How Universities Can Reopen Blackboard Contracts
- Ibiso David-West
- Oct 30, 2025
- 3 min read
The Rise and Fall of Blackboard
For nearly two decades, Blackboard has been a key player in the Learning Management System space. With universities as key users, Blackboard has been the main software tool for millions of students around the world. However, for many years now, Blackboard has been losing ground. Increased competition from Canvas and D2L (as well as Moodle, the open-source alternative) has put Blackboard in a downward spiral of talent loss, underdevelopment and customer churn. This culminated with Anthology, Blackboard’s parent company, filing for bankruptcy in October 2025.
Why Now is the Time to Reopen Your Blackboard Contract
With Anthology, Blackboard’s parent company, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October 2025, the LMS market is shifting fast. The company is restructuring over $1bn in debt, selling off SIS/ERP and CRM/Student Success divisions, but notably keeping Blackboard as its core product. For universities, this disruption brings both risk and opportunity. As Anthology reorganizes under new investors, contract terms and pricing now have completely new approval mechanisms.
If you’re managing your university’s Blackboard contract, now is the ideal time to review your agreement, whether or not your renewal is coming up soon.
Blackboard’s 2025 Product Push and Its Impact on Higher Education Budgets
Despite its underinvestment in product development, Blackboard has been expanding its offerings and focus on AI and analytics. In 2025, several product shifts have been announced:
AI-powered learning tools: Personalized content recommendations and student performance insights.
Advanced analytics dashboards: Deep data visibility for faculty, admin and institutional reporting.
Expanded integrations: Deeper syncs with Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace and other campus systems.
While these features can enhance learning outcomes, they also expand Blackboard’s commercial footprint. Renewal quotes increasingly include bundled “premium” modules, even when adoption or usage doesn’t justify them.
For university procurement leaders, this creates new complexity. Different departments or colleges might negotiate their own Blackboard licenses, making it difficult to maintain contract visibility or align renewal timing, a setup that quietly drives software overspend across the institution.
How Higher Education Procurement Teams Lose Leverage
Procurement in higher education operates differently from most sectors. Many universities have devolved structures, so software is often bought in a decentralized way. This is how you can lose control of your software spend. With Blackboard, overspend often happens when departments purchase add-ons independently, creating duplication; when advanced modules go unused; or when student seat estimates are inflated year after year. Add in last-minute renewals pushed aside by academic calendars, and you lose the leverage you need to negotiate. Without centralized contract visibility and proper forward planning, you can overspend by 20-40% on Blackboard alone.
How Early Action Drives Blackboard Savings
You’ll get a much better deal with Blackboard if you don’t wait until they send you the renewal quote. To succeed with this proactive strategy, you should start planning months in advance of your renewal date, aligning finance, IT, and academic stakeholders under one strategy. What’s more, given Anthology’s recent bankruptcy, you can actually reopen your contract far ahead of your renewal date. This can give you in-year hard savings, which is rare in the software world.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Audit actual platform usage: Which modules, analytics dashboards and integrations are actually being used?
Consolidate contracts: Bring decentralized renewals under a co-termed single contract.
Reopen your contract: Unlike many software vendors, Blackboard lets you reopen your contract if you ask the right people in the right way. If you’d like to find out how to do this, speak with the Wyn team.
How Wyn Helped a UK University Save £430k+ on Blackboard
One UK university partnered with Wyn after realizing their Blackboard costs were rising faster than student enrollment.
Wyn’s team reopened the agreement 14 months early, modeled optimal pricing scenarios and armed the university with the leverage needed to make hard savings on its existing contract, as well as the renewal term. This led to a 27% reduction in the proposed total contract value, saving £430k+ without changing the bill of materials at all.
If Blackboard is your LMS and you don’t intend to migrate in the near future, don’t wait until your negotiation leverage disappears. Book a free call with Wyn and find out where you can cut overspend.
Done right, this will save your institution’s jobs at a tough time for the sector.
