Blackboard suing Desire2Learn again?

SouthEastTexasRecord.com, an online news site focused on legal news, is reporting that Blackboard filed another patent infringement lawsuit against D2L in Lufkin, TX. According to the news site:

Lufkin Division


March 16

Blackboard Inc. vs. Desire2Learn Inc.

Plaintiff Blackboard claims it owns the rights to U.S. Patent No. 7,493,396 issued Feb. 17 for an Internet-Based Education Support System and Method.

The complaint states that the '396 Patent is a continuation of U.S. Patent No. 6,988,138, of which "Desire2Learn is an adjudicated infringer."

Blackboard alleges Desire2Learn infringes the '396 Patent through products and services including the Desire2Learn eLearning Enterprise Suite, Desire2Learn Learning Environment, Learning Environment, ePortfolio, LiveRoom, Essentials, the Holding Tank and all services supporting the products.

The plaintiff also alleges that the infringements have been willful and deliberate, and will continue unless enjoined by the court.

Blackboard is seeking compensatory damages, treble damages, attorneys' fees, interest, costs and other relief as the court deems just and proper.

J. Thad Heartfield of the Heartfield Law Firm in Beaumont and attorneys from McDermott Will & Emery LLP offices in Houston, Irvine, Calif., and Washington, D.C., are representing the plaintiff.

The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Ron Clark.

Case No. 9:09-cv-040-RC

I'm sure court documents will be available soon. Then we'll know what issues are at the core of this one.

Blackboard awarded another new patent

I learned that Blackboard was granted a new patent (#7,493,396) on February 17, 2009. According to the patent, this is a continuation of their controversial "Internet-based education support system and methods" patent (#6,988,138) upon which their much-publicized lawsuit against Desire2Learn was based.

Can anyone explain the differences in these two patents?

Choose a new LMS using integrated multi-criteria decision making approach

Imagine you're tasked with selecting a new course/learning management system for your institution. Obviously you will want to involve the various stakeholders (a group that is growing in diversity each year, by the way) and identify a laundry list of criteria. But how do you develop an objective method for evaluating various systems?

I just came across the following paper that describes "an integrated multiple criteria decision making approach, which combines the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and quality function deployment (QFD), to evaluate and select the best system. The evaluating criteria are derived from the requirements of those who use the system."

Measuring performance of virtual learning environment system in higher education
William Ho, Helen E. Higson, Prasanta K. Dey, Xiaowei Xu, Rami Bahsoon
Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 17 No. 1, 2009 pp. 6-29

Article URL for subscribers:
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/09684880910929908

I admit that I had no idea what AHP meant. (According to the QFD Institute: The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a mathematically rigorous, proven process for prioritization and decision-making. By reducing complex decisions to a series of pair-wise comparisons, then synthesizing the results, decision-makers arrive at the best decision with a clear rationale for that decision.) OK...that sounds useful and relevant to the process of selecting a C/LMS in my mind.

Oh, "QFD is a comprehensive quality system that systematically links the needs of the customer with various business functions and organizational processes", according to the QFD Institute.

The article elaborates on this analytical process. Skimming to the conclusion, I find that the authors explain the value in this approach for institutions with existing VLEs:

"...the proposed approach can support the decision makers of universities in reviewing their existing VLE systems and determining whether it is necessary to replace the existing systems by a better one...[T]he proposed approach can [also] support the VLE system developers in analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, and also identifying the opportunities and threats against the competing systems."

Unfortunately, I don't have time now to dive deeper into this topic or mentally apply it to my own institution's environment. (It does make me wonder what analytical process was used 6+ years ago when UW switched from WebCT to Desire2Learn.)

I will, however, be saving this article for future reference.

Wiki-based Text: Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning

George Siemens and Peter Tittenberger have led the effort to create a great online text at the University of Manitoba titled "Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning".

The handbook is delivered through UM's MediaWiki platform. Not only is it an excellent and evolving resource for practitioners in our field, but it is a fine example of how a modern text resource can be constructed and used for a course or series of courses.

Google, Moodle, Lurking Instructors, and other Tidbits

There have been a number of interesting news items appearing recently.

--
Moodlerooms announced that it is offering single sign-on integration with Google Applications Education Edition.

No doubt that students, faculty, and staff need modern collaborative productivity tools and all universities should be currently working to find an adequate solution to this pressing need. However, announcing a single sign-on integration is not quite as groundbreaking as press releases lead readers to believe. I would expect any new collaborative app that a university acquires to provide single sign-on through the campus's primary authentication system.

It will be interesting to track the growth of Moodlerooms. Universities can now completely outsource both their learning management and collaborative productivity systems...assuming they can reach agreements with the vendors over intellectual property issues.

--
Add Embanet to the growing assortment of open source ePortfolio systems available. Abilene Christian University, who does not shy away from launching innovative learning technology initiatives (or press releases), outsources their distance education delivery management to Embanet. ACU's vision of "mLearning" and the future of their campus is a very interesting read.

--
Students at the University of South Dakota, my alma mater, are discussing the issue of instructors tracking their activity within Desire2Learn.

This is 2009 -- don't they realize that they should assume all their web activity is likely to be tracked in some way or another? My hope is that instructors realize that a student's LMS usage data is only one small window into understanding the extent to which the student is learning.

--
I am very excited to be working with the faculty and staff who are delivering "American Foreign Policy: A History of U.S. Grand Strategy from 1901 to the Present" to both local UW students as well as a contingent of deployed military officers.

Instructors are planning to leverage a combination of Desire2Learn, iTunes U, and possibly our homegrown open-source media/presentation aggregator eTEACH to deliver the course.

And they're all integrated with single sign-on authentication.

--
Here is a great tutorial on setting up all sorts of privacy features in Facebook.

Struggling with centrally-offered tools

Hitting the target, but missing the bullseye?

I have to admit that lately I've been having a hard time feeling enthused about the suite of IT tools that are available from and supported by our central IT unit on campus...particularly when these tools are examined through the lens of teaching and learning. (Disclaimer here: I am gratefully and happily employed by the same central IT division so my goal here is not to rail on anyone or any group. Rather, I hope to articulate something I have felt but not coherently realized till rather recently.)

Earlier this week, a colleague and I were invited by an instructor to come to his graduate class and "give a demo of the collaborative tools that are available at UW". I thought this should not be that hard of a request to fulfill.

As my colleague and I prepped for the demo, we put together a list of likely tools to demo:
- Xythos, our campus file storage and web space system
- Desire2Learn Learning Environment, our primary learning management system
- WiscChat, our Jabber-based instant messaging system
- WiscCal, our Oracle-based shared calendar system
- Adobe Connect, our live meeting system

I felt a dilemma when I considered the nature of the course. The course happens to be a GIS/urban planning course on mapping mashups. The two instructors and their students are already participating fully in today's online world...or they will be very soon. The instructor had a Wordpress blog created for the course. He was discussing the merits of open source GIS software. In class, he was extolling Google Earth, Google Maps, and KML. I realized that these folks are not cutting-edge techno-pioneers...they are typical professionals (or professionals-to-be) wanting to stay current in their field.

The centrally-available tools above do have their strengths and have been enlisted to meet certain needs of the past.

For collaboration, Xythos provides a secure and robust file and web storage space. D2L gives students a group space for sharing files and a traditional discussion board for asynchronous communication. WiscChat and WiscCal, like the other tools, are available to all students and staff through a single campus ID.

However, as soon as I began thinking about what the students really need, I became rather disheartened. For their group projects in this course, students need to be able create mashups and share them with others. Students need to be able to share resources they discovered with others. Students need to be able to show their finished product to each other and to future or current employers not associated with UW.

The aforementioned campus tools seemed to fall short of what the students really needed.

One tool was different. Adobe Connect raised our enthusiasm levels...but why? It meets their need to connect with each other while the instructor is out of state a few times during the course. Additionally, it's a very cool tool: multiple live video feeds, ability to share presentations or even desktops, and it's available at no cost to the instructor or students.

We also briefly mentioned that they might consider using Google Docs to collaboratively create documents and presentations. We also mentioned that they might find pbwiki easy to use.

When these topics were raised, a number of people nodded their heads in agreement. Many of the students have already used these modern web apps and know how well they work.

Unlike when I gave virtually the same demo to a similar course 2+ years earlier, students' expectations have been affected by the proliferation of Web 2.0 tools. Our campus tools feel clunky and outdated by comparison.

In the end, I'm optimistic that the students will find tools to meet their group work needs. I just won't wager that those tools will be found in the current UW tool set.

"bulls eye" photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/loungerie/36796446/

Desire2Learn usage at UW-Madison

Now that the fall semester has ended (yikes, January and the Super Bowl have passed too!), I checked in on the data regarding D2L (Learn@UW) use here at UW. My hunch is that the trends we are seeing here reflect trends in other North American universities.

Active Course Sites
This is the stat most commonly referenced on campus, probably because it is the easiest to understand...at first. This is the number of course sites that were activated by instructors over the course of a semester. This data includes "non-timetable" courses such as used for non-credit outreach courses and internal administration. The trend shows a general increase but not at as dramatic a pace as in previous years. Obviously, there is a natural limit that will be reached for official timetable courses. The last time I compared this data with total number of courses offered, we were at approximately 30%.



Unique Users in Activated Course Sites
How many different people are we serving through our central course management system? Again, this measure is trending upward towards a logical upper limit. I am amazed that we are serving over 30,000 different people each semester. At UW, there are approximately 42,000 students and 2,000 faculty (not including the plethora of TA's and lecturers who are big users of the CMS).



Total Enrollments in Active Course Sites
This is where, I think, things get interesting. This is one stat that seems to still show linear upward growth. "Total Enrollments" is the sum of every course's total number of members, instructors + students. This data shows that the typical user has more courses in Learn@UW now than in the past. I wonder when we will hit the point where courses that do not have an online component are in the minority.



Help Desk Cases
Although not yet updated with Fall 2008 data, this too is quite interesting and satisfying. Although we are seeing a general increase in use of Learn@UW, use of the Help Desk for Learn@UW is not increasing proportionally. In fact, there's evidence that it might be decreasing.

This data does not show the total amount of support provided for Learn@UW across campus, just those official cases coming through the campus Help Desk. Hopefully, this data shows that more people are using Learn@UW without the need for support. Fewer bugs exist in the software than ever before. Performance and up-time have been outstanding for the past 6 months, at least. And indeed, there is something to be said for users' familiarity with a complex system.



Obviously, numbers are only part of the story. The real story lies within each course and in the value derived by the instructors and students. That's why I still love to be involved with faculty at workshops, brown bags, and 1-1 consultations. I enjoy hearing directly from them what is working, what needs improving, and ideas on how we can help.