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Blackboard Wins Patent Suit Against Desire2Learn
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)."
....why the hell would anybody want to infringe on their patents? It's a really horrible design and interface.
More obstacles between people, and learning.
This one particular line almost made me vomit from my eyeballs: 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... Semantics notwithstanding, is it really even slightly plausible that a company focused on education would want to crush anyone else attempting to teach people?
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Er, isn't this just polymorphism?
Ask me about repetitive DNA
I am a student at UNBC (in BC, Canada), and Blackboard is our LMS, due to the fact that Blackboard bought out WebCT recently. I have to say that as a student, marker, and Computer Helpdesk staff member, I /LOATH/ Blackboard. The system is flaky, often crashes, logs you out for no reason, refuses to load files, fails to load files, as well as a myriad of other issues.
I feel that not only is allowing a patent like this counter-productive to the advancement of the product, it also continues to add precedent that it's okay to patent stupid things and then create a monopoly. The idea behind the free market is that everyone has a fighting change to sell their product. Sure, consumers have allowed companies like Wall-Mart to take off and out-sell smaller companies, but that's the risk of doing business. Letting companies sue each other left and right is not allowing for a free market, and is in the end going to hurt consumers. For example, when Blackboard bought WebCT, they stopped supporting WebCT4 (Blackboard has released WebCT6/BCE6), despite the fact that there are many classes which are not fully compatible with the new version.
I know this isn't really relevant, but I couldn't help but take up the opportunity to badmouth Blackboard. Another point to note is that a friend of mine worked at a college in Alberta implementing the system and said it's just as ugly and trying on the server side as it is on the client side.
Ahh yes.
The "Is a..." relationship type in a relational database.
A Person is a Student. A person is a Teacher.
etc...
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Patents assisting innovation, just like they were intended for.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I've seen "multiple role" examples in various database books going way back. It's not rocket science. This patent is just taking a basic concept and saying that it a narrower context than the general example, it's patentable. It's like saying you can't have a headteacher object inheriting all the features of the basic teacher object in a teaching application, because we have patented the idea.
What other general concepts shall we patent in narrower contexts? How about patenting the basic concept of parent child relationships in Cinema Seat allocation software. It could get quite ridiculous.
Despite everything we've heard about defense against stupid patents, it seems clear that the Obviousness doctrine really doesn't matter to courts. And I hear thought the Supreme Court gave the doctrine a boost recently. I guess if you can't beat 'em, join 'em - I'm going to take a patent troll class, powered by BlackBoard!
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
And, how can you patent a person being both a TA and a student? That makes no sense. Bad summary I hope.
I ought to patent being a computer programmer and a father at the same time.
We can be digested by all ridiculous patent stories on slashdot and yet we can still laugh at them becuase most of the time we are not directly affected by it. However, as ridiculous and terrible as most software and business patents are, they will be NOTHING compared to the next big trend in patents--genetics/DNA engineering. When some soulless companies in the future robbed people of a cure for a genetic diease because somehow they claim to 'invent' it, I bet most of us won't be laughing.
Patent reforms need to start NOW, or else it'd be too late and by then we (the general populace) would be too powerless to stop it.
Here's a place where patents really suck: a good idea gets sat on and cannot be used by people would could make into something good.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
is
"N-T-I... Oh, Non-Terrestrial Intelligence. That's Better than CIA..." (from the Abyss)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
You'll be hearing from our lawyers shortly.
~~~~~~~~
Blackboard Inc.
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_8354619
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.
... that you could copyright a system for crashing browsers, infuriating mac users, and pissing off entire universities from students to faculties to staff.
What a country!
not another victory for this POS product. I have to use it for my own studies and half the time *I can't even log in*, let alone do anything useful. Arbitrarily laggy with random disconnects. And most of my professors use it minimally, if it at all. Stupid POS.
'Number-memorizing Chinese people.'-Anon
This is really no different than patenting something as obvious as a grocery store. Gee, I'll patent a store that sells food, and other items... then sue all the existing supermarkets. Yet, here we are (as stated previously) looking at something as obvious as differing user roles.
What's next? Patent moderator status on websites?
I am open source, and Linux baby!
I looked at BOTH sites, Blackboard, and Desire2Lean, and both their products tried my patience, as far as the demos go.
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?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
... and those of us who are actually in the business of teaching and/or learning can get on with it.
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.
A few years back, we had Blackboard on our campus. It was horrible and I refused to use it [Techie aside: Take a look at some of their JavaScript, it is bloated and beyond ugly]. However, someone persuaded the students that Blackboard was a wonderful thing. So much so, that their organizations petitioned the administration to make Blackboard mandatory for all classes. I don't know if the student leaders were bribed, but it would not surprise me -- it is sad to say how easily some people can be bought for the price of a couple of pizzas.
The students proposed a 'Blackboard is mandatory' motion that went through all the relevant committees. Fortunately, the Faculty Senate were rational enough to amend the motion to advocate not just Blackboard, but also 'equivalent technologies'. This left the way open for people to even use simple web pages.
Then the next thing you know is that Blackboard suddenly wanted a HUGE amount of money for the new version -- much more money than we could ever afford. The techs basically told them to go to hell, kept on using the older version while they could and began to experiment with Moodle. As one of of the more technically sophisticated people on our campus, I was one of the beta-testers for our Moodle implementation. It is always a fun job trying to break software! Although early versions of the implementation had quite a few rough edges, pretty soon, Moodle was up and running in a slick manner. Thus, for a short time, we actually had both versions. Also during this period, negotiations with Blackboard continued, largely without much progress. Eventually their greed was too much. Blackboard was just scrapped. It was not just the cost of the software, but also the hardware requirements that were ridiculous, which killed the system for us. We have now moved entirely to Moodle, which is doing very well, even if a few people were initially unhappy about the change. Hopefully, more schools will be inspired by the predatory nature of the Blackboard people to get that monkey off their collective backs.
In a final irony, just before the decision was made to pull the plug on Blackboard was made, one of my students demonstrated to me a method by which he could crack Blackboard and change the grades of assignments with relative ease. The main point here though is that behaving like bastards can ultimately have a business cost. I say to hell with Blackboard, support Moodle instead -- after all, it is open source!
I'm an undergrad Computer Science student. We have two competing systems at my university: one's a simple in-house system that allows all people from the school to view the material for each course in the spirit of free education if they want to. It does the job with minimal hassle. The other is WebCT (now Blackboard) which restricts access to information and education.
Guess which one's more popular.
-1 not first post
Well, my prediction back in 2006 was way off.
Prior art was out there (including from the company I worked for), but neither Desire2Learn nor the educational community provided enough organizational will and competence to find it and kill this patent lawsuit. I personally spent hours of my time gathering prior art evidence as well as soliciting teachers and developers to help fight this. After tepid responses from both sides (including a form-letter sent one month later from Desire2Learn), I shrugged and walked away.
Hopefully this doesn't affect open source LMSes such as Moodle or Sakai, but if it does then the EDU community has only itself to blame for not stepping up to the plate.
maybe they'll dump their winnings into a good developer who can code his way out of the shitstorm that is blackboard
C7 C4 25 8A 11 BB 0D 40 8F 4E 4E 47 CA F0 BE 5B
There's always TestTrack LMS. www.ttlms.com
Course development and deployment all online.
It's more focused on corporations, not academia, however.
It lacks the chat rooms you might find in similar tools.
I think we've stumbled across a software vendor that /.ers hate more than microsoft! Isn't that horseman #2?
I'm not sure if it's been mentioned but there is a new, free, open source alternative to Blackboard/WebCT. It's called the Sakia project [http://sakaiproject.org/]. My university (The University of Delaware) is slowing rolling it out this spring to 9 classes in different colleges. I can say as an user of Blackboard in Undergrad and WebCT in Grad at Delaware, it's very simple to use and easy to navigate. My class has many adults students who normally whine about IT but they've all found it simple to use. My professor says that it is worlds apart from WebCT on his side of it. We've experienced no downtime with Sakia, meanwhile the rest of the campus is having issues with WebCT going on and offline on a daily basis.
As you can see from the website, Sakia is spreading like wildfire and might be coming to an University near you! I can report that my usage of this semester has made me a believer in it.
-JS
I am building a student-driven Facebook app called Tassl. It does not have user roles, so it is probably safe from this patent. It indexes course data from about 100 universities now and allows you to post assignments and exams in your course via your Facebook account. It also has a News Feed that keeps you up to date when stuff is coming up that is due. Check it out. Does anyone think I am screwed here?
--
Blackboards implementation of this technology is shockingly bad (Im being nice with that comment) so they will have to start fixing these problem or watch the market stagnate. If I was Desire2Learn I would patent all the improvements/methods (totally legal) and then submarine Blackboard every time they try and improve their product.
NASA had a project in the 90's that did the very same thing with user roles in a multiuser training session. It was called ICTT. If it's not too late, maybe D2L can save themselves. I'm sure at least one of the developers wouldn't mind giving his opinion.
In general, no, they don't have to change, they just have to be APPLIED the way they are supposed to be. The law already says that obvious ideas, or ideas that are embodied in "prior art", are not patentable. But if the court doesn't pay attention to the law, then the law doesn't matter much, does it? Changing the law would not make a difference.
On the other hand, I do agree with you on the DNA thing. We should have really revamp that particular area.
Yeah, but as I like to tell my students, at least Moodle sucks for FREE. And, as a survivor of Blackboard as a student, Blackboard certainly sucks.
That sucking sound you here at my university at least (public, California) is the sound of an incredible amount of public funds getting sucked into the sucky monopoly that Blackboard is.
There are large open-source projects that compete in this space. Why aren't universities moving towards them instead of BlackBoard and other commercial products?
Does the following count as patent infringement?:
//Do stuff
//Do stuff
DB Table: Users
PK: userID (int)
Field: name (varchar)
DB Table: Class
PK: classID (int)
Field: Lecturer (Users.userID)
Field: Student (Users.userID)
Method: access
if (Class.isLecturer(curUser)){
}else if (Class.isStudent(curUser)){
}
I did a project like that in high school.
As a prof I tried out WebCT a few year ago just as my university was upgrading to Vista. My experience, using Firefox on Linux at the time, was initially limited to being told that I needed to "upgrade" to Internet Explorer or Mozilla! After fixing that with a quick user agent switch I was then told that I needed to install Java...at this point I gave up and tried Moodle and have never looked back. It turned out that this was a very good thing because the new Vista version completely overloaded the university's servers and caused HUGE problems for courses relying on it.
When I first started using Moodle I worried about what the students would think of having to use a different system from the official one. The feedback from the students was extremely positive and had helpful suggestions for improvements, which being Open Source I could actually implement! When asked to compare it to WebCT their language was, shall we say, colourful! I can honestly say that, having used Moodle for several years now it is one of the areas where OpenSource software is not just copying the leader it IS the leader. The fact that I (or my students) can come up with an idea, add it into Moodle myself and then see how well it works is fantastic. This lets me not only be innovative with my research but with my teaching too.
Because the people in charge of actually making the purchasing decisions are (a) idiots; (b) corruptible; (c) never going to use the thing anyway.
Correction:
"A non-terrestrial intelligence. NTIs. Oh man, that's better than UFOs."
When I grow up, I will be that guy.
Since when was "math.university.edu/~smith/math102/" not good enough? What does Blackboard provide that plain HTML doesn't? Apart from the ability to post grades, nothing that I have seen people use. Most of the professors I've taken courses from use it like an FTP server -- which begs the question of why they don't just do that, for much cheaper.
But my objections to Blackboard run deeper than its lousy cost/benefit ratio: Blackboard locks down information: I can find Mr. Smith's Math 102 page through Google, and I can look at his lecture notes. Blackboard, I need to sign in to. The Internet has the potential to be a wonderful educational tool -- it already is -- and Blackboard subverts that.
Death to blackboard. Viva OpenCourseWare, or, just as good, the simple homepage.
... for all you frustrated users out there (and apparently you are legion). I have absolutely no experience with Blackboard, Moodle, or any other product in this category for that matter, so excuse me if this is a dumb question.
A lot of the responses in this thread seem to fall into one of two categories:
So my question is, why don't a few of the universities that fall into the first category take some of the money they are plowing into Blackboard licenses (which presumably is quite a chunk of change) and use it hire some developers to improve Moodle to the point where it does not suck?
That would seem to be the best way to get to the place you all want to be (using software that is both inexpensive and non-sucky). Why isn't anyone doing it?
Read my blog.
I have used BB, WebCT, and now D2L, which is the mandatory software for "optional" use by the instructors from my understanding at all TBR (Tennessee Board of Regents) schools. BB and WebCT was bad from a teacher and a student point of view. When we were switched to D2L, I really found out what bad is. It sucks so hard my eyes roll back in my head every time I have to use it. The teachers say they hate it more than BB. I know I do, for I have had to retake online tests that it "lost" somehow (screenshots saved my butt), it does not always show sections for classes you are enrolled into (the IT guys and instructors are dumbfounded as to why myself and others have this issue), and it has locked out instructors as well as lost turned in assignments. The first 2 weeks of school nobody could even log into it. We were told it was a D2L issue, and nothing more. I have no clue if it was software or hardware related, but the same thing happens at the beginning of every semester since we started using D2L last semester.
Many instructors at my school said to hell with it and email to us the things we need rather than attempting to post it for us to download. Everyone hates it for it is simply not reliable. I wish my school would use the internal resources they have to code something better based on open source software. Sadly, they prefer to spend our (student) monies on crap and raise tuition rather than be practical and use the knowledge and resources already available to them. It is very frustrating.
Whomever decided to use this software at TN universities has an occular rectism (asshole nerve connected to the eyeball nerve giving a shitty outlook on life) IMHO. It sure was a bad decision I think. BB and D2L both do not come close to what they need to be. Both options are simply a way to milk the institutions and students of money. I have nothing against someone trying to make a buck, don't get me wrong, but at least have a quality product for the high cost involved, not beta software. The quality to price ratio here is skewed badly it seems.
"This is America... where the will of the few outweigh the outrage of the many..." - Unknown
As far as I'm aware, forums have had moderators vs posters for a very long time. Sysadmin vs smtp user; IRC chatter vs IRC op; etc. How the hell can they patent one user having multiple roles in a system? IRC, at least, has been around since the 80's, so it's already an expired patent, at worst.
-DrkShadow
Just curious, but if the US Trade and Patent Office is
allowing such stupid patents, why isn't anyone suing them
for that harmful stupidity?
Seems more to the point to kick the 'weak link' in the balls
than to chase around every shoe-shine in the town.
I have never used BlackBoard. But just reading all the comments I have come to the conclusion it is a "collaboration training tool". It may be that it trains you to collaboratively dislike something together.
No wonder that from the dawn of technological history, everyone who put some thought into this kind of protection ended up with a devastating indictment of business method/software patents: Quite an insightful link (tracing the take of intellectual aces and geek heroes on IP through times and ages) has recently been posted at http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=462352&cid=22512878.
Or, for that matter, like groups in UNIX?
I have also been a blackboard admin for about five years. The above post is 100% true.
Here is a short list of Blackboard annoyances:
It produces hundreds of megabytes of absolutely useless logs every day.
These logs are basically consist of tomcat java core dumps which seemingly happen every second of the day. These java dumps are completely useless unless you are a java programmer, and even if you are a java programmer, blackboard does not provide the source to their jar files. You could probably decompile them, but who would want to given Blackboard's history of suing over IP.
The built in log archiving utility doesn't work.
With all of these goddamn logs, you would think proper log management is surely something Blackboard integrates into their product, right? Wrong. They include a nice little log file archiving utility but it contains precisely zero options on how to archive them, and it frequently fails to zero out logs, leaving you with gigabytes of log files after a short time. Many BB admins, including myself, have their own script to manage logs.
It's built primarily on Tomcat.
Everything I've ever seen that was built on Tomcat has been either unstable, dog slow, or both. One version of Blackboard shipped with a version of Tomcat that leaked threads, causing BB administrators all over the planet to have to restart the tomcat processes on their BB servers every 7-14 days.
Their support is nearly non-existent
Unless you say your server is down, support tickets generally take weeks, and in some cases months to get resolved. Simple ("non-critical") cases are all but ignored. Support reps have been known to answer with a polite equivalent of "RTFM". I was given the "RTFM" response to the case I put in regarding tomcat leaking threads. They never resolved the case. Instead I ended up monitoring threads and restarting tomcat by hand. When we updated to a new version of Blackboard the problem magically went away. I'm not completely sure, but I think Blackboard never even realized that they were shipping a buggy version of Tomcat. They accidentally fixed it by shipping a newer version in a later release.
They use incredibly inefficient stored procedures which can bring down an entire system
Most of the complex processes, like deleting entire courses or students are carried out via stored procedures in the database (BB runs on SQL Server and Oracle). In SQL server, the stored procedures are extremely inefficient and can suck up so much memory that they bring the entire system to a grinding halt. I ran across this when trying to delete a bunch of very old courses in our system. In researching the problem I read that the use of cursors was a huge no-no in SQL server (but okay in Oracle!). The stored procedure that deletes courses was, of course, written using cursors. Not being a skilled DBA, I could not rewrite the SP myself, so instead I broke it up into parts and has a script run the individual parts on all of the courses I wanted to delete.
Their implementation of a poll is sheer genius, I do hope they got a patent on that too!
The great thing about it? It's trivial to vote multiple times, even though you have to be logged in to vote. Just open the frame which contains the poll in a new window, submit the poll and reload, reload reload...
More blatant fun? Write a few lines of Perl that logs you in and submits the poll, say a few thousand times. For your added convenience they made the vote a GET instead of a POST.
Remember: it's a feature, not a bug!
You don't patent "mouse trap" you patent A mousetrap. A particular design that, when followed, produces a device that traps mice. But NOT the *idea* of trapping mice, or the idea that you'd use a spring loaded device to do so.
trapping mice by snapping a wire across them: method
Diagram so you can BUILD one: implementation
So if you made a mousetrap and someone changed some wibbles so that it did the same thing but made it cheaper to produce, you get a new patent.
I designed and built two open source LMS (BBALearn and Xical/XicalServ) between 2000 and 2004. They both have a relatively solid object model and thus - unbelievably so - do seperate from the user and his roles in the system. For instance, being a tutor and a scholar at the same time.
There must be countless examples of this, why didn't they claim prior art?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The university I attend uses cash registers with Blackboard stickers on the back. Not sure if they were made by Blackboard or are just Blackboard compatible...
I agree with the general sentiment that the CMS part of Blackboard bites, but the school (and students) seem quite happy with the way their commerce suite works.
did anyone else read it as Blackbeard?
Blackboard the Pirate
The university I attended in the 80's long had a practice of advanced students teaching classes for professors. We called them T.A.'s, short for "Teaching Assistants". As I understand it, this practice has been going on for centuries at many universities.
Whew! This water sure is cold!
Let's get all these different LMS out of the way so that there is only blackboard left. And everyone who goes to school has only 1 interface to view, and we can all pay a BlackBoard tax, much like the Windows tax. That is so great, let's do it again.
Nobody cares about LMS. I maintain and develop LogiCampus, and I've had 1 or 2 forum posts in the past year. I even offered to give free upgrades to anyone who asked for them. The time to care about LMS is gone, every school buys Blackboard because they *have* to buy something. They can't use open source products, that doesn't fit into the budget somehow. Everybody uses wikipedia and blackboard, and that's fine because I'm done with college and institutionalized learning. Have a great education every body younger than me! Just make sure it's the exact same one as your neighbor's.
We all know that the business world doesn't function on the best choices. It functions on the least painful choice, or the most obvious choice, neither of which are usually the best choice.
I once did an evaluation of 5 open source LMS so, I know that there is lots of choice out there. The problem is that nobody cares. A lot of people like to complain about things like blackboard suing people, but nobody actually does anything. If you want to do something about it, go to your local opensource LMS provider and give some feedback, write some documentation, or run some tests. It's the only way to make the alternative choices more attractive to the decision makers.
I would like to know how the information was presented to the jury and whether or not the court did one of those things something like "the patent is not on trial here. the jury must assume the patent is valid. you can only use information A,B,C to make your decision" etc. I just want a clear and concise synopsis of how they got X people to decide unanimously in BB's favor. I can't help but imagine myself in the jury box, and I don't know what they could possibly say to me to go along with that unless there is way more to the story or more substance to the claim. But from skimming the previous slashdot threads on the BB patents, I don't see anything that leads me to believe there may be any real substance to the claim. So what was the jury's thinking exactly? Anyone have any insights?
I wrote an on-line education system as a project in College in '96-'97 based on hacking a security model into a perl based web board system. It actually worked surprisingly well until the server ran out of disk space and the forums ended up eating themselves (mmm, flat files for teh lose).
Sadly it sounds like Blackboard's system isn't a whole lot better as commercial software written a decade later. If it weren't for the patent trolling I might even consider redoing my original system. I had that multi-role capability which predates their patent. Anybody could make a classroom and anybody could be a student or a teacher, so I guess I beat them to that.
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In the Open University of Israel we have course ware that allows the same user to serve several roles based on identity/course/semester combination for several years already, probably predating the discussed patent. I don't know that exact claims of the patent, but I'm sure that the system here is prior art at least to some aspects. I have instructor privileges in courses where I'm an instructor, course coordinator privileges in courses I coordinate, and since I was a student in the past I also have student access to data on courses I took as a student, although the fact that the last course I took here was in 1984 means that there's not much to see except my grades. Students that took courses in this millennium can access the materials that have permissions for the semester they took the course on or that have permissions for all semesters. So perhaps some details in Desire2Learn's implementation infringe on some particular claims in Blackboard's patent, but I think it is possible to have a rich role oriented course management system that is fully covered by prior art implemented in a course management system. Not that I think that someone should be allowed to patent an existing role dependent permissions system just because the context is different from the context where it was previously implemented, or that such obvious things should be allowed to be patented. Multiple role based permissions models existed long before the computer existed, even in education institutions (Charles Dickens might provide prior art reference?)
I've built apps on Tomcat that had none of those problems. Tomcat, being free, ends up being the default of folks trying to do things on the cheap. Thus it has a certain gravitational pull to people who are throwing together hacky, poorly considered projects, in a hurry, on the cheap.
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Banner is the most hacked together peice of shit software on the planet. Hands down. There is a reason the largest university system in the world (The California State University) spend millions of dollars switching to peoplesoft and ditching banner.
(Disclaimer - I don't know the patent in detail, I haven't read it, only the summaries here.)
;-)
I worked for a small UK-based LMS vendor between October 2000 and March 2006. We deployed a huge number of bespoke and off-the-shelf LMSs to customers, mostly in the UK but a few overseas. For the first year, I was their sole developer, and was responsible for maintenance of what was already in the wild. I'm not saying who they are here just in case Blackboard's lawyers are bored
Not one of these systems prohibited administrators from running courses, and I can't think of any reason why we would have done - I met near enough all our clients in the early stages of their projects and I don't remember any ever querying this. It'd have been more work to reduce functionality and (through likely user habits) security. Admins had all the normal tools you'd expect, could do any monitoring, mentoring etc, and could also run courses.
The idea that a jury of my peers could consider my _not_ doing something stupid to be an amazing innovation is frankly horrifying. Something has gone horribly wrong here.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Pfizer for example, in 2003 it acquired the company that owned the rights to the Apo A1-Milano Protein that can CURE heart disease as we know it with one shot every 10 years or so. For those of you who don't know, Pfizer makes lipitor which you have to take for the REST of your life and it doesn't work as well (if at all) in preventing heart disease as the A1 Milano Protein. What do you think happened to the development of this cure? No one else can develop it because Pfizer owns the rights to it now. Millions of people will needlessly die from preventable heart disease which Pfizer makes billions selling the useless lipitor drug. Is anyone doing anything about it? No....
How on earth could this obvious concept be patented? In life, we refer to it as people wearing multiple hats. Web app tools like Zope (I mention it because that's what I'm most familiar with) make it dead-easy to implement a single user having multiple roles, and different roles in different contexts. Each role has its own set of permissions. I'm scratching my head on this ruling.
I interviewed with Blackboard when they were a Perl shop (2000). I haven't had experience with their products, but judging from the comments here, I'm glad I didn't get that job.
Excuse the shameless plug, but there are alternatives to Blackboard. My company, HAIKU Learning Systems, Inc. developed haiku LMS, a Web 2.0 style LMS for K12 and higher ed. Many of the posts in this discussion reference Blackboard's poor interface, high costs, frustrating code base, etc. Some of us in the LMS space care about the user experience. We care... primarily because we want learners to learn. THAT, after all, is what LMS technology SHOULD be about.
I've used WebCT which is a bit old fashioned. But it's OK.
But Blackboard really sux even as a student the discussion boards take forever to load once they have more than 70 or so threads.
The Unis would do better if they built something based on Facebook code.
I think the only reason Blackboard has such massive market share is bribes paid to Uni Elites. It's certainly is because it's cheap.
"We should use what Harvard use... Blackboard!"
"Where would you like to go for lunch today!"
Blackboard is a marketing tool for Microsoft LMS systems. They just don't realise it yet. Nor do they realise how quickly they can be dropped.
Yani
We use D2L @ the University of Wisconsin. Last time I checked D2L has a "Compile for Printing" option in the content section of the course. It lets you selectively choose which course documents to compile in to one page that can be printed (as PDF for that matter) or copied in one swoop. That method's easier for most folks to deal with rather than learning how to deal with a command line application. I haven't used curl often, but I think its safe to say that its not available on *most* end users' systems that would be enrolled in a course.
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If all you want to do is serve up static web pages, then yeah, why would you bother with any sort of CMS/LMS? We use it to facilitate totally online courses (i.e. faculty/students never meet face2face) so