Oh rapture! Article in Inside Higher Ed reports that “Blackboard, Inc., said it would acquire its top competitor, WebCT, Inc., for $180 million.” The merger is supposed to take place in the next few months; the new conglomerate will “continue to support both companies’ products for the foreseeable future, to keep disruption to current clients to a minimum, the two companies said.”

Forgive me if I am not thrilled, though if you were reading this blog last year you’ll hardly be surprised. One of the commenters on the above-linked post pointed out that Blackboard is much more flexible than WebCT, and from that perspective the merger may be a good thing; but neither company seems interested in actually disseminating knowledge, as does for example MIT’s Open CourseWare. It’s also telling that all of the dozen or so comments so far on the Inside Higher Ed article reflect a negative attitude toward the news. Some academics are worried about whether the merger signals a monopoly in the works; others are getting the word out about open-source alternatives.

Since many universities, Brown among them, seem enamored of the suboptimal options offered by WebCT, there’s seemingly nothing to be done on an institutional level. On a smaller scale, however, we can work toward better solutions. This requires humanist academics to either learn more about educational software and web design or employ people who are already good at it, or both. Since that learning curve is inevitable these days anyway (just try being full-time faculty and not knowing how to attach a document to an email), all that remains is to not give in to the apparent convenience of commercial course management software and think more broadly. Wouldn’t it be great if, in a few years, people still learned new things from the materials you created for a course you no longer teach?

Monday 17th, edited to add: A follow-up article in Inside Higher Ed asks, “In buying WebCT, did course-management giant vanquish competition, or is open source the real competition?”