Blackboard Wins Patent Suit Against Desire2Learn 186
edremy writes "Blackboard, the dominant learning management system (LMS) maker, has won its initial suit against Desire2Learn. Blackboard gets $3.1 million and can demand that Desire2Learn stop US sales. (We discussed Blackboard when the patent was issued in 2006) This blog provides background on the suit. Blackboard has been granted a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a TA might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. You wouldn't think something this obvious could even be patented, but so far it's been a very effective weapon for Blackboard, badly hurting Desire2Learn and generating a huge amount of worry for the few remaining commercial LMSs that Blackboard has not already bought, and open source solutions such as Moodle (Blackboard's pledge not to attack such providers notwithstanding)."
Polymorphism (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yes... That's What America Needs... (Score:3, Interesting)
This only contributes to the dumbening of our children.
This isn't over (Score:1, Interesting)
The link above points to a case where a federal judge overturned a verdict and punished the plaintifs and their lawyers harshly.
The verdict in favor of Blackboard is junk. It too is ripe for a successful appeal. It, like the linked case, is an example of a company using a patent suit to stifle competition.
BTW, my school used to use WebCT. Now that Blackboard has WebCT, my school is dropping it.
Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:1, Interesting)
sad.
This court is probably filled with dunces (Score:3, Interesting)
D2L's intro spewed buzzwords for maybe a minute, but it was quite grating. Worse, no pause or rewind or similar buttons.
BB's demo had pause button, but instantly reminded me of a webified version of ms access, which i would never want to touch.
If both apps are just turning to code what was done by hand, how can BB win? Both interfaces seem different, judging by their demos. Granted, getting hold of the functional versions of each will be the best way to compare them.
I suppose, were I to sit down with 100 teachers, and ask each for their advice on creating an automated grade point average, curve break points, and so on, it would not be research, but patent infringement. If that is the case, then the judge, the court, and the USPTO all need fids and anchor chains hammered up their rear ends.
Any programmer-turned-teacher should be free to develop and freely distribute OR SELL their OWN implementation of grading and scheduling systems.
As for some hare-brained idea that there is something novel about a student being a teaching aid in one subject and a student in another, that's just the height of idiocy.
Example, when I was in the USN (US Navy, many moons ago), we had this thing called "BMI" Basic Military Instruction. Sometimes, a senior seaman or 3rd class petty officer monitored as another subordinate lectured. Later in the week, or in the month, or the quarter, another sailor gave another lecture or course of material. Over time, we had our PQS (Personnel Qualification Charts) filled by date, time, pass/fail/understand/etc and other items.
Fast-forward to real-world college or high school settings. Math whiz kid mentors history kid in one year or semester or quarter or trimester. Science whiz mentors both, while Student D mentors the other 3. Later, in other classes, all are mentoring some or others.
It's just a souped-up database that schedules classes and helps create bell curves. Depending on the database, this need not even be achieved programmatically. Modules with lookup tables might do just as well, lending greatly to data atomicity, integrity and to other benefits of relational databases.
How in the hell is BB's positioning/"differentiation" novel?
Good. Maybe they will sue each other into oblivion (Score:5, Interesting)
My university uses D2L. I, as a TA, hate the motherfucking thing, end of story.
I have a professor who adamantly refuses to use it and posts course information as plain vanilla html pages (with pdf alternate links, if the LaTeK -> html doesn't look quite right). Nobody complains.
As a side-effect you can use curl to download all the notes at once. Try that with D2L.
Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've had the (mis)fortune of working with Blackboard as a sysadmin for about five years now.
It is without a doubt, a gigantic hacked-together hodge-podge under the covers. The installation guide is probably 300+ pages. Tasks that should be, by anyone's standards, put into a shell script are simply written out and numbered in the guide, which does nothing but increase the perception that not even the program's authors care about it.
Blackboard runs (or at least used to run--to be fair, later versions are apparently more cohesive) on a strange polyglot of Perl, Java, and Shell (and who knows what else). The vast array of underlying technologies has the feel of something that's been hurriedly duct-taped together, and you're almost amazed the thing runs at all.
Worse, upgrades are fantastically painful--accomplished by applying the endless patches in the proper order (obtainable at the 'behind the blackboard site' which is discouragingly useless) and any one of them can fail for any of a hundred different reasons.
Nobody I know in the education technology industry claims to like installing/administering it, and in fact, it's become one of those tasks that nobody likes to do--almost a running joke. Hoping to ingratiate myself with my employers, I volunteered to be the "Blackboard guy," a decision I've regretted to this day.
Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:3, Interesting)
I teach on various university courses with ca. 50-150 students each. Our term began this week. I have become so frustrated with Blackboard, and it led to a disastrous situation last month where 15 students almost failed a course through no fault of their own, and so I have given up on it. My university's IT department have been made well aware of the reasons, ... and as you might expect, they plan to change nothing, and will keep on throwing good money after bad on Blackboard.
For various reasons setting up a server with Moodle isn't an option for me (and from what I've heard Moodle is better only in some respects, anyway); nor is any service that requires fees, as my school would refuse to cover it. I'd have to pay for it out of my own pocket; I hope I do not need to justify my reluctance to do that.
I'm open to suggestions, of course, but in the meantime I'm using Google Groups for information distribution. Obviously online assessment isn't possible with Google Groups, but that isn't really necessary anyway with the student numbers I'm looking at. Most of my colleagues just use Blackboard for distributing lecture materials anyway; and I reckon Google Groups, or Yahoo Groups for that matter, work just fine as an online photocopier.
Re:Blackboard sucks (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh yeah, they found it alright.
Now that Blackboard has acquired WebCT, it's getting worse, inconceivable as that might seem. The licensing was getting out of hand even pre-acquisition, and my Spidey-Sense tells me we're just about to take it on the chops from Blackboard. This patent, which stakes out the ground for role-based rights as a Blackboard invention, will kill all innovation as well as open source implementations such as Moodle and Sakai, etc. Everyone is going to be afraid for the future of these alternative LMS's, and will be driven to consolidating on a Blackboard platform, which turns out to be rewarding Blackboard for being monopolistic pricks!.
When Murray Goldberg was hacking Perl scripts at UBC (or whoever he got to do it for him, if) in the early days of what became WebCT, it was motivated out of a genuine desire to extend the reach of education by someone who I believe had a longtime love for teaching. To look at it now, the product would seem quite silly, I'm sure, but it represented the Golden Age of Learning Management Systems.
I don't know the development internals of WebCT, but it always seemed to me to be a Good Little Idea, but a Bad Bigger Idea. It just didn't scale. It was like there was no architecture, no coherency.
Near Dawson City in the Yukon Territory, Canada, there is a four story mining dredge that has been designated a historic site. These dredges were incredible Rube Goldberg machines; they were built ad-hoc, with shit hanging all over the place and the next thought-of feature literally bolted on the side of them. They worked, I guess, but they sure weren't pretty.
WebCT always reminded me of those dredges, a weird world where the next idea is welded on the side of the implementation in the first way someone thought of how to do it. It ends up being this ugly-but-nearly-functional Frankenstein. Maybe I'm being unfair to mining dredges and Frankensteins.
The biggest barrier to change is, in my experience, faculty who are trained up and comfortable using Blackboard, and who already have their curriculum good to go in Blackboard.
Students - unite!. Tell your prof that Blackboard sucks, and give them specific reasons why you believe this to be the case. Pressure profs to get whatever the Teaching and Technology/Learning Committee (or whatever it is called at your University) to get a pilot of an alternative LMS underway. Get that prof to pilot some of their courses on the alternative.
Let's break this monopoly and keep a competitive and innovative LMS landscape, or we'll all be stuck with something that is, emphatically, worse that WebCT. And fsck the USPTO for enabling this horse-shit, even if they are overworked and underpaid. If you don't have the answer, don't pretend you do. Go and find someone to help with evaluation. And, no, someone who is affiliated with the company behind the application doesn't count.
Incredible Mining Dredges - they really are cool, and a lot more fun that WebCT/Blackboard: http://www.pc.gc.ca/apprendre-learn/prof/itm2-crp-trc/htm/ndn4_e.asp [pc.gc.ca] .Re:Mod parent up (Score:1, Interesting)
They use an indian company for some Java development & Their entire Quality Assurance (AppLabs Technologies pvt ltd IIRC)
It works like this, Blackboard pays a bunch of money to these guys, these guys say that Blackboard is of highest quality,
and various school boards then go ahead and implement Blackboard.
So that means, there simply isn'y anyone competent enough with them to fix all of Blackboard's problems, & BlackBoard won't shift,
from its current developers/testers to more expensive US engineers