I’ll be attending Thanos Partners’ OPEN Forum for Higher Education Executives next week. If anybody wants to catch up with me there, you can ping me or just find me at the session.
Category: Ed Tech
The “Ed Tech” category includes posts about educational technology products themselves, including LMSs and other learning platforms, adaptive learning and other digital curricular materials products, learning analytics, and educational apps of all types. It also includes technical aspects of ed tech products, especially interoperability.
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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.
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Learning to Like Twitter
In the recent past, I wrote about not really getting Twitter. Since then, I have to say that it has grown on me. I am not and never will be an addict. But it does add a nice social dimension to my day, particularly given that I work alone from my home office a lot of the time. It lets me feel a little more connected with friends and colleagues, and does so without taking up unacceptable amounts of time. So, for my former fellow Twitter skeptics, I have a few suggestions for how to get the most out of it:
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CSU Picks Moodle and ANGEL
Cal State University, with its 23 campuses and 250,000 students, has signed contracts with Moodlerooms and ANGEL, according to Campus Technology. (I’ve known this was in the works for some time now, but I guess it just went official.) These are statewide pricing contracts; individual campuses still get to choose whatever system they choose. Still, it’s a big deal for both vendors, as well as for the Moodle community. Word on the street is that both Moodle and ANGEL got particularly high marks because of their strong accessibility; California has strict accessibility laws and regulations.
I have been blogging a fair bit about the IMS LIS standard. I want to point out that LIS makes this sort of adoption more meaningful. Generally speaking, individual campuses tend to be reluctant to move off of whatever they have because of high migration costs. With LIS, one substantial portion of that migration cost—namely, integration—is very substantially reduced. It also becomes much more economically feasible for campuses to run more than one of these systems at the same time. Interoperability standards may not be thrilling from a pedagogical perspective, but if they lower the barriers for IT staff to provide alternatives to faculty and students then they have a strong impact on teaching and learning at the end of the day.
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LETSI: HR-XML Consortium Seeks Cross-Domain Interoperability
This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.
“Learning, education, and HR standards communities have very little to show in terms of cross-domain standards interoperability and convergence despite significant investments over a period of more than a decade.” Chuck Allen, Executive Director of the HR-XML Consortium, made this assessment of standards that cross the boundaries of standards-setting bodies in a “White Paper” submitted to the LETSI SCORM 2.0 Workshop held October 15-17, 2008 in Pensacola, Florida. As learning systems exchange data with various administrative, ERP and human resources systems, standards are needed to avoid expensive continuous redundant software maintenance.
Although Allen didn’t cite historical opportunities, during development of the HR-XML resume specification, the Consortium requested assistance from higher education in recording competencies and the description of academic work such as publications. Higher education did not respond.
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Why the Retention Early Warning Critics Are Wrong
One criticism I consistently hear when talking about retention early warning systems is that they may provide value for the university but mostly don’t for the student. The university benefits by retaining the student because it gets more tuition. But, the argument goes, the student may have all kinds of valid reasons for dropping out of a course or a program. Furthermore, retention and learning have no necessary relationship, they argue. You can stay in school and still not get anything of value out of it. The (usually implicit) conclusion from these arguments is that retention systems are nothing more Big Brother tools for squeezing more money out of hapless students.
There’s something a little odd about this argument even on the face of it. No early warning system is forcing students to stay in school. The students must somehow be complicit in any impact on retention. Even so, I have never been one to dismiss it out-of-hand. However, after spending a half day in an EDUCAUSE seminar by John Campbell and Kim Arnold about Purdue’s early warning system, I can say with great confidence that the critics are missing the boat—at least with respect to Purdue’s approach, and probably in general.