e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: LMS & Learning Platforms

Everything you want to know about Learning Management Systems and whatever comes after them.

  • Advice for Small Schools on the LMS Selection Process

    I have volunteered to give my local community college some advice regarding some LMS migration decisions they have to make—if to migrate, when to migrate, how to migrate, and so on. In many ways, they’re a pretty typical school with some pretty typical problems, so I thought it might be worthwhile to write down some of this advice for others in similar situations. You might be one of those others if at least three of the following are true:

    • You work at a small school of 3,500 students or less.
    • You have a couple of dozen faculty “heroes” who are using the LMS heavily, a bunch more who just stick their syllabus in it, and a substantial number who don’t use it at all.
    • You offer a small number of distance learning and/or blended courses, but you don’t have any online degree programs or similar systematic collections of online classes.
    • Your school hasn’t migrated to a different LMS in a long, long time. Maybe ever.
    • Your LMS is hosted because you don’t have the IT staff to manage it internally.
    • Your “integration” between your Student Information System (SIS) and your LMS is to manually export CSV files from the SIS and upload them into the LMS.
    • You have been on Blackboard CE since it was WebCT CE version 4 or earlier.
    • You’re not sure if you can handle a migration to anything from either a staffing or a budgetary perspective.
    If so, then this advice is for you:

  • Keeping Work (LMS) and Play (Social Networks) Separate?

    MergingArts has a good audio interview with Inigral CEO Michael Staton. Michael makes some good points about the nature of sites like Facebook that raise questions about a number of academic social networking efforts. Essentially, he argues that people don’t want to mix their work and social spaces. There’s an almost ontological separation of the two. Unlike, say, chat, which isn’t a “space” per se, Facebook is a “place” where people hang out. They’ll go there to check out what’s happening when they have a little free time, like a dorm floor lounge or a favorite pub. This is very specifically not what people want to do with work spaces, and they don’t want them mixed.  Most people don’t go to the office to hang out in their spare time. So how can social networks enhance work-like endeavors such as formal education?

    Inigral’s answer is to carry the work relationships over into the social space. If we make friends with and hang out with the people we work with, we will probably feel better about our work, try harder to please our colleagues, be less afraid to ask for help from them, etc. Other efforts that focus on embedding social networking tools directly into an academic space like an LMS may have a tougher time of it. It’s not obvious that current-generation social networking tools will transfer to direct work tasks in the way that, say, presence awareness and chat do. There’s definitely some more thinking to be done in this area.

    On a related note, Inigral has posted a survey regarding how new media is being used in higher education. If you have something to contribute in this area, please go on over and participate.

  • Blackboard Now Suing USPTO

    Update: The Patently-O blog has a short post on this issue. There’s not a lot of new information here, but at least the reporting is done by actual patent lawyers.

    According to Desire2Learn’s patent blog, Blackboard has now filed suit against the USPTO (technically against the Director of the USPTO) to stop the inter partes re-exam from proceeding. Their argument is that the law states the USPTO cannot order a re-exam after a final judgment has been rendered by the courts upholding the patent. The point of the law is to prevent defendants from going to daddy (the USPTO) after mommy (the courts) say “no.” In the complaint, Blackboard argues that the USPTO is applying the law incorrectly by allowing a re-exam to go forward until all appeals are exhausted in the courts. Instead, Blackboard argues that the cutoff should be the judgment from the first court. Blackboard doesn’t cite any precedent for their argument, which strikes me as odd. I know that inter partes is relatively new, but I find it hard to believe that this has never been tested before.

    In their blog post, D2L raises two points in response to the suit. (D2L is not a party to this particular suit so, unless they file an amicus brief, they won’t have any say in court on this one.) First, they point out that Blackboard has previously said they welcomed the re-exam and expected it to strengthen their patent. While this point doesn’t have any legal implications, it does raise the question of how sincere Blackboard’s statements were in this regard. Clearly, they prefer their chances in the courts to their chances in the USPTO. The second point that D2L raises may have legal implications, although I don’t have the ability to properly assess that question as a non-lawyer. They note that Blackboard doesn’t mention in their filing that the USPTO had preliminarily invalidated all claims of the patent. Timing here may be important. If I recall correctly, the USPTO issued this ruling before the final judgment from the court. If so, that could complicate Blackboard’s argument significantly.

    Regardless of the legal merits, the fact that Blackboard continues to assert the patent heavily undermines their new marketing message of openness. I don’t understand why they still think this strategy is a winner.

  • Bizarre Chapter in Blackboard, Inc. v Desire2Learn

    There’s a really…um…weird story posted up on D2L’s patent blog about how the court allowed Blackboard to send somebody to poke around D2L’s conference. D2L knew about it, but it was supposed to be kept secret from the conference attendees.

    Very strange.

  • Blackboard's NG Strategy

    A few weeks back, I got an invitation from Matt Small to get a tour of Blackboard NG. Given all the rumors and speculation around it, I was obviously interested. I particularly wanted to know how much of it exists in code today and how much is vapor. So I took Matt up on his offer, and got a tour from him and John Fontaine. And while I didn’t quite get a full answer to the vaporware question, I did learn a lot of other interesting stuff about the platform and Blackboard’s strategy.

    (more…)

  • Blackboard, Inc., Loses Battle In EduPatent Venue Fight

    According to a blog entry on Desire2Learn’s Patent blog, the US Patent and Trademark Office has denied Blackboard’s request to suspend the re-examination process. Bb and D2L have been fighting over the venue for the next round of the battle, with Blackboard asking the USPTO not to complete the re-examination process (despite having earlier said that a re-exam would only make their patent stronger) and D2L asking the US Court of Appeals not to hear Blackboard’s case until the USPTO issues a final ruling. D2L has won the first of these two battles.

  • Desire2Learn Conference Summary

    I had fun at the D2L conference last week. As usual, I don’t have as much time as I would like to blog about the details, so this highlight post will have to do:

    • Conference attendance was good. There were about 550 attendees this year, up from about 400 last year.
    • I had chance to get a brief tour of D2L’s new ePortfolio product. It’s quite good, although I continue to be struck by how much effort all the LMS vendors have to put into writing content management capabilities that have been implemented 6,947 times in other systems already. In an ideal world, they would be able to call existing code and focus their efforts on building education-specific enhancements.
    • After my rant about conference bags, D2L made a point of giving out bags that can be re-used as cloth grocery sacks. Now that’s a company with values! I have already re-used my bag for this purpose and am happy to report that it works great.
    • D2L is also the only company I’m aware of that produced a theme album for their conference. Since it was in Memphis, they licensed well-known music that was appropriate for the venue and put it on a CD with the conference program.
    • The attendees seemed to be both well informed and realistic about the patent fight. Despite the risks, new customers are still signing on with D2L. (I even saw an old SUNY colleague from Suffolk County Community College, which just left Blackboard for D2L.)
    • I had a highly enjoyable if somewhat chaotic panel discussion with Barry Dahl, Stephen Downes, and Robbie Melton. It was I have taken to calling The Stephen Downes Experience, with the chat backchannel projected for the audience and speakers to see. I admit that I struggled to keep up with the conversation flow, especially when I was speaking, but the struggle was definitely worth it. I will say, though, that it’s important to set expecations with the audience. Some attendees told me they were not expecting a Web 2.0 social experiment and were a little disappointed that they didn’t get a more traditional panel discussion.
    • I missed the D2L Version 8.3 product launch, but I’m told that their integration story is a big part of it and that they highlighted work that they’ve been doing with my team at Oracle on implementing IMS Enterprise Services v2 (now called Learning Information Services). I’ll have much more to say about that Real Soon Now, when we release our own product.
    • Good news: I managed to avoid spilling beer on Barry Dahl this time. Bad news: That’s partly because I didn’t drink any beer this time.