Did you hear<\/a> about
\n
\nPearson’s acquisition<\/a> of online courseware giant eCollege? Yeah, $477 mil.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I’ve taught a few courses with eCollege for old U. over the past four years.
\nI find their platform to be only mildly<\/i> (.01 micro-measures, to be exact)
\nbetter than Blackboard. I did, for what it’s worth, decide this semester that I
\nwill never ever again involve Blackboard as a platform for an online course
\nunless my employment contract requires it. With eCollege, what’s different is
\nthat everyone I know (who uses it) seems to be gushing about the features.
\nWithin eCollege I know how to change things around, add modules, rearrange parts
\nof the course, and so on, but I continue to find it excruciatingly cumbersome to
\nnavigate: two and three extra clicks to complete an operation, HTML pastes
\ncommonly (if randomly) introduce extra line breaks with nothing in the code to
\nexplain it, the style sheets cascade in highly unpredictable ways, and–this is
\nthe one that gets me the most–the discussion threads don’t allow for stylistic
\nemphasis. In other words, the threaded discussions don’t tolerate italics,
\nboldface, underlining, highlighting, blockquotes, or much of anything. For
\neCollege’s discussion threads, it’s plain text with! automatically recognized
\nURLs. Altogether, this feels like trying to fashion a fine set of dishes
\nout of molding clay with a scoop of coarse gravel thrown in. That said, their
\nsystem for uploading Micro$oft documents is fairly robust. I suppose this works
\nfor plenty of people, but to me it feels like an exhausting, high stakes
\nlabyrinth of propriety encumberanceware.<\/p>\n

$477 mil?<\/p>\n

I know this sounds highly critical, even ranty. I continue to cling to
\na couple of old ties as course developer of three courses whose curricula rely (as contractually stipulated) on the eCollege platform. And so I must
\ncontinue to work with it and tolerate its shortcomings. When I saw the
\nnews of the acquisition, I was just thinking that for $477 million dollars
\nsomebody at Pearson might stumble across this entry and consider that even
\neCollege could be sharply improved. It would be a shame to allow its
\nplatform to rest on the sole accolade of being better, even by the thinnest
\nmargin, than Blackboard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u23f3 Approximate reading time: <\/span> 2<\/span> mins<\/span><\/span>Did you hear about Pearson’s acquisition of online courseware giant eCollege? 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