After Monday’s post on my confusion with Blackboard’s overall Learn strategy, I thought I would follow up with a reminder that there is one really important area where there are strong early signs that Blackboard is doing something right in a very important area: learning analytics. Learning analytics is one of those areas where there are many, […]
Dear Blackboard, I am Confused
The good news is that Blackboard, after going quiet for a while, is out giving updates again. The bad news is that the more they talk, the less I understand. A year and a half ago, I thought that I understood their Ultra strategy and had a pretty good guess about their odds of executing it. […]
Empowering Students in Open Research
Phil and I will be writing a twice-monthly column for the Chronicle’s new Re:Learning section. In my inaugural column, “Muy Loco Parentis,” I write about how schools make data privacy decisions on behalf of the students that the students wouldn’t make for themselves, and that may even be net harmful for the students. In contrast […]
Blackboard Did What It Said It Would Do. Eventually.
Today we have a prime example of how Blackboard has been failing by not succeeding fast enough. The company issued a press release announcing “availability of new SaaS offerings.” After last year’s BbWorld, I wrote a post about how badly the company was communicating with its customers about important issues. One of the examples I cited […]
Patents Rethought: Khan Academy Did the Right Thing
To recap what’s happened so far: Audrey Watters called our attention to a patent filing by Khan Academy. I expressed my concerns about the continuing patent problem that we have in educational technology. Carl Straumsheim explained the defensive use of patents in more detail and in the process motivated me to take a look at […]
Ed Tech Patent Update: The Innovator’s Agreement
Carl Straumsheim has a good piece out on the Khan Academy patent Inside Higher Ed today. Much of it is a primer on the uses and limitations of defensive patents, but there is a piece on the specific nature of the patent pledge that Khan Academy has signed that I missed. The pledge, originally created […]
Solving the Ed Tech Patent Problem
You may have heard that Khan Academy has filed for several patents. Audrey Watters has written a really strong piece providing the details of the filings in the context of the history of ed tech patents and showing why some academics feel that the patent system clashes with the values upon which academia was built. In the process, she excavates some of my personal history in the Blackboard patent war.