Friday, August 5

A Chart of Consolidations (US Centric, E-Learning Centric)

10 comments:

Ben Watson said...

Now that is an awesome graphic! Boy, it really shows the movement towards consolidation.

Of course I'm a little hurt that it does not show the September, 1997 acquisition of my company scholars.com by CBT Systems (now SkillSoft) (smile).

Anonymous said...

At one point Pathlore acquired D.K. Systems. Not sure of the date, but that was another pure LMS company taking over another pure LMS company.

Anonymous said...

Another one...TEDS was bought by Fidelity Investments.

Clark Aldrich said...

Ooops. I posted the wrong version. Here is the right one.

Anonymous said...

AFAIK Asymetrix Corporation (of Toolbook came) actually changed its name and became Click2Learn Inc. so the chart has at least one inconsistency.

Clark Aldrich said...

Hi Brian,

I think I caught that mistake a few minutes before you did. I dragged some lines around before posting, and got that tag lost. By the way, if anyone wants it in PowerPoint, just email me and I will send it to you.

Anonymous said...

MindLeaders acquired the assets of Playback Media...a couple hundred business skill video courses.

SkyDaddy said...

(Hat tip to Stephen Downes.) Good stuff! Very interesting to see what has become of all those folks whose t-shirts and pens I picked up at conferences over the years!

If you're including the K-12 market, in December '04 ProQuest aquired Voyager Expanded Learning. Prior to that they acuired SIRS, CultureGrams, and Reading A-Z.

You might also add the recent (1998-2005) slew of aquisitions by PLATO Learning Systems (formerly TRO Learning, which was formed in 1989 to pick up the rights to PLATO from CDC).

If you want to back-date that far, the Macromedia line should of coruse include the 1992 aquisition of Authorware (itself a CDC spinoff), which really formed Macromedia.

Back down memory lane, there was also the sale of MECC to The Learning Company, which along with Broderbund is now part of Riverdeep if my sources are accurate.


fwiw, I'm just finishing "Learning by Doing" - good stuff!

Anonymous said...

This is probably far too late to even get viewed let alone answered ... but Corrie's post with the mention of PLATO and CDC got me thinking back to those days in pre-history when I was flogging IBM PCs with Pioneer laserdisc players attached -- a platform created by Advanced Systems, Inc., of Chicago and dubbed Interactive Video Instruction ... Advanced Systems, ASI -- as it was known (& possibly loathed) by a generation of IBM mainframe programmers -- was one of two companies in the video-assisted instruction (anyone remember VAI?) for corporates market. The other was Deltak ... which I seem to recall was a subsidiary of National Education Corp.(?) Sometime around 1989 these two merged and I switched jobs: no longer dealing with VAI but with CBT in the form of CDC's PLATO courseware.

Sorry for the ramble but wanted to introduce these company names and ask what happened to them? Were any of these were 'consolidated' into the lines on Clark's wonderful device?

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