e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: D2L

  • Educational Software Patents: A Call to Vendors

    A number of people responding to the Chronicle’s article on the Elsevier patent asked me to write something about it. For those of you who haven’t been following ed tech for at least a decade or just haven’t been following e-Literate for that long, the main reason that people who weren’t my mom started reading this blog in significant numbers was the work I did explaining the patent that Blackboard was asserting against D2L, the mechanics and progress of the lawsuit and, more generally, how software patents work and why they are bad for ed tech. So I felt obliged to respond to requests for my thoughts regarding the Elsevier patent. I published them in my reaction in our column at the Chronicle. Since it’s behind their pay wall, I’ll briefly summarize the points here:

    • For a variety of reasons related to the legal complexities of software patents, we can’t really know the legal scope of Elsevier’s patent unless and until it goes to trial.
    • Trying to figure out what the patent means before is not only hard but could put you and your employer at increased legal risk, so read it at your own peril. Seriously.
    • Elsevier’s public statements indicate that they might be willing to assert it (i.e., sue somebody for infringement of it).
    • Whatever your general opinion of software patents may be, offensive use of them in education is really bad because the companies are too small and the profit margins too thin to support that kind of legal activity (in contrast to, say, the mobile phone and pharmaceutical industries). Offensive use of software patents could destroy progress and innovation in educational software.
    • Inevitably, more and more leaders of education-related companies—including Elsevier’s current CEO—were not around during the Blackboard patent suit and have not seen the massive brand damage that Blackboard did to itself in the process. The danger of patent assertion is increasing because the deterrent is fading.
    • There are few legal tools available to deter patent assertion. The best tool universities have is economic.

    I ended by calling for leaders of educational institutions to gather together and sign a pledge that they would not procure products from companies that assert education-related software patents. But I don’t have a lot of hope that it will happen. After all, if they weren’t sufficiently motivated to take collective action during and immediately after the Blackboard suit, why would they be now? This doesn’t mean that they will fail to act in the face of an actual patent suit. Schools voted with their feet in response to Blackboard. In fact, the brand damage was so profound that I believe it is impacting the company’s sales to this day, even though the CEO during the suit left a long time ago and the legal architect of the suit has left the company as well. There will be consequences for companies that assert educational software patents. But there is no visible deterrent for companies that do not remember Blackboard v. Desire2Learn. Blackboard spent a lot of money and retarded the LMS market for a long time before they finally admitted defeat.

    This is an area where vendors could show leadership. As I mentioned in the piece, the fact that educational software patents exist means that there is strong motivation for companies to file for patents that they can use in defensive counter-suits, even if they have no plans to ever use them offensively. D2L didn’t have any patents at the time of the lawsuit, but I would be shocked if they didn’t have any today for exactly this reason.

    The right thing for vendors to do here is to create what’s known as a patent pool. Any patent owner who contributes to the pool pledges to only use that patent for defensive counter-suits. In return, the owner also gets to use any other patents in the pool for defensive purposes. The rules would be a little more complex to work out than a typical patent pool because there is no single well-defined software category or product that they are protecting (like Linux or video streaming technologies, for example). But it could be done. And it would only take two or three players to get it rolling. The most obvious candidate to lead this is Blackboard. They have a strong need to define themselves as “not your father’s Blackboard” and probably still have patents. If they could get Pearson, McGraw Hill Education, or D2L at the table and hammer out the structure for a patent pool, then they could begin to invite other players in.

    In an era where algorithms are increasingly important differentiators in educational software, we can expect patents to proliferate and the temptation to assert them to grow accordingly. We really need corporate leaders to step up and demonstrate their moral commitment to protecting education from this growing threat. I’d love to see this happen and would love to help make it happen.

    Any takers?

  • Quick Update On LMS Subscription Service

    Our LMS Subscription Service has been out for more than three months now, and we’d like to give a quick update(see this page for details, pricing, online signup; or sign up on right column of blog site for listserv to find out more information).

    The e–Literate Big Picture subscription services are designed to help you track the changing landscape in important educational technology topics and make sure that the decisions you make today will still make sense tomorrow.

    Based on our joint research with LISTedTECH and market analysis, we just published an article in TechCrunch titled “The LMS Market Glacier Is Melting”. (more…)

  • Changes at D2L: A second-hand view from users conference

    As I have described to several executives at D2L, there is an interesting gap between the progress we have seen with the company’s product improvements and the reaction we hear from many of their customers. With the tighter integration with LeaP and the improved usability, particularly in content authoring, I would have expected to hear more customers react to the changes. But when talking directly to many of the institutions using the Brightspace LMS, staff describe D2L as if the company and product line had not changed in several years. What is not clear is whether this gap is due the company missing the mark (and my judgement of improvements not aligning with what colleges and universities want) or whether there is just a lag where it will take time for most customers to believe in and take advantage the new product designs and features.

    2016 has been an eventful year for D2L. COO Cheryl Ainoa, a longtime veteran of Yahoo! and most recently Intuit, joined the company in April. Although this move was not advertised through press releases or even blog posts, I believe this is a significant change to how the company operates. This is not the first time that D2L has reached outside the industry for a top executive, as they employed Dennis Kavelman from RIM / Blackberry as COO from 2012 – 2014 (the period where D2L raised $165 million in two mammoth funding rounds). But I have heard that the addition of Ainoa has already seen results internally. And in the ‘keeping work in perspective’ category, founder and CEO John Baker and his wife had their first child right before the Fusion Users Conference. (more…)

  • MarketsandMarkets: Getting the LMS market wrong

    New LMS market analysis with a leader list that includes a company that is retiring its LMS and ignores the company who has a 5x lead in new implementations for its core market? Sign me up.

    Over the next week or two, we plan several posts at e-Literate based on the various LMS users conferences we recently attended. We already covered Sakai and Blackboard, and we will have commentary on Moodle, Schoology, D2L, and Canvas soon. But before we do so, I wanted to call out the recent analysis by MarketsandMarkets, which requires some commentary as it is leading to some media coverage that could misinform those trying to understand the LMS market. The headline of their recent market report:

    Learning Management System (LMS) Market Worth 15.72 Billion USD by 2021

    According to a new market research report, “Learning Management System Market by Application, Delivery Mode (Distance Learning and Instructor-Led Training), Deployment (On-Premises and Cloud), User Type (Academic and Corporate), Vertical, and Region – Global Forecast to 2021”, published by MarketsandMarkets, the LMS market size is expected to grow from USD 5.22 Billion in 2016 to USD 15.72 Billion by 2021, at a CAGR of 24.7%.

    (more…)

  • Previous LMS For Schools Moving to Canvas in US and Canada

    During the most recent quarterly earnings call for Instructure, an analyst asked an interesting question (despite starting off from the Chris Farley Show format).

    Corey Greendale (First Analysis Securities Corporation):  Awesome. A couple of other things on the, primarily on the Higher Ed space but I guess on education space, there’s a whole lot of couple questions about the competitive environment. When you’re and I don’t know if you will ever get into this level of granularity but when you got competitive wins against the Blackboard, are those predominantly from legacy ANGEL, are you getting those wins as much from Learn as well.

    Josh Coates (CEO of Instructure):  A lot of them are from Learn. Most, you know I don’t have the stats right off the top of my head. A lot of the ANGEL and WebCT stuff is been mopped up in the previous years and so, what’s left the majority of what’s left is Learn and our win rate against Blackboard it continues to be incredibly high, not just domestically but internationally as well.

    In fact, I think most of three out of the four international schools that we announced in this earnings where Blackboard Learn replacements, so yes Learn’s getting it.

    The question gets to the issue of whether Canvas is just picking up higher education clients coming off of discontinued LMSs (Angel, WebCT, etc) or if they are picking up clients from ongoing platforms such as Blackboard Learn. Beyond the obvious interest of investors and other ed tech vendors, this issue in general affects higher education institutions going through a vendor selection – for the system in consideration, are there many other schools considering the same migration path?

    Thanks to the work we’ve been doing with LISTedTECH and our new subscription service, we can answer this question in a little more detail. One of the charts we share shows higher education migrations over the past five years in the US and Canada. (more…)

  • Wheaton College Selects Schoology As New LMS In Surprise Decision

    Schoology, a social cloud-based LMS known mostly used in the K-12 market, has set its sights on expanding into the higher education market using their recent $32 million funding round. Last January, Colorado State University’s Global Campus selected Schoology to replace Blackboard Learn, yet the market impact of this decision was limited, partially due to the non-traditional nature of the online-only campus. What Schoology has needed to gain more market credibility and awareness is a second set of higher ed institutions selecting Schoology in an open competition. Enter Wheaton College in Illinois, which recently selected Schoology as its new LMS. This is the most significant new selection that I have seen.

    I interviewed CIO Wendy Woodward from Wheaton to find out more on the nature of this decision. For context, Woodward became Wheaton’s CIO in January 2015, moving from her previous job at Northwestern University. Based on her listening tour to understand campus needs, the decision to replace the LMS was listed near the top of the list. Given Northwestern’s recent move to Canvas, Woodward related that there was a common assumption that Wheaton would do the same. The faculty committee fully went through the evaluation process, however, and ended up selecting Schoology after inviting responses from 10 different solutions. The campus has already begun pilots and plans to be fully migrated to the new system by Fall 2016. (more…)

  • LearningStudio and OpenClass End-Of-Life: Pearson is getting out of LMS market

    Pearson has notified customers that LearningStudio will be shut down as a standalone LMS over the next 2-3 years. Created from the Pearson acquisition of both eCollege and Fronter, LearningStudio has been targeted primarily at fully-online programs and associated hybrid programs – not for simple augmentation of face-to-face classes. The customer base has mostly included for-profit institutions as well as not-for-profit programs that are often packaged with an online service prover model (e.g. Embanet customers). As of this year, LearningStudio has approximately 110 customers with 1.2 million unique student enrollments.

    This decision is not one isolated to LearningStudio, as the end-of-life notification caps a series of moves by Pearson to get out of the LMS market in general. (more…)