e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • 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 requires an individual whose knowledge and skills are strong in education, solid in technology, and visionary in management, development, and planning. In Dr. Udas we have clearly met this requirement. Dr. Udas has experienced, and understands, the all-important faculty and program development component which is key to UMassOnline’s future; the all-important technology component that has always distinguished our offering; and, he has been a vocal champion of online learning and teaching throughout his career.

    This was a very smart move on the part of the University of Massachusetts. I’m sure Ken will do great things there.

  • The Financial Impact of the Patent Loss on Blackboard

    Financial Crisis / Finanzkrise
    photo credit: alles-schlumpf

    You may recall that Blackboard originally won a judgment of $3.3 million from Desire2Learn in their lawsuit. The ruling from the Court of Appeals means that Blackboar will probably have to return that money—plus interest—to Desire2Learn, as Blackboard indicates in an 8-K SEC filing today. The filing says, in part, that Blackboard “expects to record one-time charges of approximately $3.5 million related to the reversal of the district court judgment” of which $3.3 million is the money they have to return and the extra $200K is presumably interest.

    Now, here’s the thing. According to Blackboard’s 2008 10-K filing, their net income for that year was $2.8 million. If you subtract the $3.3 million in income that they are going to have to return to D2L from the $2.8 million net profit, it appears that Blackboard’s business actually lost $500K in 2008.

  • Another Victory for D2L, Another Opportunity for Blackboard

    Update: Patently-O blogger Dennis Crouch has posted a legal analysis of the ruling in which he concludes, “Defendant Desire2Learn wins a complete victory (after a few million in attorney fees).”

    Via Desire2Learn’s patent blog, we learn today that the U.S. Court of Appeals re-affirmed the invalidation of claims 1-35 and newly invalidated claims 36-38 of Blackboard’s original ‘138 patent. You may recall from my previous post that Blackboard was stalling in the USPTO because they thought their odds would be better in court. I haven’t read the opinion, but from D2L’s post, it appears to be pretty damaging to the patent in the U.S.—perhaps decisively so.  Now, that doesn’t mean that Blackboard has exhausted its legal options by any means. There’s the continuation patent, the trade board fight, and the Canadian patent suit, to name a few of the remaining loose ends. But this is, once again, an opportunity for Blackboard to put this brand-damaging fight behind them by quitting the field.

  • Please Re-subscribe to My Feed

    Update: Feedburner has been restored. For now. Nevertheless, I recommend that you subscribe to the orginal URL below. When Feedburner is working, your reader should automatically get forwarded. When it’s not, your feed should still work.

    Feedburner is screwed up, so if you are subscribing directly to that URL, you may not be getting updates in your RSS reader. Please resubscribe to https://eliterate.us/feed/.

    Sorry about that. Serves me right for relying on Google.

  • Great Little Conference in Upstate New York

    My buddy Patrick Masson is running his second annual 2-3-98 conference in Delhi, NY on August 6th and 7th. The first day is all about open source in higher education with a keynote by Bob Sutor, IBM’s Vice President of Open Source and Linux. The second day is a Moodlemoot. Last year’s conference was great—good presentations, interesting attendees, and good food. If you get a chance, you should go to this conference. It’s good—and good for you!

  • Sakai Boston 2009: The State of the Union

    I have a terrible backblog of posts that I will try to catch up on over the next few days, starting with my obligatory Sakai conference summary. Since last conference represented something of a watershed, I wasn’t sure if I would use the same categories of comment or come up with something new. I think I will stick with the same categories for at least one more year, with more emphasis on the Sakai 3 effort.

    Speaking of which, I am pleased to say that the Sakai 3 effort looks significantly stronger coming out of the conference than it did going in. The Boston conference may be remembered in retrospect as the moment when the community rallied the resources necessary to deliver a completely refactored Sakai. Time will tell.

    At any rate, on to the categories:

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  • A Promising Start

    Today, Blackboard Learn President Ray Henderson announced in his blog that Blackboard will be “ramping up its commitment” to standards support, starting with a pledge to support import and export of the IMS Common Cartridge standard. If Ray actually makes this happen, and happen in a timely manner, this would be a pretty big deal. It would mean that textbook publishers and faculty members alike would have an easier time sharing content across multiple systems and migrating from one system to another. To be clear, ANGEL had a consistent reputation for leading in the implementation of standards, while Blackboard frankly has been known to make promises that they haven’t kept in this area. So if Ray is able to deliver on this (and we can’t know until the code ships), it will be a very positive step hopefully a portent of more good things to come.

    Let’s put this in perspective. On the one hand, of the three tests I suggested for the “new” Blackboard, this was the one that I was most confident that Ray would pull off. He has been personally committed to Common Cartridge and has helped drive it forward. LIS will be a tougher test, and the patent suit will be a much tougher test.

    On the other hand, Ray has only been a Blackboard employee for a handful of weeks. I think this an excellent beginning.