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Tag: John McLeod

  • Desire2Learn Drops UEN Suit

    I was able to speak with Desire2Learn Director of Marketing John McLeod to confirm that his comment on my previous post means what it appears to mean:

    All vendors enter every RFP process with the view that the process will be fair and equitable. We all invest resources to respond to RFPs, make presentations, and demonstrate our capabilities. In virtually every case, we accept the decision.

    Michael is correct, Utah law requires that a protest be made within 5 days of a decision, and an appeal – which must be filed in court – be made within 14 days of a denial. We have requested materials under Utah’s freedom of information laws. We will carefully review the materials when we receive them to better understand this process.

    Out of respect for institutions in Utah and our desire to concentrate on serving our customers, we are immediately dropping this appeal. We want to reassure everyone that our focus continues to be on improving education.

    On the phone, John re-iterated that Desire2Learn’s motivation was to better understand the decision-making process and making sure that it was fair.

    It would behoove colleges and universities to become more sophisticated about this sort of thing. On the one hand, ethics laws exist for a reason and, as one commenter on the previous post noted, it is perfectly reasonable for a company to want to ensure that those ethics laws were followed. (I recommend reading the whole comments thread, by the way; the range of perspectives is interesting.) On the other hand, these challenges definitely get abused sometimes. So it should be routine for schools to share information about these sorts of things when they happen, but also to be careful to get all the facts. Every situation is different.

    In fact, this whole situation might have played out differently had more of the details of the process been pro-actively published in the first place. That’s not a criticism of UEN; I recognize that there are all kinds of reasons why it is difficult (and sometimes even legally impossible) to share some of this. But in general, I do think that schools would benefit greatly by taking a position of publishing all evaluation process information by default and only making private what needs to be private, rather than the other way around. This change would require some non-trivial rethinking of processes and policies, as well as significant extra work, but the end result would be better contract negotiations based on shared data and best practices from peer schools as well as fewer (though higher quality) challenges after the fact.

  • Is Blackboard's Lawyer Calling D2L's Customers?

    Here’s an interesting bit from D2L’s patent blog:

    Clients have been calling us to let us know that Matthew Small, General Counsel of Blackboard, has been calling them. From what we understand, his purpose appears to be twofold: (1) to encourage clients to switch to Blackboard ; and (2) to create FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) with respect to alternative products and services in the eLearning space.

    From what we gather, he has been making statements that are not supported by the record in the Court or by the actions of the Patent & Trademark Office. If your organization is called, we invite you to suggest to Mr. Small that we are always willing to engage in an open dialogue with you and him.

    We remain confident that Learning Environment version 8.3 is an appropriate design-around to the patent claims – as we announced nearly one month ago. We also remain confident that the patent’s claims are invalid and that the Courts and the PTO will ultimately invalidate the patent.

    As there is no www.factcheck.org for this litigation, we continue to encourage you to review the documents and the facts. We are happy to discuss any questions that any client, or other interested people, may have. Just let us know!

    John Baker, President and CEO ([email protected])
    Diane Lank, General Counsel and Director, Legal Services ([email protected])
    John McLeod, Director of Marketing ([email protected])

    It’s unsurprising that an aggressive company engaged in a lawsuit with its competitor would use the suit to try to poach customers. But I’ve never heard of a company having their lawyer act as a sales guy. If it’s true, it certainly demonstrates a pretty high level of chutzpah.

    I’m very curious to find out more.  If you’ve received a call like this or know anybody who has, let me know. I’m particularly interested in who called and in what factual claims they made about the legal situation.