Edline

» see edline.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

For four years after it died, edline.net served exactly one page. A Blackboard logo at the top, then a sentence in the middle of an otherwise empty document: your website has been discontinued as of December 31, 2018, as part of the previously communicated End-of-Life date for the Edline, EasyGrade Pro, and GradeQuick products. No styling, no navigation, nothing to click but the logo. It is the plainest death certificate this site has turned up in a while, and it stayed at that address until January 2023.

Edline called itself a learning community management system, which is the kind of phrase a company writes about itself after the fact. In practice it was one website per school and one page per class, where a teacher uploaded the homework and the progress reports, and a parent logged in to find out whether any of it had been done. It covered kindergarten through twelfth grade. The company also bought the gradebook software teachers were already running on their own machines, GradeQuick from Jackson Software and Easy Grade Pro from Orbis, and wired both into the website.

The market for this was American school districts and nothing else, and the habit it depended on, a parent logging in to check, did not exist where I was. Turkish schools of that period handled grades on paper, and what eventually replaced the paper came from the ministry rather than from a vendor. I was at university through most of Edline's good years regardless, which is the wrong end of the age range for a product whose entire premise is that somebody else gets to see your homework.

~ the record ~

~ how it spread ~

Edline grew the way school software grew before procurement caught up with it, which is teacher by teacher. Newsweek ran a piece on the paperless classroom in August 2003 titled School: The Web Ate My Homework, and Edline was in it. By the time the company was describing its own reach, the line was that schools in all fifty states were using it.

Money arrived later. Archipelago Learning took a minority interest in 2009, as part of its own acquisition by Providence Equity Partners. In October 2011 Edline merged into Blackboard, and by July 2012 it was announcing its own rebrand: from then on the product would be called Blackboard Engage.

~ what replaced it ~

The 2014 to 2015 school year is when student newspapers start writing about Edline in the past tense. Districts moved to Google Classroom or to Schoology. The Churchill Observer ran a story in February 2015 under the headline New and improved Google Classroom replaces Edline, which is what a product obituary looks like when a sixteen-year-old writes it.

What Google did to Edline was not build a better gradebook. It gave the whole thing away inside an email account the district had already bought.

~ the last day of 2018 ~

The end-of-life date was 31 December 2018, and Blackboard took three products out on it. The login page at edline.net/Index.page was still answering as late as 7 December that year: a plain form asking for a screen name and a password, with the line Edline is a Blackboard product underneath it and a copyright notice reading 2018.

Then the notice went up and stayed up. In January 2023 the domain finally stopped carrying it and began redirecting to Finalsite, which had bought Blackboard's K-12 business by then. Today edline.net does not resolve at all.

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