On 26 July, Blackboard Inc, which last year took over WebCT, and is the dominant vendor of course management systems, announced that it has been granted a US patent "for technology used for internet-based education support systems and methods", and that patents corresponding to the US patent "have been issued or are pending all over the world including in the European Union, China, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand India, Israel, Mexico, South Korea, Hong Kong and Brazil".
Here is an abstract of the patent itself, taken from the US Patent Office record for Patent 6988138.
A system and methods for implementing education online by providing institutions with the means for allowing the creation of courses to be taken by students online, the courses including assignments, announcements, course materials, chat and whiteboard facilities, and the like, all of which are available to the students over a network such as the Internet. Various levels of functionality are provided through a three-tiered licensing program that suits the needs of the institution offering the program. In addition, an open platform system is provided such that anyone with access to the Internet can create, manage, and offer a course to anyone else with access to the Internet without the need for an affiliation with an institution, thus enabling the virtual classroom to extend worldwide.
Unsurprisingly, Blackboard is silent as to whether and if yes how and with (against?) whom it intends to make use of the patent; The day after its announcement, Blackboard filed a patent infringement claim against the Canadian company Desire2Learn [PDF file], hosted at this link by The Inquirer. It will now be interesting to see how much "prior art" is claimed by others in the event that the patent is actually used in anger by Blackboard - the best place at the moment (2/8/2006) to put it and to find it especially the former looks to be this area of Wikipedia. From my own experience, thinking back to the early days of the Learning To Teach On-Line course in 1997 or 1998 (which I and several readers of Fortnightly Mailing had a hand in developing), I seem to recall:
- delivery over the Internet, with materials, tasks/assignments and discussion-board and chat system all accessible by browser;
- browser-based system for amending the materials;
- learners and tutors all over the world, with learners enroled to several of the institutions in the (then) South Yorkshire Further Education Consortium, and tutors employed by several different institutions.
We used the widely available ideas, knowhow, and Open Source and proprietary software that were available at the time, and nothing we did was particularly special. According to the US Patent Office web site, Blackboard's initial patent application was made in 1999.
More recent related Fortnightly Mailing posts include: 25 January 2007 - United States Patent & Trademark Office orders re-examination of Blackboard Patent; 9 December 2006 - Two contrasting views about software patents. A debate between Eben Moglen and Blackboard's Matt Small; 2 December 2006 - Blackboard: two separate re-examination requests to the US Patent and Trade Mark Office; and an application to the Court from Desire2Learn for a stay in proceedings; 27 October 2006 - EDUCAUSE on Blackboard: "patenting a community creation is anathema to our culture"; 16 October 2006 - John Mayer interviews various lawyers with patent knowhow; 10 September 2006 - The new "post-patent" environment for e-learning: a perspective. Guest contribution by Jim Farmer; 9 September 2006 - Blackboard's work for IMS; 8 August 2006 - Did the US Department of Justice know about the patent when it cleared Blackboard's acquisition of Web CT?; 26 July 2006 - Blackboard's US Patent 6988138.
Minor change made to the final paragraphs: 27/7/2006; bigger changes (indicated by used of strike-out font above: 1/8/2006; link to Wikipedia page added 2/8/2006; link to Desire2Learn court response to Blackboard's patent infringement claim, and to more recent Fortnightly Mailing posts, added 15/9/2006, and 29/10/2006, and 27/1/2007.
There is certainly clear prior art from the very early 1990s. Details follow.
From the historical perspective I date the development of "modern" bulletin board systems in e-learning from 1991. When we started to use FirstClass at the Open University on the JANUS project, within a few months many of the so-called "standard" features had been developed - quasi-geographical virtual campus representation, assignment submission, student-only areas, chat, etc - with the development of which I continue to associate key names like Ches Lincoln and Tony Hasemer. Although FirstClass originated over dial-up with a custom client, within a couple of years we were using Internet networks and by the mid 1990s, certainly by the time I had moved to Sheffield Hallam University (and soon installed FirstClass and TopClass), the use of browser access was common.
In case any vendor thinks that documentation from that era is not available or was not published prior to 1999, that is not true. There was massive public disssemination of these results including through the major European projects JANUS, EOUN, Cafe Mondial, etc. Also I am sure that the Open University in its current "open source and open content" mode would be among the first to note that the documentation on the 1994 Virtual Summer School remains available, at http://kmi.open.ac.uk/kmi-misc/virtualsummer.html. (Gary Alexander and Marc Eistenstadt were among the key names on a large team.)
Even the extremities of the patent are well exercised. We are coming up in 2007 to the 25th anniversary of the closure (not the start) of the "Cyclops" whiteboard system developed at the OU in the late 1970s - many from its development and evaluation team (Bates, Sharples, McConnell, Woodman, myself) are still active in e-learning - and have good memories and files (even paper ones as Tony Bates pointed out recently)
One awaits further developments with interest....
Paul Bacsich
Posted by: bacsich | 29/07/2006 at 10:58
Paul is, of course, right. This is one of many madcap US attempts at claiming copyright years after the horse has bolted. However, our very own BT also made a complete fool of themselves by claiming the rights over 'hyperlinking'.
In the new Web 2.0 world these companies simply don't get it. They don't realise that making these outlandish claims is a PR disaster for their own companies.
I'd start selling Blackboard stock NOW!
Posted by: Donald Clark | 29/07/2006 at 18:04
Assuming the assertion that Blackboard filed their application in 1999, I can certainly recall a great deal of prior art from my own experiences as an IT student at the Australian National University (from 1996). Not only did the Department of Computer Science there utilise course-based web pages to store and disseminate course-based information, but an electronic network-based submission system was in place there from at least the beginning of 1996. The electronic assignment box even incorporated a novel piece of software called "Gotcha," which compared assignments with each other as well as searches of the Internet to identify instances of plagiarism; and because it employed an algorithm search, it was no use renaming variables in a programming assignment to make it "different" to another students, Gotcha would still pick it up.
In addition, we made extensive use of newsgroups as the primary source of both information dissemination (teacher-student) and discussion (student-student/teacher).
Blackboard's claim of patent is both outrageous and repugnant. As an educator and manager of e-learning at a tertiary institution (even one that uses WebCT, a Blackboard product), I'm concerned this will stifle future innovation and competition in e-learning technology development.
Posted by: Leonard Low | 31/07/2006 at 05:42
This is good info on prior art. It might be worth posting at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_virtual_learning_environments.
Posted by: Michael Feldstein | 31/07/2006 at 20:07
There's an online learning history which is in effect the beginnings of a summry of prior art [on the Moodle web site] here:
Moodle docs.
Comment from Seb: I tend to think that the best place to put the "prior art" evidence is on Wikipedia at:
History of VLEs.
Posted by: Gomer Bolstrood | 01/08/2006 at 13:49
I guess one positive outcome is that we are collectively documenting the rich history of virtual leanring environments. As Paul Bacsich says, we were developing and using a multi-site shared whiteboard system (Cyclops) for teaching at the Open University in the early 1980s, and the Poplog virtual learning environment has been in continual use from the late 1970s to the present day, providing hyperlinked course material and interactive demonstrations for AI and computing students.
Posted by: Mike Sharples | 03/08/2006 at 11:46
For BT it was a silly PR disaster as Paul suggests. I am not so sure for Blackboard. The form of the suit is absolutely standard. The filing of the suit is entirely within the law. What it could do is force small outfits to the wall. I cannot comment on the outstanding case. I can say that I have seen nearly identical filings by the same trio of lawyers who filed for BB. Between Nike and Addidas it is all part of the grand scheme of things. Between BB and D2L it will, in the first instance force D2L to hire lawyers and turn up, miles from their homes and businesses. They may or may not ever get that outlay back. It will force them to write legal briefs not upgrade specs. In short it will take their eyes off the ball and cost them real money. I can see it as nothing other than bullying.
Posted by: George | 04/08/2006 at 12:37
In a system that uses the courts to define the applied limitations of a patent in practice after its award, it is interesting that Blackboard chooses a small company from a neighbouring country that routine sells into its own market. Unfortunately, companies that either pay up on demand, or who don't/won't/can't fight the suit, merely enforce acceptance of the initally granted terms of reference for a patent. In this case, the system feeds lawyers and stifles enterprise. The selection of D2L as an early target becomes predatory.
Posted by: Gayle Calverley | 04/08/2006 at 15:03