e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Blackboard-Inc.

  • Blackboard vs. Moodle: North Carolina Community Colleges Assessment

    A while back, I wrote a post giving advice to small schools about selecting a new LMS. That post turned out to be reasonably popular. Today somebody sent me a link to a study done by the North Carolina Community College System comparing Blackboard to Moodle and, in particular, talking about the experience of some small colleges that had migrated from the former to the latter. The results are pretty consistent with the advice I gave.

    Here are the highlights, along with their correlations to my earlier points: (more…)

  • Blackboard Files Yet Another Lawsuit

    Best Lighter In The World!
    photo credit: michelle.irish

    You may recall that Blackboard purchased a patent in what appeared to be a fruitless attempt to countersue TechRadium, the company that sued them for patent infringement over their emergency warning system and that now is suing Twitter. It turns out that the purchase was not quite fruitless after all, because Blackboard used it to get some sort of cross-licensing agreement with TechRadium (with undisclosed terms) in return for TechRadium dropping the suit.

    Well, that apparently freed up some bandwidth on Blackboard’s legal team, and you know what they say about idle hands. Blackboard is now pre-emptively suing the individuals from whom they purchased the patent. Washington Business Journal has the scoop:

    (more…)

  • Trying To Follow Blackboard v Desire2Learn

    Bureaucracy illustration
    photo credit: Kongharald

    There’s a blog post update from Desire2Learn on the latest back and forth between them and Blackboard over the patents. (Remember, there’s more than one patent now.) Here’s the latest, as near as I can follow it:

    • On the original ‘138 patent suit in U.S. courts, there’s no word yet on any appeal by Blackboard of their recent defeat in the appeals court. There should be a final ruling soon from the USPTO. My guess is that Blackboard will let this suit die, even as they pursue other lines.
    • Relatedly, the action by the US International Trade Commission has been suspended pending the final results of the ‘138 litigation.
    • Meanwhile in Canada, litigation continues on the Canadian version of the original patent, as Blackboard continues to sue D2L there.
    • There’s some wrangling back and forth in the United States of Blackboard’s continuation patent. D2L pre-emptively filed for a declaratory judgment in Maryland in the hopes of heading off a suit on that patent. Blackboard has filed a motion to dismiss while simultaneously filing an infringement suit in the East District of Texas, also moving to consolidate it with another patent suit against D2L. Since I’m out of the business of reading patents, I’m not 100% sure what these are about, but as far as I know they are essentially extensions/revisions of the original patent.

    Oy.

  • Blackboard Settles with TechRadium

    Update: It turns out that TechRadium has also filed suit against Twitter. Oy. (Via Laura Gekeler.)

    Blackboard and TechRadium have apparently come to some sort of cross-licensing agreement on their emergency notification patents. This isn’t surprising. What we don’t know is whether anyone is paying anyone else as part of the cross-licensing agreement. Since Blackboard lost a ruling in their assertion of their patent against TechRadium, the more likely scenario would be that Blackboard is paying TechRadium as part of the deal. That’s just speculation, though. If anyone has any information on this, let me know.

  • The Financial Impact of the Patent Loss on Blackboard

    Financial Crisis / Finanzkrise
    photo credit: alles-schlumpf

    You may recall that Blackboard originally won a judgment of $3.3 million from Desire2Learn in their lawsuit. The ruling from the Court of Appeals means that Blackboar will probably have to return that money—plus interest—to Desire2Learn, as Blackboard indicates in an 8-K SEC filing today. The filing says, in part, that Blackboard “expects to record one-time charges of approximately $3.5 million related to the reversal of the district court judgment” of which $3.3 million is the money they have to return and the extra $200K is presumably interest.

    Now, here’s the thing. According to Blackboard’s 2008 10-K filing, their net income for that year was $2.8 million. If you subtract the $3.3 million in income that they are going to have to return to D2L from the $2.8 million net profit, it appears that Blackboard’s business actually lost $500K in 2008.

  • Another Victory for D2L, Another Opportunity for Blackboard

    Update: Patently-O blogger Dennis Crouch has posted a legal analysis of the ruling in which he concludes, “Defendant Desire2Learn wins a complete victory (after a few million in attorney fees).”

    Via Desire2Learn’s patent blog, we learn today that the U.S. Court of Appeals re-affirmed the invalidation of claims 1-35 and newly invalidated claims 36-38 of Blackboard’s original ‘138 patent. You may recall from my previous post that Blackboard was stalling in the USPTO because they thought their odds would be better in court. I haven’t read the opinion, but from D2L’s post, it appears to be pretty damaging to the patent in the U.S.—perhaps decisively so.  Now, that doesn’t mean that Blackboard has exhausted its legal options by any means. There’s the continuation patent, the trade board fight, and the Canadian patent suit, to name a few of the remaining loose ends. But this is, once again, an opportunity for Blackboard to put this brand-damaging fight behind them by quitting the field.

  • Blackboard Learn President Ray Henderson Starts a Blog

    This is good news. Former ANGELista and current Blackboard Learn President Ray Henderson has started a blog, where he says he will respond to conversations in the blogosphere and generally try to make Blackboard more transparent. He has also turned blog comments on, which he acknowledges is a small deal in the wider world but a non-trivial deal for a corporate blog. (This is true.) Maybe he’ll respond to my post on three tests for the”new” Blackboard.

    In marginally related news (under the heading of “openness”), I learned from Blackboard folks on Twitter that Blackboard’s API documentation is available without requiring a contract or login at their EduGarage site. FWIW.