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They farmed out a simple system of keeping track of tests and students to an east indian firm called 'blackboard'.

East Indian? I have a buddy who works for them.

Look at two products which were originally designed for classrooms, to allow students and teachers to interact. They might be easily adapted to your situation.

Blackboard

Lanshool

I've been at schools using both Moodle and Blackboard (the commercial variant), and my experience as a student suggests that they're fairly interchangeable.

The most important thing with both of them is an a instructor who's willing to take the time and effort to learn and use them effectively. Really engaged teachers can make excellent use of these systems, and make life - and learning - easier for students. If your teacher is the kind who's just pulling a paycheque, these systems are a waste of money.

It's a web portal, so it's a good guess they're using *some* SQL database server.

But I also read the technical requirements document to find out, and they seem to support Microsoft's SQL Server as well as Oracle as a backend.

Oh, it is so. much. worse. than mere "lock-in".

In order to help define their(utter shit) vs. the not-always-completely-brilliant; but far cheaper and better, FOSS competition, Blackboard has been expanding their offerings in new directions:

Physical Access Control Systems...

Video Surveillance...

And, yes, ID cards, cashless transactions(on and off campus), etc..

Yup. In order to protect their worthless core product from extinction, they've made it possible to bring the same level of quality to basically every corner of your campus and the lives of your hapless students. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Oh, it is so. much. worse. than mere "lock-in".

In order to help define their(utter shit) vs. the not-always-completely-brilliant; but far cheaper and better, FOSS competition, Blackboard has been expanding their offerings in new directions:

Physical Access Control Systems...

Video Surveillance...

And, yes, ID cards, cashless transactions(on and off campus), etc..

Yup. In order to protect their worthless core product from extinction, they've made it possible to bring the same level of quality to basically every corner of your campus and the lives of your hapless students. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Oh, it is so. much. worse. than mere "lock-in".

In order to help define their(utter shit) vs. the not-always-completely-brilliant; but far cheaper and better, FOSS competition, Blackboard has been expanding their offerings in new directions:

Physical Access Control Systems...

Video Surveillance...

And, yes, ID cards, cashless transactions(on and off campus), etc..

Yup. In order to protect their worthless core product from extinction, they've made it possible to bring the same level of quality to basically every corner of your campus and the lives of your hapless students. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Damn it people at least read the summary. It was some hack of the Blackboard learning system. Meaning it isn't something some teach set up in their spare time. It's a company product that the school uses. RTF summary before you go of on you're wild speculations.

Blackboard's main website in case you are living in a cave In anycase it's obvious this isn't some crappy side project of some teacher.

Many universities use this POS.

http://www.blackboard.com/

Its a user-unfriendly mish-mash of forums, teacher news posts, file transfer, PM, and file upload functionality. It could entirely be duplicated using existing open source softwares in a superior manner if someone tied together a whole suite of apps and unified the interface. All I know is I can normally trust a website to be able to Attach A File in most any browser, I thought we had that one licked back in 98.

Of course my School isn't even Worried about Firefox...

Internet Explorer 8 has not been certified to be compatible with Blackboard. Be aware you may run into issues using IE 8 with Blackboard. Using the IE 8 compatibility view may help. Click this link for more information... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956197/LN/ For information on how to revert back to IE 7, click this link... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957700

I would love to disable this, but my school uses something called Blackboard: http://blackboard.com/ which a lot of it is based off Java (uploaders, etc) and I use it quite often. I'm out of school in a day, so I guess I'll turn it off them, but I hope Apple fixes this before I have to go back to school then.

I work for a large community college network.

We are seeing a general trend of 10-20% increased use of online course tools each year. That doesn't necessarily mean that the classroom disappears though. Rather, certain topics can easily be taught using a variety of methods.

And I think that the 'listening to lectures on your iPod' is a bit misleading. Usually, online courses are either 100% online, taught using a system like Blackboard http://www.blackboard.com/ or the open source Moodle, or online courses can be a mixture of online and in the classroom (such as a chemistry course taught online, and the lab you come in 1 or 2 times per week for hands on).

There is also a fairly sizable amount of fully interactive video courses. Whereby, students come into a classroom, and the teacher teleconferences into the classroom. Full video, full audio, questions and answers, etc.. Each desk has a little microphone on it that students can use.

The reverse happens also. Online chat, online video that students can watch from home.

Each teacher is largely in charge of how they choose to mix and match the various tools.

So what we are seeing, isn't necessarily a move away from classrooms, rather, it is an increasing use of a variety of tools that allow more and more people to interact. Like your teacher lives in India, you take part of the course online from home in a rural county, and you drive in once per week for a video teleconf directed lab.

There is also a large push for business continuity. Especially around disaster planning. The more systems and outlets you have in the online world, the easier that task becomes. If a physical classroom catches fire, class is over. For a long time. If you can pick up where you left off online, money keeps coming in, and students keep learning.

I have also seen a large increase in message board/forum use. It adds a great layer to teaching and learning. Whereby, in addition to the regular lectures/labs or whatever, several 'slow' conversations can be going on inside a forum.

replace Blackboard with Moodle. When I was first starting to learn php, found moodle really easy to customize, in addition to just being great running on default. Nothing that NEEDS to be configured much to get started any more than Blackboard. Blackboard does provide hosting, but at an outrageous rate that is not really a 'hosting' price. On the other hand I have gotten many more teachers to use the Blackboard system just telling them how much the district spends per year just to have the service available.

On a side note, when the tubes came to the district, one high school hired a bunch of IT people, and the other had an industry experienced teacher run several classes that had students expand and maintain the network. The student run network was quite superior. In 1998 they managed to get an OC3 line DONATED by a local company, and a partial Class B Internet license, just to name a few things. Downtime was negligible and never during school hours. While the 'professional' school dwindled with poor service, and just the local service paid for by the school, the student run program was scraped after 4 years when students that graduated had not documented their code. It was mostly customized FreeBSD setup. (The other school was using NT4). Rather than addressing the issue with the teacher, program was terminated permanently. They hired a bunch of techs to take their place, and within about 2 years they decided it was too expensive and now there are some 6 people that go around fixing problems for the whole district.

And THIS in Silicon Valley!

I may have missed some of the details of all what happened, but I do know the kids today don't know hardly anything about computers other than how to play video games, but props to the few that can customize a myspace page. Now, email or Internet access in general is out every few days for up to several hours. Rarely, but a few times, it has been out every day for about 2 hours in the morning for a week+.

Too bad something like technology can't be used directly to teach students about the modern world, like, the technology itself while making money to have a quality infrastructure. Oh well.

Just to note, I asked the IT staff about OpenOffice, because I heard they were having major budget problems, and they said that they did a 'trial run' and for too many teachers they concluded the transition would be too difficult, and too many teachers couldn't figure it out. They are going to transition to Office 2007 instead for all the computer labs (eventually as they can afford it). I stopped making suggestions after that.

Anyway, shout out to Moodle for anyone interested in education. It is simple enough I would recommend it to (tech savvy) parents to use at home to manage their kids homework and chores, just as an idea.

Forget all that junk. Use the Blackboard http://www.blackboard.com/ system. I must warn you; it's a proprietary system.

Yeah, some tech decisions aren't made for good reasons, such as using Blackboard (which is hugely bloated). At least only the new subdomains are being used as illinois.edu instead of uiuc.edu, and that only matters with the login system. However, it is neat having my school mentioned on Slashdot.

I believe WebCT/Blackboard were using the Vista name way before either of these companies. Here's a link to their product webpage.

http://www.blackboard.com/products/Academic_Suite/ Learning_System/vista.htm

Cy

then banning "interactive websites" blocks many things that would be best left unbanned.

Many courses feature an online forum for discussion related to its subject matter. This kind of forum is meant to promote communication between students: you can ask questions to your peers or ask them to review a piece of your work. In language courses, it may also be used to practice writing in the language. Such a forum is provided by Blackboard, formerly WebCT, for instance.

Teachers wanting to go for a more personal touch may also put up a blog, on which students can post comments about the teacher's personality, or his/her (in)ability to explain difficult subject matter effectively; they may even ask questions for the teacher to answer in the next class. Some students don't have internet access at home due to, e.g., living in an apartment, and will want to post comments in class.

Now, the bill is still in its beta stage, and we don't know what it encompasses; we can't really criticise it, only speculate. The release candidate's wording will not be that general, I hope, and it will allow sites like these to be visited on the basis that they allow the teachers to give their courses effectively, and the students to ask questions when they have some. "Ask a question and you'll be stupid for a minute; don't ask any questions and you'll be ignorant for a lifetime", they say. It applies very well here.

P.S.: TFA seems to be propaganda against Son of DOPA more than information. Wikipedia is not geared towards being an "interactive website"; it provides information, and allows you to interact with editors by improving their work. Contrast this with MySpace and you'll see it's like comparing apples and oranges.

The priority date is from a 1999 application, so by US rules on priority (IIRC) the invention could have been first made public in '98. It may have been invented much sooner but not have been evidenced to have been created any sooner.

Anyhow, the first claim (unamended in the '138 application) reads:

+++
1. A course-based system for providing to an educational community of users access to a plurality of online courses, comprising: a) a plurality of user computers, with each user computer being associated with a user of the system and with each user being capable of having predefined characteristics indicative of multiple predetermined roles in the system, each role providing a level of access to a plurality of data files associated with a particular course and a level of control over the data files associated with the course with the multiple predetermined user roles comprising at least two user's predetermined roles selected from the group consisting of a student role in one or more course associated with a student user, an instructor role in one or more courses associated with an instructor user and an administrator role associated with an administrator user, and b) a server computer in communication with each of the user computers over a network, the server computer comprising: means for storing a plurality of data files associated with a course, means for assigning a level of access to and control of each data file based on a user of the system's predetermined role in a course; means for determining whether access to a data file associated with the course is authorized; means for allowing access to and control of the data file associated with the course if authorization is granted based on the access level of the user of the system.
+++

They may have had to amend it for grant, has it been granted yet(?), in which case this may no longer bear true as to the "invention". Usually amendments take the form of including matter from subsequent claims that distinguishes the claimed invention from the "prior art" (the body of evidence presented for previous works). Reading down the claims the details are for subsequent elements of a hypertext based assessment system which includes provision of [access protected] course materials, creation of tests and marking of student tests and finally (in claim 35) to having a webpage with links to email (asynchronous) and a chat session (synchronous) [all integrated in the context of an assessment system]. From what I can recall back in 1999 when I was a 2nd year undergrad this would have been quite novel [in the vague non-patent sense].

You don't mention the taking of tests, grading of test nor the synchronous communications. As I'm assuming you were an expert in the field at the time it seems they could write claims to a novel invention based on the patent - or if they can't then someone could.

Disclaimer: I _used_to_ examine patents in the G06F classification area so I don't know anything anymore!!

Incidentally their summary of interpreting patents at http://www.blackboard.com/patent/FAQ2 is really good and should be required reading for slashdotters.

Looking at 20060168233 A1 - all but one claim has been deleted, number 47(!)

+++
47. A system for providing to a community of users access to a plurality of online courses, comprising: a server computer in communication with each of a plurality of user computers over a network, the server computer comprising: means for storing a plurality of data files associated with a course, means for assigning a level of access to and control of each data file based on a user of the system's predetermined role in a course; means for determining whether access to a data file associated with the course is authorized; means for allowing access to and control of the data file associated with the course if authorization is granted based on the access level of the user of the system; wherein each user of the system being capable of having pre

From BB's FAQ:

My company would like to incorporate Open Source Software into our proprietary software (e.g., include the Sakai Course Management System as part of a commercially-licensed software package). We won't be charging for the portion that contains the Open Source Software but will be charging for our proprietary portion. Is my company covered by this pledge?

No. To the extent that any proprietary software is Bundled with the Open Source Software, this pledge would not apply. However, if your customers wish to supplement or enhance your proprietary product with Open Source Software which is not Bundled by you, that would be covered. Blackboard believes this pledge provides a strong incentive for developers to continue building extensions to proprietary solutions as well as to enhance standards such as those promulgated by IMS, while allowing schools to accomplish all of its information technology goals.

Compare that with:
Oracle and Unicon, Inc. Unveil Plans to Create Next-Generation Academic Enterprise Environment

Then http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=ORCL&d=t
vs.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=bbbb

Cage match!

Blackboard owns WebCT - see http://www.blackboard.com/webct

Blackboard DOES hate Linux. Whatever your experience with Blackboard 7, Blackboard itself does not agree:

http://library.blackboard.com/docs/bbas_r7_0_brows er_requirements.pdf

NB: NO mention of Linux. Do you really want to use Firefox 1.0? I mean is it even available? I don't see Konqueror anywhere. There's NO reason why every box in that chart shouldn't be checked that I can see. Keeping the system simple and usable would avoid the problems.

Blackboard, an excellent and widely-used online education tool at every level of education (K-12, college, even the US Military Academy at WestPoint) would be blocked if the current wording of this bill were to become law.

"Complete and udder stupidity" doesn't even begin to cover this...

It's not even just education-related services... Anything that services the high school and college age crowd is going to get a renewable audience (thus able to include MySpace, and why it is so successful). http://www.student-manager.com/, http://www.facebook.com/, http://www.myspace.com/, http://www.blackboard.com/ all have one thing in common: They service the high school to college age crowd.

While I don't disagree with your comment on actually making people learn to read and write, I do feel like alternative instructional techniques are underused. My university uses the Blackboard Academic Suite to let professors leverage the Internet to distribute electronic articles, test banks, quizzes, message boards, etc. as an aid to students. I don't think that this person is trying to eliminate books, but give them a *supplement* aka an aid.

To clarify: the vulnerability that the Georgia Tech student found was in the Blackboard Commerce Suite, not the Academic Suite.

The Commerce Suite was a product line purchased from AT&T several years ago, and is mostly seperate from the Academic Suite. This merger mostly affects the Academic Suite.

To clarify: the vulnerability that the Georgia Tech student found was in the Blackboard Commerce Suite, not the Academic Suite.

The Commerce Suite was a product line purchased from AT&T several years ago, and is mostly seperate from the Academic Suite. This merger mostly affects the Academic Suite.

Back in 2000, CMU switched to IMAP and started reccommending Mulberry as the standard mail client. I was pretty surprised by this. CMU had previously used open-source or locally developed software. Some of the locally-developed software was pretty quirky and hard to support, but they had generally been trying to make it open source or switch to open source. (For example they switched from AMS to IMAP, and were working on switching from AFS to CODA.) So I was pretty surprised when they started reccommending a closed source mail client. I remember thinking, "A closed-source, third party app? I wonder how long that's going to last..." Today I got the answer - It lasted about 5 years.

Shortly after they started using Mulberry, they started using some other closed-source third-party service called Blackboard. I wonder how long that's going to last...

Each school system is different. fcps.blackboard.com is the local server used.

...that some buisness need to read. The local school system here runs Blackboard which seems to use Apache Tomcat, and it really has problems, both with sessions and general speed. Perhaps some bigger corporations shoudl go back-to-basics with nice books like these.

If you go to university you probably have dealt with the Blackboard web application and its various features.

ArcStream makes a conduit for Blackboard called Blackboard toGo! I have never used the software but it seems to be exactly what you are looking for.

Again...this all stems on you already using the Blackboard software...(from what I understand most Universities in the states already do)...and you getting your University to use the Arcstream software.

Note: I am not affiliated with ArcStream Solutions, Inc. or Blackboard Inc.

might be this Blackboard...

I had actually labeled my chair 'Joe hates Banner' at one point. My final breaking point was after the 4.x upgrade, when I had asked the SCT contractors to make a change to their system -- wrap some tags around the output, so that I could make all of the info text italic (wasn't my idea...the registrar wanted it). I was told to change the data, rather than the program, so they wouldn't have to keep changing it every upgrade.

Unfortunately, the standard SCT upgrade procedures are to completely wipe the existing database, replacing it with what they call 'SEED', and then reapply every change made. This includes changes made through Web Tailor, which would be all of the changes that I spent a week making.

If the problem is Banner, however, that's more than just a student issue, as it also handles salary information at some places.

Oh...and if it's not Blackboard or Banner, it might be Prometheus, which was bought by Blackboard last year.

if it is about this blackboard software portal then it is a significant finding. The code is java based and i havnt come a lot of exploits for java based architectures.

When I was at university, the subjects that I was taking were all on the Blackboard system. Granted, it's a commercial product, but the features I found invaluable are as follows: 1) A news button. Here the lecturers/tutors left instructions as to what you should be doing this week, how to contact relevant staff, notification of new assessments or lecture/tutorial notes. News items were in reverse chronological order, and had a date stamp. 2) A lecture notes button. The lecture notes were all here, in PDF/Word format, in chronological order. There was one PDF/Word file per week. 3) A tutorial exercies button. Here were PDF/Word files, in chronological order, that contained activities to do each week. One PDF/Word document per week. 4) An assessment button. Here were PDF/Word documents allowing downloads of assignment sheets, information on exams and a couple of practise exams. 5) A bulletin board for users to post questions/answers and help each other. The lecturers/tutors frequented these pages too. This format was so easy to understand - every student knew what was required of them. Such a product would only take 1-2 weeks to build in PHP/MySQL. Some of my subjects also had the ability to upload assignment files (usually Word documents, or source code) - although this might not be required for an English class. Some lecturers used software to check for cheating. Online learning is good when needed information is at the student's finger tips. They can fit their learning in around work/social committments. It shouldn't really be self paced, otherwise a back-log of work will build up.

"you simply encryt data transaction to replaying messages has no effect anymore, and unless you can crack their encryption and generate transaction numbers and fully emulate the main server you can't do anything."

The problem is that with the current implementation of the system the encryption IS crackable and you CAN emulate being a server. The readers would require some type of firmware upgrade to support better encryption. In Blackboards's statement on the case they even state that the system relies on PHYSICAL SECURITY ONLY.

"Historically Blackboard's solution and other industry solutions untilized proprietary wiring on campuses. The routing od transactions was secured through physical security of these networks. The transactions themselves are secured unless the hardware systems involved are physically compromised."

If you get access to the cables and tap into them then emulating the server is nothing. Infact the code that was to be released at interz0ne was code to emulate the server. So with the current way things are done the previously mentioned technique would NOT work.

http://www.blackboard.com/docs/Statement_on_System _Security.pdf

You're thinking of another thing called Blackboard.

Way to read the article, champ.

the system looked nice... but the institution i work for probably wouldnt use it... they use blackboard. I did however find something similar and opensource...

it was moodle. it works nice and even has some extra cool features

I think professorial technophobia may be relaxing a little, anyway. I took a couple years off to work and I've noticed a difference even between my freshman year and now - NYU has, in that time, implemented Blackboard, and many professors take advantage of it. It's not much more than simple templated course home pages and discussion boards, but it's somewhere to get handouts and assignments and discuss topics outside of class. It's easy for the faculty, and a lot of them use it.

In the past year, nearly all of my courses have had their own sites - either through Blackboard or set up independently by the professors themselves, on NYU servers or elsewhere. Approximately half of my professors are using PowerPoint presentations now, and most post lecture notes or make use of class mailing lists to varying degrees. It's not shockingly progressive, but it wasn't the case when I started school a few years ago.

Blackboard is a software company/ASP that serves colleges and universities all over the place. One of the features they offer is online testing/grading. Company was founded in 1997, offering online education software since then. Not sure when the testing features were added, but I suspect they are the target of this patent.

At my university, we use Blackboard.

I recently had to deal with pissed off managers who were screaming for blood. I work at a university and we've got blackboard installed (ugh). Anyway, there's a section where instructors can view the people enrolled in their classes, but if a student drops a class, or doesn't pay their tuition or is otherwise removed from the class their enrollment record is tagged as "disabled" with a little red X next to their name. Well it turns out some brilliant professor was sending emails to her students saying, "Please let me know the nature of your disability, so that we can accomodate any special needs you may have." It made its way up to the vice chancellor for IT and he demanded that we change it, because it supposedly because it violated the rights of people with disabilities or some shit.

Actually, my school has quite a few smart boards. They are gradually integrating them into every class. I use one in Calculus, Computer Science, and Networking while others use them in some English, Science, and Social Studies classes also. The things aren't cheap, and the projectors cost even more (the light bulbs start at $400) but the ability to post notes from class online at a site ironically known as blackboard is a nice little extra. In the long run, they're fairly unnecessary, but nice. Our school just likes to show off (wireless network and such).

I'm a technician on a campus that uses the CampusWide system (Optim9000). AT&T actually sold off the CampusWide division to Blackboard.com late last year. This is the updated URL. The system runs on an HP-9000 server (HP-UX 10.x, soon 11.x), and uses its own proprietary network format and database (I think it's called Raima, but don't quote me.) It can run across a standard LAN, but for reliability, it's usually set up to run on its own separate network. CW is supposed to be releasing a piece of hardware that will allow readers to use IP addressing, but it hasn't materialized yet (they keep saying 'soon'). The system can handle point-of-sale, access control, digital photo-ID production/management(uses an Informix database and DataCard software/hardware to store pictures/print IDs) and scales upwards effortlessly. Our campus has well over 200 readers, 15,000+ cardholders, and 99%+ up-time. I know that USC, UCLA, Duke, Harvard, and around 400 other schools use this system. (Even Honda Motor Co. uses it at one of its plants.) It's not cheap, though. Hope this helps.

I am a software engineer at the University of Alaska Anchorage. We have recently unveiled a campus wide (10,000+ user) implementation of Blackboard 5. The cheapest version is $5,000. It is available for Linux, Solaris, and NT. I was pleased to discover it uses primarily OS tools - Apache, MySQL, Perl and mod_perl (of course). There is a more expensive version that uses Oracle. In the base product, users all have to be created manually. This can be overcome by writing some scripts to plug more data into the MySQL database. This should be a major point for most power users looking for some standards - based systems - although you can't (under the license) change their code, the system is open and side things can be done (like inserting into the database). The blackboard code has proven to be scalable enough to handle this workload, and the end users enjoy the flexiblity and power that it provides. It is a shame that it isn't free, but I doubt that the university would endorse it if it were.

If you're trying to do plain course delivery, WebMentor is a useful (if not very elegant) solution. If you have the resources and clients with bandwidth, take a look at BlackBoard, which is more robust than WM.

We also use WebCT at Minnesota State University Moorhead for online testing, quizzing, chat, BBS, and grading.

We are currently running version 3.1.3 on a Dell Poweredge 2400 running RH 6.2 and software raid. The software runs very well on Linux and has been extremely stable in comparison to our old WinNT 4.0 SP6 system running version 2.2.

Running WebCT on Linux has allowed us to integrate the system with existing systems on campus such as email with very little hassle, something we couldn't accomplish using WinNT 4.0.

I have also heard of blackboard but never used it.

WebCT does offer a free trial of their software and it's extremely simple to install and to get running. You can download their software at http://v3trials.webct.com/freetrial/

Blackboard requires a registration keycode to use their software (no free trial) but you can find their site at http://www.blackboard.com/

To suplement those courses we are also using a system by Tegrity which allows you to stream live audio and video over the Internet. It works together with powerpoint and it supports a whiteboard for the teacher.

You can also use the interactive whiteboard in blackboard together with tegrity if students don't mind having both windows open.

You may also want to look into Rotor which is a very nice system that is used for anything from distance learning to presentations for/by the entertainment industry.