order / disorder

Not breaking news anymore but at the end of last week, Blackboard won their initial court case with Desire2Learn over patent infringement. Many think that this will run and run - firstly with appeals by D2L to the court and secondly with appeals by the elearning community to the US patent office.

Where will it get BB and the elearning community as a whole? If the BB patents and the judgment are upheld, then D2L are out of pocket and are likely to be restricted in expansion and development plans. BB move further into monopoly status in the commercial market. They will also continue to receive much opprobrium from many for their actions. At the last users conference I attended, it was surprising the level of distaste that was expressed by clients in relation to BB going down this path. Many felt that this wasn’t something that was useful for elearning but that there was little that they could do about it because of the enterprise level of tie-in required to run BB in a modern university.

The big worry for many is what effect this will have on the open source products such as Moodle and Sakai. I wonder if this will be a problem at the end of the day? If it becomes possible, then any move to restrict or penalise users of these products may just accelerate the development of federated tools, linkages, aggregators etc, to enable PLE’s with a low technical overhead that can support the needs of learners and formal education. For learners this should be a good thing. It should also be a good thing for educators, although some of them might not realise it at first. There will be stumbling blocks of course but there does seem to be a slowly creeping acceptance in higher education that providing access to information, or open learning, won’t derail them and it is the added value of quality teaching that will bring forth quality learning in their students.

Whatever, the BB patent saga will provide a floorshow for all to watch and current customers will no doubt be rewarded with an above inflation rise in their license fees.