Blackboard to merge with Anthology, creating massive ed-tech company – Inside Higher Ed

Anthology, which emerged a year ago from the combination of three higher education administrative software firms, will merge with Blackboard, long the most visible company in learning technology, the two companies announced today.

The companies did not share any financial data, but the combined entity is likely to be among the sector’s biggest educational technology firms.

“Our combined footprint, from both a product perspective and from the more than 4,000 colleges and universities we serve worldwide, likely makes us this the largest education technology company selling into higher education,” Jim Milton, Anthology’s chairman and chief executive officer, said in an interview this morning. Milton will lead the combined company, whose name has not yet been decided.

Anthology, whose roots date to 1988, developed from the combination of Campus Management, a provider of administrative systems including student information, finance and human resources software; Campus Labs, a firm focused on assessment, learning and student success technology; and iModules, a community engagement software company. ListEdTech last year estimated that Anthology itself was the third-biggest higher ed administrative technology company behind Microsoft and Ellucian.

Blackboard was for many years the dominant provider of learning management systems, though competitors such as Instructure (maker of Canvas) and D2L have gained ground and, in the former’s case, surpassed it.

In 2019, Blackboard sold off its Transact unit, one of the businesses it had bought as it sought to expand beyond being a learning management company. That led to intensifying speculation that the company could be broken up or sold.

Milton and Bill Ballhaus, Blackboard’s chairman, CEO and president, said the power of the combined company will flow from its ability to bring data from across the student life cycle to bear on student and institutional performance. “We’re on the cusp of breaking down the data siloes” that often exist between administrative and academic departments on campuses, Ballhaus said.

This is a breaking story. This article will be updated later.