Slashdot Mirror
Khan Academy Seeks Patent On Education A/B Testing
theodp writes: The Education Revolution will be patented. USPTO records show that Khan Academy is seeking a patent for Systems and Methods for Split Testing Educational Videos. From the patent application: "Systems and methods are provided for comparing different videos pertaining to a topic. Two different versions of an educational video may be compared using split comparison testing. A set of questions may be provided along with each video about the topic taught in the video. Users may view one of the videos and answer the questions. Data about the user responses may be aggregated and used to determine which video more effectively conveys information to the viewer based on the question responses." Now it's up to the USPTO to decide if something like the test and control studies conducted 40+ years ago (pdf) by the PLATO system to measure the effectiveness of different teaching methods would count as prior art. In response to an earlier post on Khan Academy's pending patents on learning computer programming and 'social programming,' Slashdot user Khan Academy said that the nonprofit is using patents for good, so not to worry.
Gandalf: Don't... tempt me Frodo! I dare not take it. Not even to keep it safe. Understand, Frodo. I would use this ring from a desire to do good... But through me, it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine.
Some how I think Sal Khan is less high minded than Gandalf...
Caldera was once a very pro-open source company. Then they morphed into The SCO Group. Top executives come and go.
As the summary states, Khan follows Twitter's patent pledge. This is a good first step as far as it goes, but it still explicitly allows for offensive litigation if the "inventor" agrees. That's not sufficient. At the very minimum, Khan should adopt a clear, irrevocable policy never to enforce patents against open source projects, like many Patent Commons participants. Ideally it should partner with Creative Commons to work out an even stronger patent license, consistent with its mission. CC has previously developed model patent licenses and I'm sure they'd be happy to help.
If the Khan Academy user who originally posted in Slashdot in response is reading this -- please bring these resources to the attention of management.
I actually read the patent application and it is bullshit; the summary isn't misleading. Normally when a Slashdot headline says "Company X trying to patent Y", that really means Company X is trying to patent some specific invention RELATED to Y. Not this time. They're actually trying to patent A/B testing of videos.
To prevent this patent from being issued, someone needs to send USPTO -printed- prior art such as a magazine or journal article describing A/B testing of educational videos. Along with the printed prior art, they need to include a "301" letter. The letter and prior art will become part of the patent file which should be examined before any patent is issued.
There's no need to patent the incredibly obvious when patenting the merely obvious will do!
Although Blackboard has filed patent lawsuits against competitors (and was briefly boycotted for it), it at least has issued an irrevocable patent pledge not to sue open source projects. I suspect ignorance, not foul play, on the part of Khan Academy is the cause.
Ironically, nonprofit Khan Academy's Twitter pledge is less permissive than that of the corporate behemoth, since it reserves the right to sue anyone, for any reason, provided company and "inventor" agree. Not sure OIN is a good fit for its needs given its close tie to usage of patents within "Linux systems". Something like CC's model patent license or a simple, broad pledge never to use patents offensively against anyone may be a better fit.
KA's policy error here is likely the result of swimming in the Silicon Valley ideological soup, where Twitter's pledge is considered remarkable. KA has never been an especially awesome organization when it comes to open source citizenry. For example, it uses the "non-commercial use" restriction for its materials, which is widely rejected within open source and free culture circles like Wikimedia, Linux, etc. Hopefully this will change over time as the organization becomes more aware of the policy discussions around these issues, since a lot of its work is otherwise excellent and world-changing.
khaaaaaan!
Most education majors are aware of that despite the fact that A/B testing is ubiquitous, it lacks serious reliability and/or validity as a serious methodology for evaluating teaching techniques or evaluation models for those techniques. It's a sad comment on the state of online training that most methodologies end up being evaluated in this fashion. Teachers use A/B testing because it's quick and easy as a way of putting some kind of data point in a teaching or evaluation process; it's time for online training to understand this and work to rise above such primitively approaches in creating new teaching techniques involving the increasing use of technology. It's only in this way that online education can truly compete with conventional education practices.
They are creating a patent portfolio so they can counter-sue other companies that may sue them. Doesn't matter if the patents are bogus.. it takes time and lawyers fees to go through the federal courts. And the patent system isn't broken?
We need a patent system with more critical examiners. But the examiners are understaffed and only seem to rubber stamp patents anyway so lets create a separate court system for just patents; with an overstaffed public defenders office whose job it is to strike down patents. All patent must go before a judge before they are officially approved. Furthermore anyone in the public can sue to challenge the patent to augment the public defenders. And the judge must have the special responsibility to not approve a patent if he has any doubt. Meaning it's up to whomever submitted the patent to prove their case and that all issues have been brought up. Make it mandatory that the patent has to serve the public's interest; and in conjunction with that judgement make the term length of the patent variable. Furthermore the court should have the ability to set the valuation of a patent and to forcibly grant licenses to others.
I call absolute bullshit on this one. Language testing is about measuring a student's performance against one or more criteria. What Khan is apparently hoping to patent is a method for measuring the effectiveness of a piece of media, in this case video.
In the realm of text readability analysis this has a long history, perhaps the best-known technique being the Gunnar Fog Index, invented in 1952. The ubiquitous Cloze test, invented in the early fifties, was originally intended to measure and grade the reading difficulty of a piece of text.
So prior art aside, as far as I can make out Khan's product has nothing to do with the measurement of language skills.
But didn't Sesame street basically do this? They weren't giving an explicit B, but if the kids became less engaged than some metric suggested they should be then a B was created.
I have long stated that I feel like the entire patent system is just a useless waste of time and needs to be simply removed from the legal code of the USA in its entirety. The professed reason for why patents exist is to help small time inventors to be able to profit from their engineering efforts and to ensure that their ideas are protected for a limited time, as per the U.S. Constitution:
Article I, Section 8
Congress shall have power....
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
Kahn Academy is not even trying to accomplish this goal themselves. It is merely a defensive patent to ensure they don't get screwed by a patent troll.
I have yet to see anybody I personally know that has earned a dime from a patent. I know a few people who are professional engineers who have had patents filed from work they've done professionally.... where the patent filing fees were paid by their employers and were also largely defensive patents as well. I also know several people who have indeed gone through the effort to file a patent and go through the legal hassle of trying to get a cool idea patented, only to have the fancy patent grant letter from the USPTO being the only real thing they ever got from all of that money and effort.
I contrast that to at least copyright, where I do know of a few authors who have written books and through copyright have been able to earn some money from their writings, software, or artwork of various kinds. Copyright at least sort of works as intended to protect authors to have an exclusive right to their work for a limited time (that is now perpetual.... but a separate legal issue not relevant to this point).
Patents simply don't work. Even famous inventors like Philo Farnsworth and the Wright Brothers, people who clearly invented incredibly novel ideas after spending substantial amounts of money perfecting the concepts they are associated with, basically got taken for a ride by the patent system and ended up with only a small pittance from all of the legal efforts they expended.... and still didn't stop others from developing products and making huge amounts of money from their supposedly patented ideas.
Wicat System has prior art. Massive, government military contracted, prior art.
KA has never been an especially awesome organization when it comes to open source citizenry. For example, it uses the "non-commercial use" restriction for its materials, which is widely rejected within open source and free culture circles like Wikimedia, Linux, etc. Hopefully this will change over time as the organization becomes more aware of the policy discussions around these issues, since a lot of its work is otherwise excellent and world-changing.
Non-commercial is particularly insidious in the education system. When I was teaching English overseas, it was in commercial night-schools. A great many teachers started publishing their materials on a free "non-commercial" license, completely oblivious to the fact that they were technically blocking their colleagues from using it. Many schools are private entities, even some that are considered independent but still funded by the public purse, so that means KA doesn't get used there. Schools tend to buy in to textbook-led courses, all of which assume a certain ordering of materials; trying to integrate outside materials with a structured course is a very demanding task for a teacher, so most don't do it, and the teachers are locked out of materials unless the textbook authors have specifically integrated it, which they can't, because that would be "commercial use".
Very, very few schools can therefore make use of KA materials. Who does that leave? Not private tutors, certainly, because they are all clearly commercial entities.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
It looks like they're trying to patent experiments.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
but instead of rehashing a chunk of Groklaw i ask you this question
What is The SCO Group doing these days??
That should be a fairly easy list to compile, just list every company that has filed a patent in the last twenty years.
I withdrew my kids from the Khan academy when I read some samples questions.
"A Muslim died killing an infidel and gains 72 virgins. Demonstrate that even if he only has sex with one each day, that in eternity he will have more sex than all the infidels combined during the life of the universe".
" Hamid has 10kg of explosives. If 1kg has a 90% chance of killing an armoured car driver, and 500g a 40% chance which size bomb should he make in order to kill most people? For extra points why any this not be the best tactic in the real world?"
Is this true? Why do we put up with this, when there would be complaints if atextbook had even a slight religious bias?