Blackboard - D2L Verdit from Sakai Foundation's Executive Director' Perspective
Michael Korcuska posts in his Sakai Blog his reactions to the jury's decision in the Blackboard -D2L patent suite.
Michael Korcuska posts in his Sakai Blog his reactions to the jury's decision in the Blackboard -D2L patent suite.
Michael Korcuska is the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation. He spoke with the participants of the NITLE Sakai Usergroup Meeting in Seattle this year. His reflections on this conversation is available on his blog Michael Korcuska Sakai Blog. He has also recently posted his thoughts on the direction of Sakai for community discussion.
Today, sakaiproject.org announced that Thomson Learning adopts Sakai 'for supporting the delivery of world-class learning products and services.' This announcement is good news for open source LMS users as it demonstrates a commitment to support the open standards for integrating publisher developed content.
The LMS group, the group charged with investigation of online course tools to replace WebCT, needs student input to help guide the process of selecting a new learning management system.
Your responses will provide the LMS group a more complete understanding of the online tools central to learning and the general landscape of online course tool use at the College. This survey is not just for WebCT users but for all students, whether or not you are currently enrolled in courses using the web or web-based tools.
I am not sure of the etiquette (so if I cross some imaginary line of what is acceptable please forgive me) in addressing the readers of your blog directly. But, I would like to extend a warm welcome to those following the blog. I also encourage you to join in the conversation with reactions, feedback, news and resources.
Our group chose a blog to communicate our work, as it allows the readers to not only easily stay informed but contribute to the process through comments, trackbacks, and tagging of related content and posts. You might have noticed the 'Tags:' line beneath each post title. A tag is a keyword that with each of our posts. One tag that we associate with all of our posts is 'acelms'. If you are blogging or social bookmarking, co-commenting, or what have you, please include the 'acelms' tag to broaden the conversation.
Today, Blackboard committed not to assert certain patents it holds against Home-Grown or Open-Source LMS. Or at least the ones that are not bundled with proprietary software.
In response to this statement, Educause and the Sakai Foundation issued a statement of their own.
At first glance, it might look like UCLA's decision to converge on Moodle for instruction and collaboration university wide is indicative of a shortcoming on Sakai's part. On further investigation, it seems that the decision was more about where UCLA views itself as being able to contribute to the community and alignment with university culture.
In the end, it seems that UCLA's decision could result in a win-win situation down the road for all of the open source LMS and collaboration community. Their continued relationship with Sakai as foundation members demonstrates their belief in that system and bleed-over of UCLA's efforts with Moodle can be assumed without much of a stretch.
As mentioned in the most recent minutes, the group is starting to clarify the current needs and climate from the faculty perspective.
As feedback is always welcome I wanted to share the wiki page(s) I am using to develop the survey.
Please feel free to jump on and make suggestions. Have no fear in destroying anything previous versions can be recovered pretty easily as it is a wiki.
Thanks to this post, sakai vs. moodle: browser support by the Bates lms evaluation workgroup.
It appears that Mozilla Firefox is the browser that will work on Mac or Windows to provide complete functionality of Sakai or Moodle.
At the beginning of the process, we posted a draft timeline, but I noticed that I forgot to post the working timeline.
It is now available for download. It is a MS Word document.
Whitman College, in Walla Walla, Washington, is featured as this month's Sakai Spotligh. Whitman College, went live with Sakai in Fall 2005 and is currently reporting approximately 1/3 of the faculty teaching this semester integrated Sakai to their course. This translates to about 78% of the students are learning with Sakai.
[via Bates LMS]
The lawsuit Blackboard filed against Desire2Learn for patent infringement could be water under the bridge. Recently,
"The Software Freedom Law Center, an advocacy group for open-source software, asked the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this month to re-examine the patent(on behalf of Sakai, Moodle and ATutor). This is the first formal challenge against the patent's legitimacy filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office."
This according to a recent article by Dan Carnevale of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Chronicle subscribers can read the full article - The Chronicle: Daily news: 12/01/2006 -- 01: Blackboard Patent on Classroom Software Faces Formal Challenge From Open-Source Advocates.
More information on the patent:
* from Desire2Learn's perspective - http://www.desire2learn.com/patentinfo/.
* from Blackboard's perspective - http://www.blackboard.com/patent/
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a challenge has been filed to Blackboard's patent. If this succeeds, it should eliminate any fears about moving to D2L, Angel or even an open source product. While I've never been too concerned about Blackboard suing the open-source products, it's clear from this move that Sakai and Moodle have been concerned. Let's hope this all turns out the right way.
Blackboard Patent on Classroom Software Faces Formal Challenge From Open-Source Advocates
It's true that Cornell issued new guidelines in response to an infringement complaint from American Association of Publishers. It's also true that AAP is extremely happy with Cornell's response to the complaint and are using news of Cornell's guidelines in many press releases and news stories in the hope that other schools will adopt the same sort of guidelines.
Academic and Library organizations are putting a different spin on the story. For example, The Library Journal posted Settlement? Cornell Issues New Gudielines on Electronic Reserves, in which Carrie Russell, American Library Association copyright specialist, cautions against using the Cornell guidelines as a national standard.
Continue reading "Cornell & American Association of Publishers - Another View" »
I came across an article today about book publishers going after colleges that allow professors to post resources online. One of the first schools they targeted was Cornell University. As a result of this Cornell has written guidelines which the publishers are now happy with, and which they are hoping other schools will also adopt.
The Cornell guidelines are available online (pdf):
Copyright_Guidelines.pdf
Essentially they state that the same rules apply to putting together a coursepack and to putting resources online. Professors are expected to either obtain copyright permission or establish that fair use applies when posting resources online.
None of this is surprising. The interesting part of the policy is that they state that whenever possible online resources should be behind a password protected area and should go away when the course is over. They specifically say that Cornell "provides support for implementing these features in Blackboard."
In my mind, this puts to rest the question of whether or not an LMS can be used for electronic course reserves. Cornell's answer, which is supported by The American Association of Publishers, is that an LMS can be used provided that permission has been obtained or fair use applies. I'm good with that.
I've created a comparison of features of the 4 products we discussed at today's meeting. This comparison was created using the tool at EduTool and may be a bit out of date.
Campus Technology, recently posted this article to their web site. It presents an overview of the benefits and challenges higher education faces regarding open source applications.
[via Bates LMS blog]