A while back, I wrote a post giving advice to small schools about selecting a new LMS. That post turned out to be reasonably popular. Today somebody sent me a link to a study done by the North Carolina Community College System comparing Blackboard to Moodle and, in particular, talking about the experience of some […]
Blackboard Files Yet Another Lawsuit
photo credit: michelle.irish You may recall that Blackboard purchased a patent in what appeared to be a fruitless attempt to countersue TechRadium, the company that sued them for patent infringement over their emergency warning system and that now is suing Twitter. It turns out that the purchase was not quite fruitless after all, because Blackboard used […]
Review: Sakai Courseware Management
I’ve been meaning to get to this for a while. I promised Michael Korcuska that I would review the new Sakai book that he co-wrote with Alan Berg. This is a particularly important milestone for the Sakai community because it is the first one published about the LMS. When you have only one book on […]
The State of the LMS: An Institutional Perspective
The Delta Initiative, a consultancy group, just did a terrific webinar in cooperation with the Cal State system on the state of the LMS. This is not one of those predict-the-demise or predict-the-next-flux-capacitor presentations, though. It’s just an excellent, down-to-earth institutional view of how LMS adoption is going in the real world and what the […]
Trying To Follow Blackboard v Desire2Learn
There’s a blog post update from Desire2Learn on the latest back and forth between them and Blackboard over the patents. (Remember, there’s more than one patent now.) Here’s the latest, as near as I can follow it: On the original ‘138 patent suit in U.S. courts, there’s no word yet on any appeal by Blackboard […]
Blackboard Settles with TechRadium
Update: It turns out that TechRadium has also filed suit against Twitter. Oy. (Via Laura Gekeler.) Blackboard and TechRadium have apparently come to some sort of cross-licensing agreement on their emergency notification patents. This isn’t surprising. What we don’t know is whether anyone is paying anyone else as part of the cross-licensing agreement. Since Blackboard […]
Ken Udas to Head Up UMassOnline
I am thrilled to report that my former colleague Ken Udas, most recently the Executive Director of Penn State World Campus and before that a fellow escapee from the SUNY Learning Network, has been selected as the new CEO of UMassOnline. Says University of Massachusetts President Jack M. Wilson, The role of CEO of UMassOnline […]