Workday Explores Going Private
On August 13, Reuters reported that Silver Lake is in talks to take Workday private. Before the report, Workday carried a market value near $43 billion. The stock jumped nearly 18 percent on the news and closed the day with a market value of roughly $51 billion. A deal at that size would rank among […]
Resilience Is an Operating Model: Takeaways from Tambellini’s 2026 Future Campus™ Summit
Resilience is often treated as a response to disruption. The 2026 Future Campus™ Summit made a stronger case: institutions must build the capacity to align, decide, and adapt into everyday operations before the next disruption arrives. From August 4 to 6, Tambellini Group convened higher education leaders, technology executives, analysts, and advisors in New York […]
Reading the Signal at InstructureCon 2026: Two Tracks and an Overdue Trust Conversation
Instructure brought roughly 3,000 attendees to Louisville from July 21 to 23 under the theme “Education in the Making.” The announcements arrived quickly: a new venture studio called Instructure Foundry, Foundry’s first announced project, national survey research on AI use in education, and a Canvas roadmap spanning more than 20 learner, educator, and administrator capability […]
From Outcomes to Assessments: A Call for Intentionality, Not Just Content Correlation
As I wrap up my tour of the major LMS provider conferences, including Blackboard, Canvas, and Brightspace, I find myself returning to a deceptively simple observation: too many courses are still designed around content rather than around learning. That is not a criticism of faculty commitment. As a former K-12 teacher, professor of education, and […]
Reading the Signal at JAM 2026: Jenzabar Bets on the Fundamentals
Jenzabar JAM 2026 emphasized performance, reliability, security, accessibility, and a foundation-first roadmap. Here is what higher education leaders should take from the company’s cloud, AI, and student success direction. Vendor conferences have a familiar rhythm. The lights come up, the roadmap slides appear, and the pitch races toward whatever the industry has decided is the […]
Higher Education in a BANI World: The Case for Resilience by Design
At Tambellini, we spend a great deal of energy working with institutions that have tough problems. This has always been true, but we have to admit that the time we are living through is not the same as in previous decades. “Resilience by Design” is the theme of both our research and our upcoming Future […]
The HBCU CIO Exchange: Ideas, Innovation & Impact
Post-Conference Summary & Future Steps | July 8–9, 2026 | Alabama State University, Montgomery, AL Executive Dialogue at the HBCU CIO Exchange The HBCU CIO Exchange convened CIOs, CTOs, and senior technology leaders from across the HBCU community for two days of executive-level dialogue on the campus of Alabama State University. Framed around the themes […]
Stability Before Innovation: What Building Blackboard Together 2026 Signaled for Institutions
Building Blackboard Together 2026 did not feel like a company trying to convince the market that it had reinvented itself. It felt like a company showing customers that the uncertainty was ending. The context makes that shift significant. Following Anthology’s bankruptcy and Blackboard’s emergence as a stand-alone company, the conference took place during an important […]
D2L Fusion 2026: Inside D2L’s Next Phase: Learner Mode, Createspace, and the Shift to Governed AI
D2L Fusion 2026 did not center on a sweeping reinvention of the learning management system. Instead, the company focused on a more practical question: how can AI improve the work students, faculty, and instructional teams are already doing inside Brightspace? That direction was most visible in two announcements: Lumi Learner Mode and Createspace. The products […]
AI Pilots Are Not an AI Strategy
AI pilots are not an AI strategy, but for a lot of organizations, the pilot has become the default first move. And that’s fine as a starting point. Pilots let teams test an idea, see what the technology actually does, find where the workflow breaks, and get comfortable with it. The trouble starts when the […]
