{"id":165,"date":"2009-04-20T09:04:50","date_gmt":"2009-04-20T16:04:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/?p=165"},"modified":"2009-04-20T09:39:05","modified_gmt":"2009-04-20T16:39:05","slug":"can-blackboard-patent-online-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/can-blackboard-patent-online-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Blackboard patent online learning?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Image<\/a>
Image from noblackboard.org.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A lot of schools use a “learning management system” called Blackboard<\/a> to make course materials and registration functions available online. If you’ve ever used Blackboard, though, you know that it’s like a magic portal back to 1999.<\/p>\n

Blackboard’s design is truly hideous (frames everywhere!), the options for customizing course sites are dismal, and the interface makes even the simplest functions baffling. (Google “I hate Blackboard”<\/a> for some entertaining commentary.) The City University of New York recently got an object lesson in Blackboard’s shortcomings<\/a> when the system crashed and burned, paralyzing CUNY’s online functions.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Anyway, awesome news! Blackboard apparently believes<\/a> — with some backing from the U.S. Patent Office — that it is the originator and patentholder of the Learning Management System (LMS). (“LMS<\/a>” is what online-eduction types call the software for organizing and delivering online course material.) More specifically, Blackboard believes that it is the originator of “a course-management system where a single user with a single log-on could have multiple roles across multiple classes.<\/a>” So fervently does Blackboard believe this that it successfully sued<\/a> a competitor, Desire2Learn<\/a>, for patent infringement.<\/p>\n

There are ongoing challenges<\/a> to the lawsuit and to the patent itself. Most recently, Desire2Learn offered to donate a million dollars to non-profit educational institutions<\/a> if Blackboard agreed to drop its suit.<\/p>\n

Many schools are so grossed out by Blackboard that they’re looking at alternatives<\/a>, including open-source LMSs. Two major open-source alternatives are Sakai<\/a> and Moodle<\/a>. Yale uses Sakai and it’s okay — certainly better than Blackboard. It’s not clear how Blackboard’s lawsuit will affect Sakai and Moodle, but at least some people believe<\/a> that Blackboard’s patent is bad news for Sakai, Moodle, and other LMSs.<\/p>\n

Blackboard is baaaaaad, and this seems like a classic case of free-market economics: companies should not have monopolies, because the products they put out will be crappy and expensive.<\/p>\n

I’m intrigued by some fairly heated<\/a> bloggy<\/a> arguments<\/a> that LMSs in general are just wrongheaded<\/a>. (If you’re interested, “edupunk<\/a>” is the appropriate buzzword to Google<\/a>.) LMS opponents argue that the platforms needlessly privilege top-down, closed-access models of learning. These opponents favor more piecemeal approaches, in which educators cobble together wikis, blogs, and content-delivery software that meet their own needs.<\/p>\n

I like the anarchic spirit of these arguments, but I think it’s delusional to expect most professors to develop their own solutions to online content. I don’t think an LMS is necessarily bad, but I do believe most of the existing options are abysmal. And heavy-handed corporate control of LMSs make them even abysmal-er.<\/p>\n

For the last class I taught, at the University of Rhode Island, I obediently used Blackboard, but I’d definitely come up with my own (probably WordPress-based) solution if someone tried to make me use Blackboard again. That may be moot, though, since URI has switched to Sakai<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A lot of schools use a “learning management system” called Blackboard to make course materials and registration functions available online. If you’ve ever used Blackboard, though, you know that it’s like a magic portal back to 1999. Blackboard’s design is truly hideous (frames everywhere!), the options for customizing course sites are dismal, and the interface […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,45],"tags":[47,12,46,48],"class_list":["post-165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching","category-who-owns-what","tag-blackboard","tag-copyright","tag-lms","tag-patent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":173,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions\/173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}