Regular e-Literate readers know that I am a big booster of the IMS Learning Information Services specification. (For an overview of the basics of the specification, see my posts here, here, and here.) There has been a lot of news recently about adoption, and I thought it would be worthwhile to pull together a unified post of who is doing what. I’m going to divide vendors and projects into a few different categories based on their released code, public commitments, etc.
Tag: Blackboard-Inc.
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Desire2Learn Delivers IMS Basic Learning Tools Interoperability (BLTI) Support
In other IMS news, Desire2Learn has announced that they are the first LMS provider to support BLTI, a specification designed to support plugging third-party tools into an LMS. According to the press release, here’s what’s included:
- Management interfaces to define integrations to external learning tools (Tool Providers) and to create links
- New Quicklink type to allow links to Tool Providers to be easily incorporated throughout Desire2Learn courses
- Links to external learning tools that can send user, organization, and course context information for a personalized experience in the tool; single-sign-on to learning tools is supported through an oAuth framework using a key/secret shared between the external learning tool and the configured link in Learning Environment
- Management tools to configure mapping from Desire2Learn roles to IMS roles, and from Desire2Learn org unit types to IMS context types
A couple of other platforms are following D2L on this road.
- Sakai has a pre-alpha version which is publicly available for testing, and which has been proposed for eventual inclusion in the next Sakai release (2.7).
- A prototype third-party building block is available for Blackboard through OSCELOT.
This is just the work that’s visible to the public. As is often the case with these things, (a) more work is going on behind the scenes, but (b) you should demand to see working code and a commitment to a supported release within a defined time frame before taking any statements of support by a vendor or project too seriously.
Kudos to Desire2Learn for taking the lead here.
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Fair Enough
I received the following email from George Kroner, a developer who works for Blackboard:
I wanted to point out one issue I take with your recent blog post. OSCELOT, the open source organization that you mention, is not maintained by Blackboard. Rather, OSCELOT is a separate, independent organization that was founded by a number of Blackboard clients and now hosts 300 developers who contribute to over 100 different open source educational tools. Specifically, their mission is to support the creation of interoperable learning tools that span multiple platforms. Yes, it is true that we sometimes sponsor their events – just like we sponsor the events of a number of other organizations. Yes, it is true that a lot of the tools they have to offer plug into Blackboard’s LMSs, but this is due to the history of the organization. Every organization has to start somewhere. You’ll notice some tools are actually webapps or binary executables that aren’t connected to Blackboard in any way.
The OSCELOT gang is a bunch of fun, bright individuals who have a true passion for advancing education with open source tools, apps, simulators, etc. Many of them are instructional designers, librarians, sysadmins, and individuals only tangentially connected to Blackboard who contribute their own non-work time to this organization. Personally, I think you are doing them a huge disservice by knocking their work in this way. Their vision is much bigger than being just a Blackboard development shop. As for me, I’m quite proud of what they do – just as you are proud of the work going on in the Sakai community. In fact, some of the contributors to OSCELOT also contribute to Sakai. Hopefully as everyone commits to and implements the open standards that we both believe in, we’ll see collaborative opportunities through organizations such as OSCELOT that will afford us the opportunity to more effectively move forward together.
It certainly was not my intention to denigrate the OSCELOT contributors in any way, and I appreciate George’s note to correct the record regarding the organization.
That said, none of this changes my main point about Blackboard, Inc.’s opportunistic touting of the value of open source when it is developed for their platform while simultaneously attacking it with falsehoods and poor argumentation when it competes with their offerings.
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Blackboard's Response to Open Source: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt
Blackboard has not been having a good time in the state of North Carolina. As I noted recently, the University of North Carolina (a Blackboard customer) reported highly favorable results of their pilot study of Sakai, with an outcome of further investigation into Sakai as a full replacement of Blackboard as their primary LMS. It turns out that this was following on the heels of a similar study done by the North Carolina Community College system favorably comparing Moodle to Blackboard. The details were different but some of the underlying dynamics were the same: the open source system in each case was found to be functionally equivalent to Blackboard for all practical purposes, the open source platforms did roughly as well as Blackboard (in the Moodle evaluation) or better than Blackboard (in the Sakai case) in usability evaluations, and Blackboard was deemed to be expensive relative to the alternatives.
What’s interesting in the Moodle evaluation is that Blackboard wrote a response, which was published by the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS). And the heart of the response is a swipe at open source with many claims that are…factually and logically questionable.
Unfortunately, the PDF has some sort of copy protection on it that prevents copy/paste. (I thought Blackboard was on an openness kick….) So I have laboriously retyped the section of the response entitled “Top Five Risks to Consider When Evaluating Open Source” so that we can weigh the strengths of Blackboard’s arguments together. I apologize for any mistranscriptions.
Here we go:
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The Cost of the Blackboard Patent Suit (and Who Pays It)
An e-Literate reader comments on my post about Blackboard owing Desire2Learn money:
The amount [that Blackboard will have to pay Desire2Learn, including the original award plus interest] will probably be over $3.8M USD from my rough estimates which is higher than the expected writedown Blackboard took. This should result in additional expenses that will have to be recorded by BBBB.
What’s also interesting is that Blackboard’s top execs made record bonuses before this writedown, at the same time they took away any salary increases and the 401K plans for the regular staff. I think that is the bigger story.
Blackboard reported a $2.8 million net profit in 2008. The $3.3 million write down brings them to a $500,000 loss. An additional estimated write-down of another half a million would bring them to a $1 million loss for 2008. In the same year, Michael Chasen received $545,833 in salary, $663,039 in bonus, $1,833,560 in stock options, $80,466 in shares of restricted stock, and $14,911 in “other compensation”, for total compensation that was valued at $3,137,809. Matt Small received $370,833 in salary, $166,544 in bonus, $722,966 in stock options, $40,233 in shares of restricted stock, and $17,372 in “other compensation”, for a total compensation of $1,317,958. Coincidentally, if you add up the 2008 bonuses for the five Blackboard executives listed in the company’s proxy statement, the total is $1,074,127—almost exactly what the company’s final adjusted net loss for 2008 may turn out to be.
Moving forward, Blackboard is apparently going to incur the additional expense of an attempt to appeal their failed patent suit to the Supreme Court, even though Matt Small is on record saying that it is highly unlikely they will succeed.
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Blackboard Owes Desire2Learn Over Three Million Dollars
(cc) photo credit: zolierdos I’m a little late on this one, but late last week the U.S. Court of Appeals denied Blackboard’s rehearing petition. Their only recourse now would be to appeal to the United States Supreme Court and hope that the court miraculously decides to hear their case. As a result, Blackboard will have to return roughly $3.3 million to Desire2Learn, wiping out 100% of the company’s earnings for 2008.
This does not mean that the litigation is over. Blackboard is still suing D2L in Canada for infringement of the original patent, and the company has been granted continuation patents (basically revised versions of the original patents) that they could assert.
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UNC's Sakai Evaluation Results
The University of North Carolina, a current Blackboard customer that is evaluating Sakai, just published a very interesting report of their findings so far. Among other things, it’s a good model for schools that want to do a thorough evaluation of a platform and have the resources (i.e., staff and time) to do it right. Here’s the excerpt of it that UNC chose to publish in their blog post announcing its release:
The findings of the pilot are positive, leading the Sakai Action Group to recommend ITS continue to fund Sakai for the 2009-2010 academic year, implement student information system (SIS) integration, when possible, expand the number of participants using Sakai, and research a possible future migration path.
The whole report is worth reading, but here are some of the highlights from my perspective:
- There are relatively few comments from faculty or students about functionality gaps in one direction or the other. To the contrary, the platforms were seen by many as being functionally equivalent. LMS’s have reached that “good enough” stage where they are starting to commoditize.
- There were two exceptions to the “equivalent functionality” rule. First, a number of users seemed to appreciate Sakai’s more flexible permissions structure. I have written about the under-appreciated importance of groups and permissions on many occasions. The second was the ability to use Sakai for non-course work groups, projects, communities, etc. Blackboard has this capability, but you have to pay extra and license it separately. Frankly, I don’t know how they get away with it. No other LMS that I know of charges you twice for what is 95% the same functionality.
- There were lots of comments on usability, and almost all of them broke in Sakai’s favor. First of all, this confirms the point that I’ve made a few times here that usability is often more important than functionality. From UNC’s data, it looks like faculty and students were able to do more with Sakai while making fewer calls to the help desk. Which brings me to the other part of this. Three years ago, Sakai’s usability was bad to the point of being embarrassing. But it absolutely kicked Blackboard’s butt in UNC’s review. This is strong affirmation of the huge strides the Sakai community has made in usability.
Good stuff.