e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Blackboard-Inc.

  • Wikipedia Page on History of the VLE Gathers Prior Art Info

    As you may know, patents can be invalidated if one can demonstrate that the claimed invention was in public use or described in a published document prior to the date of the patent filing. This evidence is called “prior art.” A few of us decided that we should begin documenting prior art–not just on the Blackboard patent, but on educational technologies in general. We debated a bit about where to house the effort. I ended up creating a one-sentence stub in wikipedia on Sunday (two days ago). A couple of people mentioned it on a couple of listservs, but we didn’t advertise it widely. And yet, lo and behold, two days later we have a pretty good document that was generated by a variety of people. This morning, a colleague whom I had not spoken to about the page emailed me to point me to it and suggested that I contribute. And tonight, Stephen posted about it, which means the cat is out of the bag for sure.

    The internet is a wonderful thing.

    At any rate, if you have any important data to add to the page about the history of VLE development, please do so. I imagine we will eventually spawn a family of pages about related technologies (whiteboards, LCMS’s, etc.). This would be a Good Thing To Do even if the Blackboard patent fight didn’t exist.

  • Blackboard Sues Desire2Learn for Patent Infringement

    You can see the filing here.

    That didn’t take long.

  • Survey Gives Proprietary AND Open Source VLE Developers Cause to Worry

    IM+M (Jim Farmer’s company) has published some survey data on VLE adoption by higher ed institutions in the UK from 2001 to 2005. Interestingly, the data looks bad for almost everyone. There’s some limited good news for Moodle and Boddington, but as institutions are voting with their feet, the general sentiment seems to be “A pox on all your houses.” (more…)

  • Blackboard wins clearance to buy WebCT

    Looks like the Blackboard/WebCT merger has been approved:

    FEB. 6 10:36 A.M. ET Blackboard Inc., an education software developer, said Monday it received clearance from the Department of Justice to buy WebCT Inc., a rival provider of Internet learning software, and expects to close the deal in March or April.

    Up until now, I believe the two companies have been legally bound not to work together too closely or make public statements about detailed post-merger plans. I’m not sure if the gag comes off immediately upon Justice Department approval or only after the merger has been officially consumated, but either way we should be hearing more detailed plans through official channels relatively soon now.

    This should be interesting.

  • More Thoughts About Blackboard: "The fault, dear Brutus…"

    Jim Farmer’s financial analysis of Blackboard certainly has gotten a lot of attention–and for good reason. To start with, that ~$250K cost per sale is a truly eye-popping number. But upon further reflection, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the most important part of the story that Jim tells. Here is the most important part:

    Software suppliers do not spend on sales and marketing not considered ?necessary.? The costs are driven by customer demands and customer expectations. Enterprise procurements can be very expensive for software suppliers. Requiring extensive proposal responses, large-scale demonstrations using extensive prescribed scripts, and presentations with experts drawn throughout the company are required by customers as a condition of doing business; this is costly.

    Blackboard spends a ton of money to acquire each new customer because they have to. It’s the only way they can successfully run the gauntlet of the higher education sales process often enough to make money. The procurement process itself is broken. It requires proprietary vendors to spend between a quarter and a third of their revenue on sales–money that could be better spent on product development or discounts to customers. It blocks Open Source support vendors that don’t have armies of salespeople from participating in many RFP’s. And, according to Jim’s analysis, it results in a net price increase of as much as 26% for the customers. Everybody loses.

    The good news is that this problem is fixable.

    (more…)

  • Blackboard by the Numbers

    Update: Welcome, Chronicle readers. Since it wasn’t made clear in the Chronicle’s reference, I’d like to point out that the paper I’m quoting was written by Jim Farmer, who is the Coordinator of Georgetown University’s new Interoperability Center, formerly the Sakai SEPP Community Liaison and project administrator for the uPortal project. Jim has pretty impressive credentials across the board, including having served as the CIO for the Cal State University system. You can find his full bio here.

    Sorry I’ve been incommunicado for a while. There’s been lots of stuff going on, both professionally and personally (including a new grandbaby).

    Anyway, I’m going to make it up to you with a special treat. Jim Farmer has a fantastic analysis of how much it costs Blackboard to make a sale, what that means to their overall business model, and how that compares to the cost-per-sale of a commercially marketed open source software product and the cost for community-building the Open Source uPortal project. Some of it may be slow going if you’re not familiar with financial analysis, so I’m going to unpack a few of the good parts and speculate a bit on the implications.

    (more…)

  • Blackboard's WebCT Deal Spurs Antitrust Questioning

    According to the Washington Post, the Justice Department is looking into the possibility that the Blackboard/WebCT merger might violate antitrust laws. Given that the combined company would own 80-90% of the LMS market, it’s no real surprise. This will be interesting to watch.

    (Found via Online Learning Update.)