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LMS & Learning Platforms
Everything you want to know about Learning Management Systems and whatever comes after them.
Sakai Newport 2007: The State of the Union
Six months ago, following the Amsterdam conference, I was highly encouraged by some of the signs of progress I was seeing in the Sakai community. In an exchange with a commenter on that post, I wrote, The question I’m trying to answer in this blog post is, given these sorts of concerns, how much progress […]
Desire2Learn Competencies and Rubrics: Part I
Anyone who has been awake in higher education in the last couple of years knows that there is a lot of attention on outcomes and assessment lately (although with distinctly different emphases in the U.S. and the E.U.). A natural consequence of this attention is that the various LMS platform developers are adding capabilities that […]
Sakai Foundation Board Platform: Vision for the Technology
I am honored to announce that I have been nominated to the Sakai Foundation Board by current Board member Ian Dolphin on behalf of the University of Hull. Over the next few weeks between now and the election, I’m going to outline my platform in series of blog posts, starting with this one about the […]
Blackboard Is Losing Customers, but What Does It Mean?
After Blackboard’s recent earnings announcement and conference call, Jim Farmer and I had a chat about what we learned. One thing that struck us both was that Blackboard’s total number of LMS license customers is declining. Jim, being handy with Excel, put this chart together: There is a clear long-term trend toward reduced number of […]
Blackboard's Dirty Laundry Comes Out in Patent Trial
Desire2Learn has published some fairly tawdry details that have emerged during the discovery phase of the patent trial. (During discovery, both sides can demand to see relevant internal documents from the other side. Nasty confidential details can get exposed.) For one thing, Blackboard apparently sponsored a spy to go to the D2L user conference and […]
Court Re-affirms Invalidation of First 35 Blackboard Patent Claims
This just in from the D2L patent blog: On August 4, we announced that Magistrate Judge Hines had issued his Memorandum Opinion Construing Claim Terms of the United States Patent No. 6,988,138 (the “Markman” decision). We noted that the decision was subject to procedural appeal. The decision rendered claims 1-35 invalid. On August 22, we […]