e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Blackboard-Inc.

  • Patent Troll Sues Blackboard for Patent Infringement

    A company called Sampo IP, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of patent troll Marathon Patent Group, is suing Blackboard for patent infringement. The patents in question appear to be incredibly broad and have also been asserted against Salesforce as well as high-profile customers of collaboration companies Jive, Hyperoffice, and Rally, including Dell, Starbucks, Hewlett-Packard, Aetna, and about 15 others. I have not read the patents carefully, but they seem to be related to applying push notifications to allow one person in a group to send notifications or requests to other people in the group.

    Really.

    For those of you tempted to Schadenfreude because of sins of Blackboard’s past, that would be a mistake. Patent trolls like Marathon can come after any company and their customers. In this case, the Marathon patents appear to be broad enough to be important for countless educational applications and could be applied against a range of vendors and schools alike. At the moment, there are no reports of suits against education customers, and there are practical reasons why the patent trolls would be somewhat unlikely to file suit against such customers in the future. But there is no legal barrier. We should all be rooting for Blackboard and the other defendants in this case.

    Patents are a serious and ongoing threat to education. I had hoped during the Blackboard v. D2L fight that there would have been enough concern and awareness within the community to take some broader action, but that never happened. Unfortunately, there are very few tools to employ against patent trolls but what steps can be taken to minimize edupatent suits in general should be taken. Vendors in the space, who own substantial IP, should be encouraged by their customers to form a protective patent pool, for example. Patent pools are of little value against trolls, but at least it would reduce the likelihood of lawsuits by practicing companies. And since big technology players like Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle do substantial business in this space, perhaps they could be persuaded to contribute broader patents and create a substantial umbrella of protection. It is even possible the patent pool might yield prior art that could be effective in invalidating patents held by trolls. The sector could also unite to give companies like Marathon a PR black eye whenever they come after educational software. There are steps that could be taken, but educational leadership needs to step up to make it happen.

    You can find and read the legal complaint here.

     

  • Ray Henderson Update

    As e-Literate readers know, Ray Henderson is no longer President of Learning Platforms and is now serving on the company’s Board of Directors instead. This sort of thing naturally sets of all sorts of concerns and speculation. I had the good fortune to be able to speak with Ray today and have some details straight from the horse’s mouth.

    First, he made it clear that this change was initiated by him rather than the company, and it was for reasons unrelated to Blackboard politics or direction. A lot of people don’t know that Ray’s family still lives in Indianapolis; both his kids and his parents are half a country away when  he is at Blackboard headquarters in Washington D.C. Euphemisms aside, when he told me that he needed to spend more time with his family, I believed him. I also believed him when he told me that both Blackboard CEO Jay Bhatt and company owners Providence Equity Partners have been working hard to find alternative arrangements that would keep him involved with Blackboard in a meaningful way. Ray made it clear that he will continue to be a very active participant in Blackboard product planning, albeit now in a non-operational role. Boards on Private Equity-owned companies are different from those in publicly traded ones in that way; it is not abnormal for a member of the Board of a PE-owned company to be actively involved in decision-making on a focused and part-time basis.

    Ray used a lot of the first person plural pronoun—we—when talking about Blackboard’s work going forward. I didn’t get any less of a sense of enthusiasm for what the company is doing than I did when I spoke with him a few weeks ago. I believe he will continue to have meaningful involvement with the company. Whether the new executives being brought in will perform well remains to be seen, but if they have the benefit of Ray’s perspective and experience in the strange market that is higher education, then parts of his job that he will no longer be doing are easier for a seasoned technology executive from another industry to take on and do well. (In fact, in some cases those parts may be better managed by more of an operational specialist.) There’s no question that Ray’s reduced involvement is a loss for Blackboard, but it’s being mitigated and, most importantly, it’s not an indicator that executive management failed to recognize the substantial improvements in the company that have taken place on his watch.

    Beyond that, we can make some reasonable guesses about what Ray’s future might look like. In addition to a continuing part-time commitment to Blackboard, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him involved in due diligence evaluations for Providence when they consider acquiring ed tech companies. Nor would I be surprised to see him involved with other ed tech companies. He mentioned, for example, that he is on the Board of In The Telling. Ray is still a fairly young guy and seems as fired up as ever about education and entrepreneurialism. I doubt that he is going to fade away any time soon.

  • Blackboard Analytics Update

    In my last post, I promised that I would give an update specifically on the state of Blackboard’s learning analytics. Well, here you go. This is a summary of what I learned about their product from a chat with Mark Max, Blackboard’s VP of Learning Analytics and, to a lesser degree, with VP of User Experience Stephanie Weeks. I wrote about Blackboard’s Retention Center product some time ago. That product (or feature set, since it is free in Blackboard) directly competes with Desire2Learn’s Student Success System. This post is more broadly about their Analytics product suite, which is most directly analogous with Desire2Learn’s Insights product, although it is actually much, much broader in scope.

    The short version is this: Blackboard has very solid and reliable technology base from which they are building their learning analytics. It is easily the most mature platform among the LMS providers from that perspective. What they are a little short on is vision. In other words, they are pretty much the mirror image of Desire2Learn.

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  • Yup, Something (Good) Is Up at Blackboard

    When a company the size of Blackboard makes substantial organizational changes, it can be difficult to assess what is really going on. In the beginning, the stories tend to look similar. The old CEO…decides he wants to “spend more time with his family.” ((Or “hikes the Appalachian trail.” Pick your favorite euphemism.)) Well-known long-time employees leave the company en masse, some of their own volition and others not. It’s a common enough story trope, but it comes with two distinctly different endings. In one version, the company accelerates its downward spiral until it crashes spectacularly. In the other version, everybody is amazed at the company’s revitalization and they live happily ever after. It is nearly impossible to tell from the beginning of the story how it will end. All of the people leaving the company are, of course, unhappy and are likely to have negative opinions of what’s going on. And often they have valid criticisms, even in the stories that later come to happy endings. When an executive is trying to turn around a billion-dollar company quickly, a scalpel won’t do it. Some meat cleaver work is necessary. Collateral damage is inevitable even in the best of cases. So reports from former employees are interesting but don’t tell the whole story. Customers won’t see the results of the changes for a while, so there will be few clues there. In fact, they may see things get worse before they get better due to the chaos of the reorganization. And even the employees who are on the inside often don’t know what to think in the early stages.

    And so it has been with Blackboard. Up until recently, it has been very hard to tell which way the story will go. But I agree with Phil that we’re beginning to see early signs that we may get the happy ending here. I had an opportunity to visit Blackboard this week, and what I heard is very consistent with Phil’s recent experiences with them.

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  • BREAKING: Blackboard Uses “MOOC” in a Sentence

    This week we heard the news that Blackboard…um…they are…well…something about MOOCs. They like them, I think. Or something.

    Look, I get it. The company has realized that they need to take more direct action in response to the MOOC trend and, while they are not yet in position to make a specific product announcements, they want to let their customers know of their intention to do so. I don’t have a problem with that. But let’s please all get with the fact that the real story at the moment is Blackboard’s recognition that they need to have a MOOC strategy and not anything that they have…you know…actually done. At least, not anything that they have shown us yet. As far as I can tell, what Blackboard has announced is that they have an announcement. A newsworthy announcement for sure, but still just words. There is nothing MOOCish they have shown us this week that we haven’t already seen. It is hard to tell that from a casual read of most of the coverage.

    This is more a criticism of the ed tech press and blogosphere than it is of Blackboard. Transparency is good. I like it when a company’s executives tell us what they are thinking about and planning. There also was some substance to the announcement at a business level. We now know that Blackboard’s MOOC platform will be free and that it will not be CourseSites. That is new information. Sure, they could have been a little less hype-y about it—their press release does read like a product announcement—but really, they are well within bounds of normal corporate PR puffery. If we can’t read between the lines correctly, then shame on us.

    As Phil has pointed out, the collision course between MOOC providers and LMS providers is becoming a clear and significant trend, and Blackboard’s announcement is one data point confirming that trend. But at this point I have no idea what they think it means for them to play in the MOOC space, how serious they are about it, or whether their product entry will be interesting. We will have to wait and see what they do.

  • Desire2Learn’s Analytics Product Looks Very Good

    I’ve been super-busy with a consulting gig over the last few weeks and have fallen off the wagon with my blogging. This is one of the many reasons that I am grateful to have Phil as my prolific yet profound co-publisher and that we have attracted a group of terrific featured bloggers.

    Anyway, I thought I would get back to business with a long-overdue post about D2L’s learning analytics product, called “Insights.” There are several pieces to the product, but I’m going to focus on the component that they call the Student Success System. I have blogged from time to time on Purdue’s Course Signals project, (now commercialized in an offering from Elucian), as having set the bar for student retention analytics. More recently, I wrote about Blackboard’s Retention Center, which is clearly following in Purdue’s footsteps. My impression of Retention Center is that it is a reasonable Version 1 product that captures some but not all of the value of Course Signals.

    D2L’s Student Success System also follows in Purdue’s footsteps. But rather than simply playing catch-up, I would call it an incremental but meaningful improvement over Course Signals in most aspects. From what I can tell based on initial conversations with D2L about the product details, this now appears to be the system to beat. (I reserve the right to change my opinion based on implementation experiences from clients, which are particularly important for this product.)

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  • Blackboard’s New Early Warning Analytics Product

    A couple of weeks ago in my post about the different types of learning analytics, I described retention early warning systems thusly:

    Most people don’t think about early warning systems as being in the same category as adaptive analytics, but if you consider that “adaptive” really just means “adjusting to your personal needs,” then a system like Purdue’s Course Signals is, in fact, adaptive. It sees when a student is in danger of failing or dropping out and sends increasingly urgent and specific suggestions to that student. It does that without “knowing” anything about the content that the student is learning. Rather, it’s looking at things like recency of course login (Are you showing up for class?), discussion board posts (Are you participating in class?), on-time assignment delivery (Are you turning in your work?), and grade book scores (Is your work passing?), as well as longitudinal information that might indicate whether a student is at-risk coming into the class. What Purdue has found is that such a system can teach students metacognitive awareness of their progress and productive help-seeking behavior. It won’t help them learn the content better, but it will help them develop better learning skills.

    Well, last week, Ray Henderson announced Blackboard’s new Retention Center and described it as follows:

    The Retention Center gives critical insight on learning and activity gaps to instructors, within the LMS, that helps them quickly diagnose students that are falling behind. Pre-configured and automatic so they don’t have to hunt for it. No set-up: it automatically calls out students that are at risk while instructors still have time and space to do something about it. With the feature instructors can see:

    • Who’s logging in: this is a simple but powerful predictor of student success. Instructors see how long it’s been since students have logged in to the course and how many have been away for five days or more. And not by fishing through student profiles or reports but in an automatic view complete with red flags where they’re needed.
    • Whether they’re engaged: which students have had low levels of course activity, at 20 percent or below the average in the last week.
    • Whose grades are suffering: which students are currently trending at 25 percent or more below the course average so they can target extra help to where it’s most needed – even when it isn’t asked for.
    • Who has missed deadlines: instructors might know this anecdotally or on a case-by-case basis, but now they can get a real-time view of all students that have missed one or more deadline.

    Eerily similar, no? A number of years back, when I pressed Course Signals inventor John Campbell on which factors in the LMS are most highly predictive of student success across different courses, he named exactly these four. The only surprise here is that this isn’t a common analytics feature of every LMS and courseware platform on the market yet. Purdue proved that their value in helping at-risk students is high. I’m glad Blackboard is stepping up.

    The one piece that’s missing is a simple standard where an SIS or other longitudinal data system could pass an at-risk “credit score” to the early warning system to modify its sensitivity. If a student on the honor roll drops off the radar for a week, it’s less of a cause for concern that a student on academic probation (for example). I tried to push this idea for a standard at the IMS a few years back but got nowhere with it at the time. I hope that Blackboard will push for something like it now that they have a system to take the data.