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Blackboard Loses on Appeal

On July 27, 2009, a federal appeals court invalidated Blackboard Inc.’s 1999 patent for its learning management software, overturning a lower court’s decision last year finding that the Blackboard competitor Desire2Learn had infringed the giant’s intellectual property.

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Monday’s ruling by the appeals court is the latest development in a several-year court battle initiated by Blackboard in July 2006. The behemoth accused Desire2Learn of infringing dozens of Blackboard patents for online course management and e-learning technologies, and sought $17 million in damages and an injunction barring the Canadian company from continuing to infringe the patent.

After a two-week trial in Lufkin, Texas, a jury in a district court seen as friendly to patent holders ruled that Desire2Learn’s learning platform used technologies for which Blackboard received U.S. patents, known collectively as the ” ‘138 patent,” in January 2006. But its verdict gave the company far less than it was asking for, awarding Blackboard $2.5 million for lost profits and $630,000 in royalties. The district court invalidated 35 of the 38 claims that Blackboard made against Desire2Learn, but backed three other claims related to what constitutes a “user” of a learning management system.

Both companies appealed the parts of the case they’d lost to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has nationwide jurisdiction over U.S. patent claims. Its highly technical decision upheld the lower court’s conclusion that Blackboard’s claims 1-35 were invalid. But the three-judge panel rejected the lower court’s finding that Blackboard’s patented learning system had originated the approach of giving a single user with a single log-in multiple roles, such as being a teacher in one course and a student in another.

But Blackboard has already initiated another lawsuit against Desire2Learn, accusing the Canadian firm in April of infringing new U.S. patents that the company received on its software. So while company officials continue to reassure higher education technology officials and others that Blackboard has no intention of asserting its patent rights against “open source or home-grown course management systems that are not bundled with proprietary software,” they show no signs of retreating in the wake of Monday’s stinging defeat.

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New Systems Design Certificate Program

We are excited to announce the launch of a new online certificate program created by Cornell’s Engineering School in collaboration with eCornell – Customer-Focused Product and Service Design.

This program is relevant to anyone who participates in new product or service development or is involved in a new company initiative.  In just 3 months, you can learn to define and develop a new product or service to satisfy any set of requirements.

Learn more about this program.

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A Gripe Session at Blackboard

At an open “listening session” with top executives of Blackboard on July 15 at the company’s annual conference, college officials
expressed frustration with many of the system’s fundamental characteristics. At times, the meeting seemed to turn into a communal gripe session, with complaints ranging from the system’s discussion forum application, to the improved–but still lacking–user support, to the training materials for faculty members. Participants’ concerns were often greeted with nods of agreement and outright applause from their peers as they spoke of their frustrations with the system.

“Every time we have a migration [to an updated version of Blackboard], we have new features to figure out. You should be
providing us workable faculty materials with your product,” one commenter said amidst applause by those in the audience. “You put the burden on ourselves … and then create the documentation and then train. That’s why so many of us struggle to move forward to the next [version]. We are Blackboard on our campuses, and for us to be advocates, you have to give us the tools to be successful — training.” She emphasized that she would rather see more of a focus on fundamentals like training than updated versions of the software. The commenter also mentioned technical issues with the system that she believes need fixing.

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Search Heats Up

Keep your eye on the world of Search.  There is deep interest from the user and the investment community in expanding the world of Search.  Google continues to add new functionality. Twitter users are developing a broad set of search tools aimed at harvesting knowledge from one’s social network.  Microsoft has rebranded their search as Bing and poured resources.  And, my inbox is filled with recent venture notices from engines like Wowd and Yebol.  Instructional designers will need to do some deep thinking about the role of Search in learning architectures.

From Elliott Masie’s Learning TRENDS #580, June 8, 2009:

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Students in the T. Colin Campbell online courses create Yahoo Group

A new Yahoo group is available for students who have taken the online courses in plant-based nutrition as an informal way to continue to keep in touch after the completion of coursework.

The Certificate in Plant-Based Nutrition offered through the T. Colin Campbell Foundation and eCornell is an innovative online three-course program designed to help understand the role of diet in healing and managing disease. It expands upon the ground-breaking book The China Study, by T.Colin Campbell with each course providing approximately six hours of learning based on the lectures and research of Dr. Campbell along with a variety of other experts in the nutrition and medical fields.

 

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In Global Recession, Global Ed Still Growing

In discussing the impact of the financial crisis on international education at the annual conference of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, John K. Hudzik, vice president for global engagement and strategic projects at Michigan State University, pointed out that, by 2020, “many predict that … global higher education demand for seats will double to 200 million. This suggests to me that we are in a growth market,” Hudzik said. “We’re at about 110 or 115 right now, there’s a lot of growth and maybe we won’t hit 200, but it’s still growing.”

In anticipation of such growth, Hudzik’s co-presenter Hans de Wit, an international higher education consultant based in Amsterdam, suggested international educators should be thinking about such things as expanding online delivery, developing joint and dual degrees with institutions abroad, and creating global experiences close to home to supplement experiences abroad.

Hudzik suggested that colleges look beyond China to consider other countries that are poised to play a bigger role in the global
higher education scene in the future. “Growth in higher education is global,” Hudzik said. “You can’t manage well too many partners abroad, but thinking strategically about diversifying the countries with which your institution engages itself is probably a very good thing to think about right now.”

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Online Learning a Time Saver

Hello,

My name is Mary Allen and I am an enrollment Counselor with eCornell.  I am often asked how much time does it take to complete a Cornell University Certificate online.  Most courses are 2 or 4 weeks in length and your average weekly time commitment is around 3-6 hours per week.  Very Manageable.  I have earned 3 certificates from Cornell University online.  I gave up TV in the evenings  (Okay I did not give up my Thursday Night TV)  🙂  and I also did the courses on the weekends.  Some students are even allowed to do the courses at work.  How cool is that?   Depending on the number of courses in a certificate program you can earn a certificate in just a few months time.

For more information contact enroll@ecornell.com or visit our course catalog.

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1 Million Downloads in 7 Weeks for Stanford Course on iTunes U.

Free videos of Stanford’s wildly popular course on creating applications for the iPhone and iPod touch have now been downloaded a remarkable million times from Stanford’s site on iTunes U in the iTunes Store.

And all of the million downloads have come in just seven weeks, since the course began on April 1. This makes the iPhone Application Programming videos the fastest to reach the 1 million milestone in the history of iTunes U.

Apple engineers teach the live version of the course to Stanford students in a small auditorium in Stanford’s Quad. The rest of the world can take the course online for free by downloading videos of all the class lectures and the slides used by instructors. (The videos and slides are available at https://itunes.stanford.edu.)

Only Stanford students enrolled in the classroom version of iPhone Application Programming will receive credit for the course, however.

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MIT Will Provide Open Access to Articles

Faculty members at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have voted to make all of their scholarly articles available to the public, free and online. MIT and faculty members will let others use the articles in any way except to make a profit. Individual authors may opt out on an article-by-article basis. “The vote is a signal to the world that we speak in a unified voice; that what we value is the free flow of ideas,” said Bish Sinyal, chair of the MIT Faculty and the Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning.

Read the full article.

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At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard

According to a recent article in the New York Times, the physics department at M.I.T. has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.

Other universities have implemented similar changes, including Harvard, Rensselaer, North Carolina State, the University of Maryland, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. At these institutions, physicists have been pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning.

“Just as you can’t become a marathon runner by watching marathons on TV,” observes  Eric Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard, “likewise for science, you have to go through the thought processes of doing science and not just watch your instructor do it.”

Read the entire article.