Clients furious, but shareholders must be thrilled

Blackboard has announced a 32 percent jump in second-quarter revenue over last year, pulling in a whopping USD 13.6 million. A Washington Times article makes no mention of the patent or legal action against Desire2Learn that has clients up in arms and legal council Matthew Small doing damage control on a teleconference with Australian clients from a maternity ward while his wife is in labour. The article does describe why many institutions will stick with Bb, despite the company's corporate ethics.

"As long as the industry trends continue, there will be more use of online learning on campus," she said. "So long as that is true, the switching costs are high enough for the universities ... they'd rather just stick with their current vendor."

Having nearly completed a uni-wide Blackboard roll-out, I understand now more than ever the effort involved in fostering adoption of a platform so embedded into teaching and learning activities. Switching is hard. Not so much from a technical perspective but from an organisational change perspective. That said, I'll be interested to see if this figure changes over the coming year:

During the second quarter, Blackboard had a software-license renewal rate of more than 90 percent.

Netvibes is my new homepage

Written in AJAX, Netvibes appears to be a contender for the mythical title of Uber-Portal (one portal to rule them all). From www.netvibes.com:

Netvibes.com is a custom made web 2.0 home page solution

This service is free and gives the user the ability :

* to create a personalized page with the content they like.
* to put together data feeds and services from web 2.0 with a very simple interface
* to access your page anytime and from any computer .

It is also possible to :

* browse, modify, and import your RSS feeds with our integrated RSS/ATOM feedreader. You can easily import an OPML file as well.
* to import, download and listen podcasts without any additional software
* to check your mail on one or many gmail account, to stick webnotes, weather and many more to come !

Link to PLC eLearning 2.0 blog

I had included a link to the PLC blog in the title of my previous post, but it looks like some aggregators might not be picking it up. Here it is in text: http://plcmclearning.blogspot.com/ (Thanks Michael for pointing this out!)

Leave it to librarians to make embracing web 2.0 this cool

Lynette, my former colleague and self-titled "new" librarian, pointed me at this project which is being run by the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County in the US. The project seems to have been inspired by 43 Things takes staff on a 9 week guided tour of web 2.0 in the context of learning 2.0.

I really like how they've sent realistic tasks, or "23 Things", that introduce some of the core applications that underpin web 2.0 (eg. blogs, RSS, aggregation) but then go beyond to look at image sharing (Flickr), collaborative cataloging (LibraryThing) and of course media hosting (YouTube). Nice bite-size bits and with prize draws for staff who complete all 23 Things. Kind of like a web 2.0 scavenger hunt.

I always love it when someone manages to cut through the mystery of learning and to enable learning through experimentation. Librarians in particular seem to produce some great examples of this.

The Chronicle: Blackboard Sues Rival Provider of Course-Management Software, Alleging Patent Infringement

I missed this excellent article from The Chronicle posted on Aug 2nd. It covers views and reactions from a few different fronts including Blackboard, Desire2Learn and clients. A few telling snippets:

"This is not a patent that covers all of e-learning," Mr. Small (Matthew Small, senior vice president and general counsel for Blackboard) said. "It doesn't cover all course-management systems."

He then goes on to say:

many e-learning companies could operate without infringing on the patent, though he declined to provide any examples. However, he also said that had Blackboard not merged with WebCT, then WebCT would have been infringing the patent.

Black web? How about Black-borg?

Michael Rees has pointed out "Blackweb" as a new name for Blackboard that has been suggested in light of their over-the-top legal activities. A trekkie-minded colleague has suggested "Black-borg", which I think is my favorite so far.

Silliness aside, I've cooled down a bit, had a few days to absorb the media and commentary and have boiled it all down to three things that really have me fuming over this situation.

1) I've worked with Blackboard at client universities for almost 5 years now. I've seen the product go through numerous upgrades, experienced the challenge of overcoming academic and student perceptions after a massive product failure, and more recently gained an insight into the corporate culture of Blackboard as a company. I'm used to being known as "the Blackboard person" while in differing roles (although I do try to correct this view). There has been discussion about how this move by Blackboard will impact on how academics perceive Blackboard as a product. I love the challenge of opening academics' eyes to the possibilities and opportunities educational technology can provide them. It's what I'm passionate about and what gets me up in the morning. It can also be tough. By behaving in a manner which I think is in opposition to many academics' educational ideals, I believe Blackboard has just made my job a whole lot harder.

2) I really don't like the way Blackboard has handled this in terms of communication. I generally receive an official email every 2 weeks or so from Blackboard, advising of everything from conferences to new appointments in my region. The only official communication I've seen from Blackboard regarding the patent and resulting legal action is an email from Michael Chasen, CEO which was sent to a single US usergroup and then forwarded to a global community listserv. This is not how you go about keeping your clients in the loop. Part of the email reads:

We hope that you will come to see that our patent and law suit are not a dramatic change for the industry, but a fair course for us to protect our investments in our technology and your investment in Blackboard. Our aim is to build an organization that will endure and be there to support you as your needs evolve.

3) Which leads me to the third thing that really gets me about all this. I have no problem with patents on technology. I have no problem with capitalising on innovation. Everyone needs to make money somehow and Blackboard has already managed to make an awful lot of money in support of something great. I do have a problem when capitalist activity such as this stumbles a little too far into the sacred three of Education, Health Care, and Religion. I realise that education is already far more of a commodity than it has been in the past, especially in Australia, but there need to be limits on how far this trend can go.

Chuffed: Even without electricity, eLearning comes good

It's exam week here at Bond, and to my surprise and delight, a number of the academics using Blackboard for the first time this semester have chosen to run some portion of their final exam (as well as other pieces of assessment) online using Blackboard. They didn't get hung up on the reasons not to use online assessment, they just dove right in and tried it out. They were willing to experiment. Fantastic.

The lecturer of one of the largest classes run by the university is one of these willing academics so of course, the practical component of his student's final exam was conducted online through Blackboard. The exam was to be run in an envigilated environment within a computer lab at 10am this morning. Great.

Today, one of the reasons not to use online assessment showed itself in a big way. We had a major power outage this morning. The whole campus as well as the whole suburb was out for about 2 hrs. Back-up power kept the server room running, but not the lab computer or the lights for that matter, so no exam. The willing academic took it all in stride and rescheduled the exam for later this afternoon. Wonderful.

Then another reason not to use online assessment appeared. Some residual problems from the power outage this morning cause Blackboard to go down, as well as a few other services, and it went down in a fairly major way. We had power, we had computers, but we didn't have Blackboard. Nuts.

We got it back up fairly quickly and the students had an extra half hour to sit in the lab and study before finally being able to complete their exam. The willing academic? He'll do it all again next semester. Fantastic.

What a lousy birthday present: Blackboard patents the LMS

It's my birthday today and it's nothing but bad news. The US Patent office, in their infinite wisdom, has granted Blackboard a patent on pretty much all things related to online course delivery. Ick. Ick, ick, ick. The abstract of their patent (full details available from the US Patent office website) describes their patent of:

A system and methods for implementing education online by providing institutions with the means for allowing the creation of courses to be taken by students online, the courses including assignments, announcements, course materials, chat and whiteboard facilities, and the like, all of which are available to the students over a network such as the Internet.

This is like patenting a lecture hall as an environment that facilitates learning. What are you trying to do, Blackboard? Seriously.

Will the open source community, which is becoming more and more viable, be able to continue to grow with Blackboard standing by with a patent to wave at them? Forgive my rant but this has be quite upset. More thoughts on this once I've cooled down.