An article in the November 9th issue of Fortune Magazine (also online) by reporter Beth Kowitt says that Learning Management System (LMS) vendor Blackboard “becomes the Microsoft of its space.” She writes, “The company has $312 million in annual revenue, and about 60% of schools that use only one piece of management software have Blackboard, according to the Campus Computing Survey.”
The article almost completely ignores the patent battle with Canadian LMS vendor Desire2Learn (D2L), and doesn’t mention the fact that Desire2Learn has been vindicated. Blackboard’s patent was overturned because D2L was able to prove “prior art” for all of Blackboard’s claims. Part of winning that battle was the huge article on “The History of Virtual Learning Environments” (the British term for Learning Management Systems) that was produced by the collective effort of many in the learning community. This article clearly demonstrated that what Blackboard claimed as a unique invention had been available in many forms before the date they filed a patent application.
Considering the negative publicity generated by Blackboard losing the patent fight to D2L (who gained tremedous free postive PR), this article in Fortune should have the people in Blackboard’s marketing department smiling again.
If you want more information on the the Blackboard/D2L battle, check out Stephen Downes’ daily newsletter on e-learning or Michael Feldstein’s blog (in either case, search for “Blackboard” to find hundreds of posts on this topic).
Blackboard Software Rules the Schools | Fortune | Beth Kowitt | 30 October, 2009
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Did the article mention that many schools (school of business and ten others at UW-Madison) within large institutions have switched to open source systems like Moodle? Probably not.