e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Desire2Learn

  • Blackboard v Desire2Learn Trial Is Coming Up

    From D2L’s patent blog:

    Since our last posting, we received word that the judge has decided not to rule on any summary judgment motions – he’s letting all issues go to trial. As a result, Desire2Learn’s legal folks – inside and outside counsel – have been working overtime preparing for trial.

    We’re going to trial on February 11, in Lufkin, Texas. We anticipate that the trial will last approximately two weeks – both sides have been restricted to 18 hours each to present their cases. We continue to be grateful for the support of others in the industry. Most of the issues will be tried before a jury; inequitable conduct is tried before the judge. At this point, we’re (obviously) careful about divulging our trial strategy – we’re sorry we can’t share more.

    As much as ever, we’re confident of our defenses, including the defense of the patent’s invalidity and inequitable conduct, and the fact that we do not infringe.

    Looking for a warm place to spend a couple of weeks in February? Consider an early-spring trip to Lufkin!

    If anybody is planning to go to the trial, please let me know.

  • Desire2Learn Competencies and Rubrics, Part III

    Well, I should have learned by now not to promise in advance how many parts a series will have and when I will complete them. It seems that, as soon as I declare publicly what my blogging plans are, Brother Fate smacks me upside the head with his big, fat overcommitment stick.

    But apparently I’m a slow learner, because here comes another statement I’m bound to regret. If you work on competencies and rubrics for ANGEL, Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai, or any other system and are willing to share information, I’d like to talk to you. My goal would be to write not a review but an overview of the basic principles underlying your system design, much as I have done with this series. Many thanks to Kenneth Chapman and the D2L team for being so open. I think this kind of dialog really helps us move the state of the art forward.

    At any rate, this is very late and somewhat abbreviated, but here, at last, is Part III of the series.

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  • Desire2Learn Competencies and Rubrics, Part II

    I’ve been a little surprised at the amount of attention–both positive and negative–that my first post in this series has received. I want to address some of the comments on the negative side. There seems to be some concern that systems like D2L’s might promote bureaucratic mandates that increase burdens on teachers, or that they reduce teaching to training. I understand where these concerns are coming from, but I wonder how much of this is really about terminology. There seems to be an allergic reaction to the terms “competency” and “learning objective,” perhaps even to the point where the language is getting in the way of our being able to objectively assess the educational affordances of the software.

    So I’m going to change my plan a bit for this series. In this post, I’d like to try to abstract away from the terminology and lay out a framework that will hopefully let us explore those affordances without the linguistic baggage dragging us down. Fundamentally, I’m going to propose that the most productive way to think about a system such as D2L’s is in terms of metadata. When we use tags (for example), nobody really thinks that the total value of the object being tagged can be reduced to the meaning of the tags themselves. It’s just not even a serious question. So what happens to our understanding of competency modeling in the context of higher education when we think about it as a tagging exercise?

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  • Desire2Learn Competencies and Rubrics: Part I

    Anyone who has been awake in higher education in the last couple of years knows that there is a lot of attention on outcomes and assessment lately (although with distinctly different emphases in the U.S. and the E.U.). A natural consequence of this attention is that the various LMS platform developers are adding capabilities that are focused in this area. Blackboard has probably created the biggest splash with their highly promoted Outcomes product, but all the major platforms are doing work in this area, to different degrees and employing different strategies. I’ve been curious for some time about how the different approaches to this thorny problem space will shape up, which is why I am grateful that Ken Chapman, Desire2Learn’s Leade Product Manager, was willing to sit down with me at EDUCAUSE and talk to me about what D2L is doing in this area.

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  • An Open Casket After All

    Update: The intrepid Jim Farmer has also posted a copy of the D2L entry in the immagic eLibrary.

    As it turns out, one of your fellow e-Literate readers saved the D2L post and pasted it into the comments section of my last post.

    I love you guys.

  • Burying the Bodies

    Following my last post regarding the nasty details of Blackboard’s behavior that came out during the discovery phase of the trial, we now see the following message up on the D2L blog:

    [Our Litigation Update post, originally posted here on October 24, has been temporarily removed, as late today we received a letter from Blackboard’s lawyers.

    Right now, our lawyers are quite busy preparing responses to various court filings by Blackboard – and those responses must be filed with the court soon. It’s more important for our lawyers to address the substantive issues, and not be sidetracked by Blackboard’s attempted distractions. So . . . it’s down, but we promise it’ll be back, in one form or another.

    We continue our pledge to be as transparent as possible. And now perhaps our readers can begin to appreciate how difficult that can be.]

    I don’t suppose anybody out there has a cached copy of the post….

  • Blackboard's Dirty Laundry Comes Out in Patent Trial

    Desire2Learn has published some fairly tawdry details that have emerged during the discovery phase of the patent trial. (During discovery, both sides can demand to see relevant internal documents from the other side. Nasty confidential details can get exposed.) For one thing, Blackboard apparently sponsored a spy to go to the D2L user conference and report back on the events and even had an employee pose as a university employee (with a fake email address) to gain competitive information.

    Classy.

    Also, Blackboard’s communications with its PR firm apparently say that, while the public story around the patent is that they are protecting their intellectual property, the “real” purpose was to “contain and control” D2L. So the goal is to distract the #2 vendor in the LMS space with a costly lawsuit. Not only has Blackboard known all along that their lawsuit could damage competition in the LMS space (as I and others have argued); they explicitly intended to damage competition, as the court documents apparently show. Judging by the amount of traffic I saw at the D2L booth this week here at EDUCAUSE, it looks like they failed.

    There’s more to the blog post, which is worth reading in its entirety (although it will probably make you sad and a little queasy.) D2L is preparing to file for a summary judgment, which is not surprising given that they have already gotten two thirds of the patent claims ruled invalid by two different judges. Sadly, since Blackboard’s motive is apparently to cost D2L as much money as possible regardless of their chances of winning in court, it seems virtually certain that Blackboard would file an appeal if they lose.