e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Blackboard

  • Brown University moving from Blackboard to Instructure’s Canvas LMS

    This is a guest post by Phil Hill from Delta Initiative, follow on Twitter  @PhilOnEdTech or his blog

    Brown University announced today that they will be moving from MyCourses, which is their branded version of Blackboard Campus Edition (formerly WebCT), to Instructure’s Canvas LMS.  They have already been piloting the Instructure system, and plan to fully move into the new system by Spring 2013.  The Computing and Information Services (CIS), aided by the Academic Technology Steering Committee, started the move to replace MyCourses after Blackboard announced it would end support for Campus Edition by October 2012.  Brown University had been on the WebCT / Blackboard system since 2002.

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  • Moodlerooms and the Cambridge Global Grid for Learning

    I know it’s been a little quiet here on e-Literate since I started gearing up for my (awesome) new job. Posts are likely to be sporadic for a while longer yet. But fear not, Dear Reader, for I have not forgotten you. I do have a backlog of posts that I intend to get to whenever I can squeeze out some time.

    I’m going to start with a topic that’s been in my queue for some time now. A while back, I wrote a post comparing Moodlerooms’ content deal with Cambridge University Press to Blackboard’s deal with McGraw Hill. It turns out that my assumptions about that deal were wrong. This matters for several reasons. First, I take pride in giving you accurate information, and in this case I didn’t. But beyond that, the nature of these deals can tell us a lot both about the shifting landscape of the relationships between LMS providers and publishers as well as the growth of new sustainability models for educational content. Both of these dynamics will be important to watch.

    Cambridge Global Grid for Learning (GGfL) is a new and somewhat experimental division of Cambridge University Press. They refer to themselves as “digital content brokers.” They aggregate content from about 40 different providers, such as Reuters and Corbis. They then hand curate the content, weeding out items that aren’t appropriate (their current target market is primary and secondary, although they have plans for higher and further education) and tag it in ways that will make it easier for teachers to find. The assets are pretty granular, so articles and images and videos rather than whole courses. But all items in the collection have been copyright cleared for use in courses. GGfL has plans to begin pulling OERs into their collection as well, thus providing a single portal for finding free and fee content.

    Pricing is relatively cheap. Right now, a high school can license their entire library for $1,795 USD. Their current model is one license for everything, but they eventually want to provide license options by collection or even by asset, and they want to link the content to metadata on learning outcomes. And contrary to my earlier reporting, their deal with Moodlerooms is quite different than Blackboard’s deal with McGraw Hill. According to Tom Murdock, Moodlerooms’ co-founder and Chief Architect, Moodlerooms customers will all have access to a basic GGfL subscription bundled with their Moodlerooms support contract, with the option to upgrade their GGfL contract for a fee. In return, GGfL will promote Moodlerooms to their customers who may be looking for an LMS. Unlike the Blackboard/MGH deal, which is essentially a portal deal in which MGH pays Blackboard for access to their customers, the Moodlerooms/GGfL deal is a cross-selling partnership. No money is actually changing hands between the two companies.

  • Details Are Trickling In

    The Waterloo Record has some more details (although there’s still a lot we don’t know):

    • Of the $3.1 million awarded to Bb, there were $2.5 million in lost profits and $630,000 in royalties. I don’t understand this yet, but it appears at first blush as though the forward-looking damages (i.e., royalties) might be limited.
    • The jury gave the judge the option of granting Bb an injunction. What this would mean is that D2L could no longer sell its product in the US while the injunction is in force. However, (a) Bb has not yet asked for that injunction, and (b) an analyst quoted in the article claims the judge would be unlikely to shut D2L down like that, especially if an appeal is pending.
    • Speaking of which, a quote by D2L’s CEO John Baker seems to indicate that D2L will appeal, although his statement is general enough that I wouldn’t call it definitive.
    • D2L thinks that they could develop a workaround for (what’s left of) the patent. (Remember, a good chunk of it was ruled invalid.) In other words, even if the patent holds, they think they can avoid infringing on it with minor modifications to their software.
    • At least one of D2L’s major customers (University of Wisconsin) went on record expressing concern that this suit would increase their licensing fees.

    I’m still trying to understand what all of this means. I don’t think anybody involved with this has changed their position or reduced their level of concern while this fight has dragged out, so the questions are really about what the legal ramifications are and what the various community members (including but not limited to D2L and BB) will do next.

    One thing that is clear, however, is that so far nobody has benefited financially from this. The $3.1 million Bb could receive in settlement probably won’t even cover their legal fees. Their stock is at the same level it was when they initiated the lawsuit and down over 40% from its highs. And obviously D2L has not come out richer either. Blackboard has a net loss of customers and has created tremendous negative press for itself while D2L now has at least one major customer who is willing to go on record saying that they are worried. (We know a lot less about the financial impact on D2L because it’s not a publicly traded company.)

    Tell me again how software patent assertion is going reward and enhance innovation in higher education?

  • Common Cartridge: e-Learning Made Easy

    This is a guest blog post by Jim Farmer, Coordinator, Scholarly Systems Group at Georgetown University and editor at the eReSS project, University of Hull.

    On September 4, 2007, a summer morning in Adelphi, Maryland, the workgroup, breakfast in hand, slowly assembled into in a large conference room at the University of Maryland, University College (UMUC). The tables were assembled in a U-shape with twelve places on each of the three sides. A digital projector on a stand in the center became the symbolic altar of digital technology. A large screen at the open side of the U illuminated knowledge with multicolored four-line outlines, charts, graphs, “screen captures” and illustrations.

    Heads down behind black or sliver laptop screens, eleven representatives of publishers, software suppliers, higher education organizations, and colleges and universities sat scattered among the conference tables. As part of the IMS Global Learning Consortium Common Cartridge Test Fest, they had been considering how this technology could be used to transfer digital content from publishers and authors to learning management systems for use by faculty and students.

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  • More on the Supreme Court Ruling

    Patently-O has up a PDF of the KSR v Teleflex ruling (which, by the way, was unanimous). Basically, the court says that, while the original precedents provide adequate guidance for obviousness, the Federal Circuit has interpreted that guidance too narrowly, arguing that “Rigid preventative rules that deny recourse to common sense are neither necessary under, nor consistent with, this Court’s case law.”
    Probably the passage in the opinion that resonates the most with the kinds of issues that come up in Bb v. D2L and are likely to come up in any similar edupatent disputes is the following:

    When there is a design need or market pressure to solve a problem and there are a finite number of identified, predictable solutions, a person of ordinary skill in the art has good reason to pursue the known options within his or her technical grasp. If this leads to the anticipated success, it is likely the product not of innovation but of ordinary skill and common sense.

    In other words, if a problem is fairly well known in the market, and if there are a fairly small number of fairly well-known methods for solving similar problems, you can’t get a patent just by being the first to apply the known solution to the known problem.

  • Supreme Court Strikes a Major Blow for Patent Reform

    This is huge. Today the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of KSR v. Teleflex, where the central issue was the meaning of “obviousness.” The reason that the word is important in patent law is because an innovation that is deemed “obvious” is not patentable. For example, Teleflex had combined two existing devices for truck gas petals and claimed that the combination was a new idea. KSR claimed that, even though nobody had combined the two devices in production at the time of Teleflex’s patent filing, it was fairly clear to “a practitioner with ordinary skill in the art” (i.e., Joe Truck Designer) that the two could be combined.

    This has direct bearing on Blackboard v. Desire2Learn. Before this ruling, the standard for proving obviousness was very high. As a result, finding, say, one pre-existing LMS that implemented half of the claims in Bb’s patent and another one that implemented the other half probably wouldn’t be enough. Unless you could find one system that implemented every one of the 44 claims, the case for invalidating the patent would be very difficult to make. This ruling should make D2L’s case easier.

    Just how much easier remains to be seen. I haven’t found any details on the ruling yet, so I don’t know what new guidance the court set.

    In related news, the court also ruled in favor of patent reform in Microsoft v. Alcatel-Lucent today. While this ruling is unlikely to have a direct impact on Bb v. D2L or on edupatents in general, we won’t know for sure until we see the written opinions. We should know more about both cases in the next couple of days.