Late last month, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted what appears to be an incredibly broad patent to Blackboard for “core technology relating to certain systems and methods involved in offering online education, including course management systems and enterprise e-Learning systems”. The company has since filed an infringment suit against market challenger Desire2Learn. Others such as eCollege and the Open Source Sakai Project have issued statements too.
The good news is we can all now sit back and enjoy some unfolding drama in the e-learning business. On the other hand I'd much rather see all of the resources that will surely go into this fight fostering innovation and serving the needs of customers. In the meantime, anyone who works in the field should take a look at the History of virtual learning environments entry being constructed by supporters of Desire2Learn on Wikipedia. Now that's what I call a history lesson.
Technologies like this seem like they will be outdated as they become labeled "Web 1.0". The new solutions are free and open source like Moodle, or CollegeBrain.net
I'm a University Professor and my institution is currently using Blackboard. I must say I find the Blackboard interface atrocious.
CollegeBrain.net is like the Facebook of eLearning. The free service is great, the customer support (free also) is very responsive. I was able to join CollegeBrain, add my school, and begin creating courses. They even have a pre-written set of instructions in the Course which I was able to hand out to my students in lecture. Using this one page document, my students were able to create free accounts and join my course roster online. The downside is that they don't have as many features as Blackboard, but they sure do have a great interface. They seem to be adding content regularly, but the most activity I've seen is in new schools being created.
I encourage you to check out the site that referred me. They have some excellet resources for other educators:
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/site-of-the-week/site/?i=53553;_hbguid=c1a1fc5d-258d-486a-a765-f7950b754d2c&d=site-of-the-week
-JBF
Posted by: JB Freeman | April 23, 2008 at 02:58 AM