Learning from Past Experience: The CMS and the Campus Portal
The course management system offers a model by which we can better understand and appreciate the ePortfolio
Success Algorithm. In the late 1990s, the CMS was introduced as an innovative online technology with a new
electronic toolbox. A number of vendors rushed into the market to deliver their early software releases, but for a
couple of years, the CMS languished as a show-and-tell technology used by no more than a handful of instructors,
albeit from leading institutions.
The CMS was finally accepted only after several significant events occurred. First, a template-based authoring
interface was invented, offering a very easy-to-learn and easy-to-use software environment. The Oncourse3 and
Blackboard systems (http://www.blackboard.com) were the first to create and promote the CMS template-based
navigation scheme, which all CMS software products offer today. Second, major new programs and services were
introduced that could be offered only with the application of CMS technology. For instance, online distance learning
programs, such as those offering MBAs online, were developed based solely on the use of CMS technology. Third,
the CMS presented many convenient utilities and features that eased the tasks of traditional classroom teaching and
learning. Faculty members liked the CMS because they could take advantage of its simple tools to post the class
syllabus, course announcements, grades, reading lists, and so on. Satisfied users caused the CMS to grow until it
became a very sticky technology, with most institutions now offering a CMS for some or all of their courses.
Today, however, ePortfolio systems are still in the refinement stage of inventing a new, sticky software environment
in addition to developing a viable, dependable business plan to fund and support the ePortfolio environment for
current students and future alumni. Developers need to think outside the box about the future of interface design and
navigational scheme to create a truly usable and sticky environment. We need smooth integration and easy
interoperability, with the understanding that this new environment must be assimilated with the other related
technology already in use, such as the CMS, personal file storage, the student information system, and productivity
tools (such as word processors). We also need to develop advanced ePortfolio tools that offer unique services not
accessible outside the ePortfolio.
Like the CMS, the campus portal has generated many discussions among higher education communities over the
past several years. Many campuses used vast resources to develop a campus portal, whether by building it in-house,
buying it off the shelf, or using some free, open source software. However, no more than a handful of institutions
have managed to complete a successful, working, sticky portal project. The struggle to develop and implement a
successful portal project has not been caused by a lack of software packages; rather, the problem has been the lack
of innovative design for the human aspects requirements of the project.
The attempts to develop successful campus portals should offer insights for developers working to deploy successful
ePortfolio projects. Maybe by looking at the less successful campus portal projects, developers will be able to
understand the attributes that caused the failures of these projects. Such an investigation could suggest guidelines
New Player in Course Management Software
September 9, 2009
The learning management software industry has a new competitor.
It’s Learning, Inc., a Norwegian company, is looking to take a share of the U.S. market from Blackboard and other top
learning-management software providers after cornering the learning-management markets in Norway and Britain,
and gaining "substantial" shares in Sweden, Denmark, and Holland.
The company caters to professors who put a special emphasis on personal attention in the classroom. Many
classrooms — especially those at community colleges — include students with a broad range of capabilities, said
Jonathan A. Bower, the president of the U.S. branch of It’s Learning. And while Blackboard “does a superb job of
supporting the delivery of lessons in the classic fashion” — that is, to everybody at once — it is less useful for
professors who wish to simultaneously challenge advanced students and reach those who may need remediation.
“Instead of creating one assignment for everybody,” Bower said, “as I get to know my students, what I can do is
create supplemental assignments, remedial assignments, extra credit assignments,” and assign them to different
students — or groups of students, in a large classroom — in order to “deliver a dramatically more individual, nuanced,
and ultimately successful individual experience.”
All learning management systems store data that reflect how well students are doing in a class, Bower said, but rarely
do professors use that information to help them do better. “If colleges are going to take responsibility for achieving
outcomes, they’re going to have to start using assessment data in real time to start improving student performance,”
he said.
More attention for students, however, means more work for professors. But Bower said the real advantage It’s
Learning has over other learning management systems is that it is easy to use — so easy that professors will be able
to apply multiple lesson plans without spending any more time than they would have to administer a single lesson
plan.
“I can do in two hours what I used to be able to do in two weeks,” said Bower.
On top of that, it costs about half as much as Blackboard -- and less than free, open-source software like Moodle,
when savings on technical support and training are factored in, Bower said.
Can It’s Learning actually elbow its way into the crowded marketplace of learning management providers? It is too
soon to tell. Originally developed by graduate students at the Bergen Technical College in Norway, It’s Learning
claims to have a 65 percent market share in Scandinavia. But as far as U.S. institutions are concerned, it is fresh off
the boat, with only one client.
That client is Grace University, a small Christian university in Nebraska that serves a mixture of online and residential
students numbering several hundred. According to Nathan Boeker, the director of online learning at Grace, the
university abandoned Blackboard in 2005 in favor of a mishmash of other services, and was looking for something
that wouldn’t require extensive training and technical support. “We knew from experience that if it’s not easy to get up
and running, [professors] are not going to use it,” Boeker said. “We were doing a lot more support than we knew we
had to.”
The university is running the system in six courses — which run the gamut from totally online to mostly face-to-face
— as a two-semester pilot program. So far, Boeker said, it has been pleased. “What we’ve heard from professors has
been very, very positive,” he said, noting that a number of the instructors are adjuncts who have experience using
Blackboard, Angel, and other systems. “The reports I’m getting in is how clean the system is, how easy it is to get
things done.”
Lara Oerter, vice president of product management and marketing at Blackboard, said the company is aware of It's
Learning's work in Europe, and noted that the U.S. market for learning management "has historically been very
healthy and competitive, especially as the importance of technology in higher education has grown over the years."
If anyone from Blackboard is reading this, here is a clue: If, for example, your product sometimes plays the role of a
spreadsheet, make it work like MS Excel. First of all, everyone in the world would know how to use it. Second, it your
product is five times harder to use than Excel, that should be telling you something
If this company begins to have any success, they will likely be bought out by Blackboard. Blackboard is like the Borg
of online learning systems. Desire 2 Learn and others should prepare to be assimilated.
To all those complaining about Blackboard: Open source is the only answer. And there are enough companies
around customizing and selling open source products so why use closed-source software? We use OLAT
(http://www.olat.org) and are perfectly happy with it. If something is not the way you want you either fix it yourself (or
let your developer team do it) or your pay one of the companies working with OLAT to do it. You'll never have this
flexibility with Blackboard or with this new company, you only get this with open source software...
http://mfeldstein.com/bad-news-for-blackboard-good-news-for-moodle/
Bad News for Blackboard, Good News for Moodle
By Michael Feldstein | Published: March 23, 2008
The American Association of Community College’s Instructional Technology Council (ITC) has just published its 2007
Distance Education Survey Results, covering data from 154 U.S. community colleges. And there’s a lot of interesting
stuff in it. Here are the headlines that I drew from it:
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Distance education continues to grow at a very healthy clip, particularly in this market segment.
Blackboard is losing market share rapidly
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ANGEL and D2L also grew their market share.
We have reason to expect more LMS churn in the near future, which is bad for Blackboard.
Moodle doubled it’s market share in the past 12 months and now has the highest market share after
Blackboard/WebCT in this market segment.
The top 5 areas of likely distance learning-related service growth in this segment are (1) online student
organization web site and services, (2) online counseling and advising, (3) online plagiarism evaluation, (4)
audio/video streaming, and (5) online textbook sales.
As you can imagine, the LMS market share stuff is what interests me the most at the moment.
To begin with, it’s clear that community colleges represent a really important growth area for distance learning and,
by extension, to LMS vendors. Survey respondants reported an 18% year-over-year growth in distance education
courses, in contrast to the 9.7% growth rate that Sloan-C found in it’s broader cross-section of universities and the 2%
growth in on-campus enrollments for the same year. That’s pretty impressive. Which is why it must be particularly
worrying to Blackboard to read this paragraph in the report’s “Observations and Trends” section:
It seems that the recent merger of Blackboard-WebCt in February 2006 and a substantial increase in
fees may have prompted a growing number of colleges to review their learning management system
(LMS) commitments. Thirty-one percent of the respondents indicated they were considering switching
from their current LMS. Although licensed LMS solutions prevail, Moodle, an open-source solution,
reflected a doubling of its share in one year.
Blackboard lost 7% market share in this segment over the past year. Even worse for them, it looks like this trend is
accelerating. Note that EDUCAUSE reported in 2005 (with a somewhat different survey population) that only 13% of
surveyed institutions were considering changing their LMS in the next 3 years. If the two survey populations are
behaving similarly, then the number of institutions that are shopping around has more than doubled since then.
Under these circumstances, Blackboard could easily lose 20% market share over the next 3 years.
The degree to which this will impact their bottom line and stock price are complex questions. First of all, a lot will
depend on how many Blackboard Enterprise customers they lose. Keep in mind that Blackboard has already lost close
to a third of their “Basic” license customers in 2006 and 2007 (where the “Basic” category also includes WebCT Vista
and CE) and they still performed pretty close to their guidance to Wall Street during that time. In order to keep this
feat up, they need to grow their number of lucrative Enterprise license customers even as their total number of LMS
customers shrinks. We’re in LMS buying season right now; watch to see how many Blackboard Enterprise customers
announce that they’re leaving for other platforms versus how many new Enterprise wins they get. Blackboard is also
trying to sell more stuff to the customers they already have. Notice that they’ve been on a bit of an acquisition spree
lately, buying up everything from content management to emergency warning systems to video surveillence systems.
They’re trying to diversify their way out of this problem. Still, even if Blackboard manages to continue its financial
levitation act for the next few years, part of its stock valuation is based on the assumption that the company has a
near-monopoly with all that implies. If it loses 20% market share then it will almost certainly lose market value
regardless of its revenues because the “multiplier” that Wall Street applies will go down.
OK, but if Blackboard is the loser in this report, then who are the winners? Clearly, Moodle is a winner, having gone
from less than 4% market share to more than 10% (in this segment) in a year’s time. Moodle is now the only nonBlackboard LMS with a double-digit market share in this segment. I have to wonder how much of that growth is due
to one support vendor. From what I’ve been hearing, Moodlerooms has been tearing up the U.S. market with very
aggressive pricing and good support plans. I have a feeling that a big portion of the shift in overall market share is
WebCT CE customers going to Moodlerooms.
Another clear winner this year is ANGEL, which went from 5% to more than 9% market share. In this case, I have to
wonder how much of this increase is due to SUNY. The SUNY Learning Network, which supports a couple of dozen
community colleges in the SUNY system, is well along in the process of migrating from a home-grown LMS to
ANGEL. If there was strong SUNY participation in this survey then a good chunk of ANGEL’s upswing could be
attributable to them. Which just goes to show you how important these big system-wide wins can be for a platform.
D2L also gained a bit more than 2% market share, while the rest were flat or slightly down.
There’s a lot more in this report–stuff about services, faculty- and student-reported needs, and other important
topics. I highly recommend reading the whole thing
http://flexknowlogy.learningfield.org/2009/05/06/angel-a-corpse-for-blackboards-corpulence/
Today Blackboard announced that it has acquired ANGEL Learning, Inc., producer of one of the
most widely used course management system (CMS) in US higher education (according to
ITC’s March 2009 Distance Education survey, ANGEL was 2nd only to Blackboard+WebCT). In
2005 Blackboard acquired its primary rival WebCT, making it quite possibly the number one
CMS provider to higher education institutions in the USA.
http://flexknowlogy.learningfield.org/2009/05/06/angel-a-corpse-for-blackboards-corpulence/
ANGEL: A Corpse for Blackboard's Corpulence
May 6, 2009 at 2:36 pm, Stein
Today Blackboard announced that it has acquired ANGEL Learning, Inc., producer of one of the
most widely used course management system (CMS) in US higher education (according to
ITC’s March 2009 Distance Education survey, ANGEL was 2nd only to Blackboard+WebCT). In
2005 Blackboard acquired its primary rival WebCT, making it quite possibly the number one
CMS provider to higher education institutions in the USA..
Blackboard now owns WebCT and ANGEL. 2008 higher education CMS usage table adapted from the March 2009 ITC
Distance Education Survey
This most recent acquisition is a surprising but not unpredictable indicator of Blackboard’s lust
to dominate the higher ed CMS market. In 2006 the US Patent Office awarded Blackboard a
broad and hotly contested patent on learning management system features, which Blackboard
immediately used to sue its next largest commercial rival, Desire2Learn. And though Blackboard
was successful in its legal actions, twice since then the US Patent Office has rejected the
original 44 patent claims, first in March of 2008 and again in April of this year.
Blackboard, however, presses on, appealing the rejections, fighting with Desire2Learn in the
courts, suing the US Patent Office, and even filing more patents (including one detailing a 3D
learning environment, and a set of claims in Canada[!]) on which they can base new lawsuits
against D2L.
As ITC noted in its March 2009 survey, ANGEL had gained considerable market share in the
US, putting it in the #2 slot against Blackboard+WebCT. What once looked like good news for
Angel has become a nightmare for an CMS consumer market in need of diverse and innovative
choices, and a looming shadow for other CMS producers, as Blackboard continues to thwart
and denigrate healthy competition in the field of e-learning. At this point I’m continuing to put my
faith in Moodle, the popular open source CMS, and wondering if US antitrust law contradicts
Blackboard’s aggressive behavior.
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4 Comments
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Tags: blackboard, law, legal, patents, usa
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Posted in blackboard, lms
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4 Responses to “ANGEL: A Corpse for Blackboard's Corpulence”
1. Mark Jenkins Says:
Blackboard’s internal disorganization and dismal customer service record since the WebCT
acquisition will only be exacerbated by this. It’s a disaster, compounded by the fact that many
current Angel clients chose the system both for its specific virtues . . . but also as a deliberate
choice against Blackboard’s corporate stance, much less their ability to serve their clients.
To have Angel pulled into the problematic and dysfunctional support environment that we’ve
seen from Blackboard over recent years is a generalized problem for higher ed and especially
institutions who can’t manage effectively an open source solution. I can’t see how this is a
good thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc.
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On October 17, 2000, Blackboard Inc. filed and won a complaint with the World Intellectual
Property Control against a company called Cupcake Patrol for control of the domain name
"Blackboad.com," which lacks the last 'r' before the final character.
In April 2003, the company sued security researchers Billy Hoffman and Virgil Griffith for
publishing, and planning to present, a paper highlighting security flaws in their Blackboard
Transaction System.
On January 17, 2006, Blackboard was granted US patent 6,988,138 on "Internet-based
education support system and methods" (with other multinational patents having been issued
or pending) with claims over features of course management systems (U.S. Patent 6,988,138).
Some of the claims include making announcements, assigning projects, providing course
information, and letting students see their grades online.
On July 26, 2006, the company issued a press release regarding its patent portfolio and on that
day filed a lawsuit against Desire2Learn (D2L), another course management system provider, for
patent infringement, using the above patent to assert its rights under US patent law. The
Complaint was filed in Federal Court in the Eastern District of Texas, Lufkin Division, a rural East
Texas judicial district. Desire2Learn has posted a Patent Information page which
comprehensively documents Blackboard's complaint against them. The Federal Circuit has ruled
in favor of Desire2Learn across the board and confirmed that all 38 patent claims asserted by
Blackboard are invalid.
After the announcement of the lawsuit against Desire2Learn, some in the e-learning community
felt that the patent award ignored prior art on e-learning and distance education and started a
Wikipedia page, History of virtual learning environments, and a Moodle Docs wiki page, Online
Learning History, to document existing examples of course management systems.
Because of concern over the patent claims, some in the e-learning community protested by
calling for a boycott of Blackboard. See, for example, BoycottBlackboard.org. A web site against
education patents, with a lot of information about the patent has been created:
Noedupatents.org.
On 9 August 2006, a complaint was filed against Blackboard, Inc. by Portaschool of Atlanta, GA
in the United States District Court of the Northern District of Georgia for deceptive business
practices, and knowingly and willingly misrepresenting themselves in a patent application.
On January 25, 2007 it was announced that the Software Freedom Law Center was successful in
its request that the United States Patent and Trademark Office re-examine the e-learning patent
owned by Blackboard Inc. The request was filed in November 2006 on the behalf of Sakai,
Moodle, and ATutor. The Patent Office found that prior art cited in SFLC's request raises "a
substantial new question of patentability" regarding all 44 claims of Blackboard's patent.
Groklaw, a website that tracks legal issues generally related to Open Source software, has the
press release: Groklaw.org
On February 1, 2007, Blackboard announced via press release "The Blackboard Patent Pledge".
In this pledge to the open source and do-it-yourself course management community, the
company vows to forever refrain from asserting its patent rights against open-source
developers, except when it is itself sued for patent infringement.
On February 22, 2008 a Texas jury found Desire2Learn liable for infringing on the Blackboard,
Inc. patent.
On March 25, 2008, the US patent office issued a non-final action rejecting all 44 claims of
Blackboard's patent.[2]
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On July 27, 2009, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled on the
appeals that resulted from the trial in Texas against Desire2Learn. The Federal Circuit has ruled
in favor of Desire2Learn and confirmed that all 38 patent claims asserted by Blackboard were
invalid.[3]