Email the Editor    Email a Friend    Print this Page 

At a wedding I attended this weekend I ran into Christine, a health-care worker who is trying to develop her skill set by taking an online course. She is set to begin this September, and given her 12-hour shifts she’s grateful for the flexibility e-learning offers.

“I might still have to do a shift and then take a day to finish my course work,” she said, “but it’s something I’ll have to balance. I just hope I know what I’m getting into.”

The institutions that provide such courses are probably asking themselves the same question. Recently a company called Blackboard, which last year bought a Canadian e-learning provider called Web CT, ignited a firestorm in academic circles when it sued a Waterloo, Ont.-based competitor, Desire2Learn, for patent infringement. This would not be news but for the potential scope of the intellectual property under dispute. Although Blackboard says its patent cover only specific technical details, its critics say it tries to take credit for the entire concept of what’s called a learning management system (LMS). That means Desire2Learn and its customers, as well as those of countless other vendors and educators, could find their online classes dismissed a little too early.

Blackboard’s timing has a lot to do with the accusations coming its way. It launched its suit the same day its patent was granted, which suggests its patent was a deliberate attempt to shut down a competitor and stave off further innovation. In reality, Blackboard had little choice. In the legal world, failure to protect your intellectual property devalues it as an enterprise asset. If it was, in fact, given a patent that claims ownership over the very essence of an LMS, the fault lies as much with the patent-granting authority as it does the vendor.

Perhaps it was inevitable that someone would become the SCO of the educational software market, but we are dealing here with a uniquely complex market dynamic. Unlike traditional server or desktop software, educational and e-learning tools are often born within academia itself. The rise of open source has only increased this mix of proprietary and community-developed code. Blackboard has said it will only go after commercial entities it believes are infringing on its patent, but that would provide little incentive for open source e-learning innovators who want to reap a financial benefit from their efforts.

The countless blog comments and Wikipedia entry surrounding this case shows the academic community wrestling with what a learning management system actually is, and whether that is what Blackboard owns. In the strictest sense, it could be quite broad – an electronic way of communicating information to be assessed, evaluated and applied by the user. Which means, essentially, that surfing the Internet is an e-learning experience, and your Web-connected home PC an LMS. Blackboard, Desire2Learn and others create more vertically-specific tools which replicate or automate the processes surrounding education, such as registration and testing. As e-learning evolves, Blackboard’s patent may only cover the bare fundamentals of what it takes to teach students over the Internet, but that’s still more ownership over a process than any one firm should enjoy.

If Blackboard wants to reassure the customers it wants to convert to its platform, and to rid itself of a reputation that may be unwarranted, the best thing it could do it publish more details on the patent and identify its limits as well as its reach. In doing so it could provide some real leadership for a segment of the market that could benefit from an education in intellectual property rights. At the moment, they’re being forced to take a crash course.

sschick@itbusiness.ca

share: