During the Building Blackboard Together 2026 conference (July 14-15, 2026), 50 academic leaders joined the Senior Leadership Summit to discuss the landscape of the higher education ecosystem, and the pressures colleges and universities are feeling right now. Everyone in the room agreed that the current climate around higher education is heated and that fewer people see the value of post-secondary education than ever before. After Justin Menard, CEO of ListEdTech, started the summit with an overview of the current LMS landscape, Dr. Van Davis, executive director of WCET, continued with a conversation about the value of higher ed and why a college education still matters. It set the tone for the rest of the day, as we talked through the LMS as a learning ecosystem and how schools are prioritizing innovation, showcasing learning, and highlighting value.
Attendees, some from as far as the UK and Nigeria, spent time reflecting on the struggles they're seeing on their own campuses. Those struggles didn't start with a conversation about AI. Institutions are educating the next generation of teachers, leaders, entrepreneurs, and scientists, and they're feeling the pressure to prepare graduates with marketable skills and prove the ROI of a degree. As the day went on, conversations circled around workforce readiness, ROI, and even anecdotally touched on curricular and program changes. One theme kept surfacing underneath all of it; the struggle most schools were actually describing wasn't value. It was change.
Changing faculty mindset around curricular decisions made to highlight ROI in degree attainment. Changing stakeholder perceptions of the marketable skills graduates possess. Changing institutional processes, procedures, and policies to meet the current state of higher education around the world. Then balancing all of these while facing the added pressure of an AI-driven world. Individual problems on campuses may show up as issues around curriculum, graduation rates, or emerging AI. But the umbrella over all of it is change management: how campuses are adapting, or failing to adapt, to a landscape that keeps moving.
However, that wasn't just a read in the room. At the end of the day, we asked attendees to reflect, in writing, on four areas: the challenge that mattered most, the opportunity being ignored, one idea they were taking with them, and the one thing Blackboard could help solve. Thirteen leaders answered. One of them, without any prompting from us, wrote the exact phrase back. Change management. Not a tool. Not a feature. They named change management as the opportunity not being paid attention to in higher education.
The other responses backed it up, just from different angles. One leader described the problem as pace: workforce trends moving faster than higher ed's ability to pivot, especially programmatically, because it simply takes too long to update a curriculum. That's not a complaint about a specific tool sitting unused. It's a complaint about how long it takes for an institution to decide to change at all.
A different leader named the other half of it: adoption. Pace is about how long it takes an institution to make a decision. Adoption is about whether the people inside that institution have what they need to act on it, and those are not the same problem, even though they get treated as one in most change management plans. Faculty are not slow to adopt because they are resistant. They are slow to adopt because most institutions ask them to change how they teach without changing anything about the conditions they teach under, the time they are given, or the support that is supposed to come with the mandate. A decision made quickly still has to travel through a workload, a course load, and a set of expectations that were never redesigned to hold it. Change management has to account for both halves, or it only ever measures how fast leadership moved and never asks whether anyone downstream was equipped to move with them.
That's the real story out of the Senior Leadership Summit at BBT26. Leaders didn't spend the day worried about a specific AI tool or a platform. They spent it worried about their own institutions' capacity to change in curriculum, in stakeholder perception, in process, and yes, in how faculty respond to new technology. AI is just the loudest example of change happening right now, running into the same two problems named above: institutions too slow to decide, and people not yet supported enough to adopt what's decided. It's the current test of a much older capacity, or incapacity, that was already there long before anyone brought AI into the room.
Finally, leaders were asked what Blackboard could help solve on their campuses, what we could do to support the institution. Almost no one answered with a feature request or a tool they wished existed. They answered about the relationship, the partnership Blackboard has built with their campus over years of showing up, and the fact that we are there as they navigate change, not just as they navigate a product. Most of the time, the question a vendor gets asked is What can you build for me. This one was closer to Will you still be here while I figure out how to change. We have spent years building that kind of relationship with institutions, one conversation and one renewal at a time, and hearing it come back unprompted, in almost exactly those terms, tells us it's the piece worth protecting as everything else around it shifts.
