e-Literate

Present is Prologue

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.

  • Burying the Bodies

    Following my last post regarding the nasty details of Blackboard’s behavior that came out during the discovery phase of the trial, we now see the following message up on the D2L blog:

    [Our Litigation Update post, originally posted here on October 24, has been temporarily removed, as late today we received a letter from Blackboard’s lawyers.

    Right now, our lawyers are quite busy preparing responses to various court filings by Blackboard – and those responses must be filed with the court soon. It’s more important for our lawyers to address the substantive issues, and not be sidetracked by Blackboard’s attempted distractions. So . . . it’s down, but we promise it’ll be back, in one form or another.

    We continue our pledge to be as transparent as possible. And now perhaps our readers can begin to appreciate how difficult that can be.]

    I don’t suppose anybody out there has a cached copy of the post….

  • 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 report back on the events and even had an employee pose as a university employee (with a fake email address) to gain competitive information.

    Classy.

    Also, Blackboard’s communications with its PR firm apparently say that, while the public story around the patent is that they are protecting their intellectual property, the “real” purpose was to “contain and control” D2L. So the goal is to distract the #2 vendor in the LMS space with a costly lawsuit. Not only has Blackboard known all along that their lawsuit could damage competition in the LMS space (as I and others have argued); they explicitly intended to damage competition, as the court documents apparently show. Judging by the amount of traffic I saw at the D2L booth this week here at EDUCAUSE, it looks like they failed.

    There’s more to the blog post, which is worth reading in its entirety (although it will probably make you sad and a little queasy.) D2L is preparing to file for a summary judgment, which is not surprising given that they have already gotten two thirds of the patent claims ruled invalid by two different judges. Sadly, since Blackboard’s motive is apparently to cost D2L as much money as possible regardless of their chances of winning in court, it seems virtually certain that Blackboard would file an appeal if they lose.

  • My Point Exactly

    Inside Higher Ed has coverage of a Congressional hearing on “The Role of Federally Funded Research in the University Patent System.” Here’s the money quote:

    Arti K. Rai, a professor of law at Duke University School of Law, agreed that there was no need for lawmakers to contemplate “a major overhaul of the current system” by which universities patent government-funded research. But she argued that the incentive the government gives universities to patent inventions may not be as appropriate in all fields of research, singling out information technology in particular as an area in which the federal interest may lie more in having discoveries hit the market as open source applications rather than as patented products.
    “At universities, there is sometimes too much emphasis on generating revenue,” Rai said. “Federal agencies and universities should show more sensitivity” to the idea that certain types of research might be better developed in non-commercial ways.

    As if to prove the point, it turns out that the hearing was called in the first place largely because Iowa State University wants to change the law that limits the total amount of money that federally funded research labs can collect on patent licensing, raising the limit from 5% of total budget to 15%.

    With encouragement from [Iowa Senator Charles] Grassley, Elizabeth Hoffman, executive vice president and provost at Iowa State, testified at Wednesday’s hearing that the 5 percent limitation unfairly affects small labs like Ames, while mammoth labs like Sandia National Laboratory, its partner on the solder research, never get close to the 5 percent threshold because their operating budgets are so much larger. She urged lawmakers to amend the Bayh-Dole Act — the 1980 law that set the guidelines for how nonprofit institutions have retained title to inventions resulting from federally funded research, filed patents and sold licensing rights to small businesses and corporations — by raising that threshold to 15 percent for “government-owned, contractor-operated” labs with annual budgets of under $40 million.

    “Any such limitation must not discriminate against only a portion of government-owned, contractor-operated, nonprofit entities,” she said. “Certainly, it should not have an inequitable impact on a single, small and successful national laboratory.”

    While Grassley endorsed Hoffman’s proposal — which was modeled on legislation that has been approved by the House of Representatives and introduced by Grassley in the Senate — Leahy, the only other senator to attend Wednesday’s hearing, expressed skepticism about it. If Congress raises the royalty threshold to 15 percent of a nonprofit’s budget instead of 5 percent, and Iowa State strikes gold with another invention, “won’t you want to change [the threshold] again?” Leahy asked.

    “I hope we’re so successful,” Hoffman said. “At this point in time, we would be happy with the 15 percent.”

    “At this point … I understand,” Leahy said with a smile.

  • Must-Read: Campbell and Oblinger on Academic Analytics

    John Campbell and Diana Oblinger have co-authored an EDUCAUSE paper on academic analytics that anyone with a practical interest in the topic should read. To begin with, it is a model of how to write a paper that addresses multiple institutional stakeholders across very different domains of expertise. It starts with a clear overview of the goals, breaks down the technical and logistical challenges into terms that non-experts can easily understand, lists out the likely questions, benefits, and risks for each stakeholder group, and presents high-level steps to prepare organizations that are looking to take on such an academic analytics project. And on the substance, it presents a balanced and comprehensive picture of the pros and cons of applying data mining techniques to student information in the service of improving educational outcomes.

    I particularly appricate the practical goals that the the authors set: increasing retention and graduation rates. I understand these may seem like pedestrian measures that don’t tell us how much students have learned and don’t necessarily improve the quality of the teaching either. But Campbell and Oblinger make a persuasive case that achieving these goals correlates with better outcomes for students, universities and society as a whole. Students who graduate tend to get better pay and better benefits and are more engaged in civic activities than their peers who don’t graduate, particularly in certain minority communities. Universities with higher percentages of students who graduate save more money per-student on recruiting, leaving more money to invest in improving the quality of education. And the society as a whole benefits from having more people who are not dependent on public support programs, who pay more in taxes, and who are more engaged in politics and other community-focused activities. On top of all this, we actually know how to measure retention and graduation rates. I’m concerned that many of the frantic efforts we on college campuses now to quantify student learning will turn out to be wastes of time and money because we don’t really know how to quantify learning in meaningful ways. Worse, if we delude ourselves about how much we’re able to measure, we may end up distorting the system of educational incentives in ways that actually harm students. This is exactly what has happened in K-12 in the United States with No Child Left Behind.

    The Campbell/Oblinger approach may not be sexy, but it’s practically and ethically sound while still managing to be ambitious.  This paper deserves your attention.

  • More on Software Licenses and Patents

    Since my last post, I’ve gotten some good feedback from folks who are knowledgeable about the issues. I hope to write about this topic in more detail after I’ve gotten back from EDUCAUSE and had some time to do a little more research, but in the meantime, I want to at least mention two of the points of criticism that I’ve received about the first post and that deserve some attention.

    First, one reader pointed out that the protection in the Apache clause that is weakened in the ECL is actually untested legally. Apache, as I understand it, puts the burden on the contributor to vet the IP with the institution they represent. If an employee of BigResearch U contributes code that that is covered by a patent held by BigResearch U, then there is an implied granting of a license covering that patent. In theory, this is good because the benefit of the doubt goes to the adoptee. It removes uncertainty about possible infringement.

    Except that maybe it doesn’t. I’m told that this implied license has not been tested and might not hold up in court. So, my reader argues, the additional ECL clause that I complained about simply makes explicit a legal wrinkle that may exist with the Apache license anyway. And by making it explicit, the license forces the community to look to other, better tested mechanisms.

    Which brings me to another major point brought up by a different reader. In my first post, he argues, I only talked about half the equation. I didn’t talk about the contributor agreement that goes along with the ECL and adds protections at the time of code contribution. That’s a fair criticism, particularly given that not all open source projects have this protection. (For example, I don’t think Moodle uses contributor agreements, although I’d appreciate input from anyone who knows for sure.) You can only evaluate the total patent protection provided by the ECL if you look at both the license and the contributor agreement together.

    As I wrote at the top of this post, I’ll be going to school on these topics over the coming weeks so that I can post more about them. Ironically, with all the coverage of edupatents I’ve done over the past year, the intersection with copyright licensing is just not something I’ve gotten into very much. I want to thank Chris Coppola, John Lewis, and all the folks who have been helping me privately to get up to speed on these issues. With a little luck, we’ll get some more public conversation going among the various knowledgeable folks in the community so that the larger community (including me) can broaden its understanding of this facet of the edupatent problem.

  • Backward University IP Polices Force Convoluted Sakai License

    A couple of weeks back, I was somewhat disturbed to read a post by Unicon’s John Lewis on the forthcoming Version 2.0 of the Educational Commons License (ECL), which is used by both the Sakai and the Kuali projects. While pointing out some significant improvements over the previous version, John notes correctly that the proliferation of open source licenses has a cost in terms of confusion in the marketplace and wonders why Sakai and Kuali can’t just use the Apache license upon which ECL is based. (After all, he observes, Moodle uses plain vanilla GPL.) So John did a little digging, and the only difference he could find between ECL and the Apache license was a clause on patents. Specifically, ECL weakens Apache’s patent protection clause.

    Seeing this, I contacted Chris Coppola, the Sakai board member who has been leading the charge on licensing issues. Chris was gracious enough to post more detail on the issue and help me get in contact with other folks who could help me make sure that I understand the legal implications correctly. Now, I happen to trust Chris’s judgment and motivation, and I am confident that the license would have come out the right way if he had final say. Unfortunately, he does not. Nor does anyone on the Sakai Foundation Board. As a result, ECL 2.0 is disturbingly flawed from the perspective of the edupatent crisis. (more…)

  • 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 posted the Objections that Blackboard filed to the Memorandum Opinion, as well as the Conditional Objections that we filed. Finally, on August 30, we posted the respective responses to the Objections and Conditional Objections.

    Today, we received notice that the Court issued its Order Denying Plaintiff’s Objections to Memorandum and Order Construing Claim Terms of the United States Patent No. 6,988,138. In the Order – as indicated by its title – the Court, by Judge Clark, denied Blackboard’s Objections. It denied as moot our Conditional Objections. We had requested that the Court consider our Objections only if it reversed the initial Memorandum Opinion.

    The bottom line: Two judges have now ruled Blackboard’s Patent Claims 1-35 are invalid because of indefiniteness of claim 1. Blackboard cannot claim infringement at trial of those claims.

    We mentioned before that we were pleased with Judge Hines’ decision. Suffice it to say we are now very pleased.