You’ve recently posed three interesting challenges for me and “the new Blackboard.” You asked whether we’d change our approach to the industry in some important ways. All require real thought and commitment, and I’ll share with you and your readers that I’m pondering these (and more) as I consider which positions I’ll focus on most in my early days.

Today I’ve shared a related announcement committing Bb to standards like Common Cartridge, both import and export, and LIS. It’s an important call that speaks directly to the questions of citizenship that have been questions for our direction. It also speaks to the issue of effort Bb will put forward to opening our platform. See My blog for my letter to our customers and note to the eLearning community.

I look forward to the road ahead on questions like these, working with my new colleagues here and with the community overall. In the meantime, never too late for you to join the conversation around standards at BbWorld in DC.

Ray

Interesting comments regarding WebCT leadership. I won’t attempt to draw too many parallels here, but I will note that being involved with a resurgent national ISP that picked over the bones of it’s competitors through near surgical M&A efforts (in which I was involved), I lost count of the number of “new blood” executive level managers who came and went as we continued to swallow ever bigger fish. Hopefully a similar fate will not befall Ray Henderson.

-Greg

“As to the D2L lawsuits, we have been told that it is because they have a genuine disagreement. That D2L copied Bb code and that the patents had to be defended so that Bb could protect it’s clients from patent claims by others.”

I’m a technologist, not a lawyer, but I have read every word of the Bb patent, and as many of the legal filings, court opinions, USPTO papers, etc. as have been made public. There is a LOT of it.

At my most generous, it’s very hard to imagine that anyone with a solid understanding of the patent could truly believe that it is legitimate.

I sincerely hope that you were told “D2L copied Bb code” by someone who is simply misinformed; none of the court filings suggest such a thing and in any case the products are not in the same programming language.

They might have meant to say that D2L copied Bb *concepts*, ideas covered by the patent; that is what the lawsuit was about. Another perspective is that Bb copied those same concepts from other people, and then requested and received a patent on those concepts.

The USPTO evidently agrees with the latter idea, which is why they are in the process of overturning the patent.

Note: I don’t work for Bb or D2L, but have some past experience with both. I don’t know much about Angel, but it sounds like it has been an awesome product and a great company to work with. I wish you and the other Angel clients all the best during this transition!

As someone who was at AUC and was able to talk personally with both Ray and Mr. Chasen, I wholeheartedly agree with your post with two caveats and a defense.

First, I would favor putting continued quality of support or improvement of support, respectively, ahead of LIS. I am fairly confident that at least Bb is already looking at LIS as another, ‘value-added’, component. Angel’s XEI package is pretty slick by the way.

Second, while Bb archives may be encryped there is a way to export an IMS package that can be imported straight into Angel, including quizzes. In fact, before publishers and test generation programs supported ANGEL, I could simply request/export a Bb cartridge. Same thing with the old WebCT CE 4.1 with CEMT. It is one of the reasons we picked ANGEL.

In your defense, openness is a value that has many of us in the ANGEL community spoiled. I have been amazed at the creativity of solutions that have come out of the listserv and AUC presentations. I would dare say that a large majority of them require no changes to underlying code. Sure a few nuggets have been shared abd a couple code mods, but most are using the tools presented by the ANGEL interface. The point is not about changing out code on the backend, but about gaining a richer understanding of the mechanics of the platform. And that is just the software.

When you talk about the openness of the company, they had no risk of losing product direction. Feature requests were welcomed if not encouraged. In addition to strong leadership from Ray and other execs, the entire organization had(still has) a shared vision of client relations, collaboration and innovation. Even in virtual environments, strong personal relationships help people get through tough times. The openness and engagement are functions of the culture and values of the company and the people that company employees. Make comparisons where you will.

As to the D2L lawsuits, we have been told that it is because they have a genuine disagreement. That D2L copied Bb code and that the patents had to be defended so that Bb could protect it’s clients from patent claims by others.

How does that leave moodle and Sakai? Well, jury is out. In less than thirty seconds I heard that they had been licensed to use Bb patents which quickly morphed to a commitment not to pursue patent claims against moodle and Sakai. Does the fact that moodle claims nearly 60,000 sites in 210 countries have any bearing? Even if only 1 in 10 are actual production instances, that is still a huge community. What about new OS products?

btw Micheal, Thanks for letting me rant. I will be setting up my own blog when I get an extra hour in a day. Hmm. Careful what I wish for. Soon.