Interview with John Baker

Sorry, this took several days longer to post due to technical problems on my end. 
I sat down with John Baker, CEO of Desire2Learn (now D2L), late Tuesday night at the 2006 MERLOT Conference to talk about the Blackboard suit as well as a few other things about D2L such as their recent growth and even pandemic planning. (Photo courtesy of Al Essa under Creative Commons license.) 

The interview was recorded and edited with Audacity, but I uploaded the final cut into Odeo so that there would be a nice player embedded into the blog post. I'm still having a problem finding a nice way to get an audio player into a Blogger post.

NOTE: edited June 1, 2022. Replaced the Odeo embed (Odeo is in the Deadpool) with an embedded audio player from the Internet Archive. This was Desire2Pod - Podcast Episode #1.
    
  • 0.00 Introduction and quick background 
  • 1:30 Support from competitors (eCollege press release) 
  • 3:58 Al Essa's comments about copyright vs. patent (Part 1) 
  • 5:36 Blackboard's patent filing in Canada (patent application) 
  • 6:40 Anti-trust comments/questions about BlackCT 
  • 10:50 Quotes from Blackboard (BB Patent page) 
  • 14:25 How does a 2000 patent relate to recent D2L developments (LOR, LiveRoom, etc)? 
  • 16:35 Potential for D2L benefits from Blackboard's attack 
  • 18:30 Pandemic planning 
  • 21:10 D2L Growth during past 2-3 years 
  • 24:05 Feedback on version 8 from clients using it 
As you can imagine, on many topics he was only comfortable saying a little bit. I had no expectations for John to give away any trade secrets or compromise their legal positioning in any way. With that in mind, I hope you find something in there worth listening to. 

Full disclosure: My college (LSC) uses D2L. I am the FY07 Chair of MinnesotaOnline which also uses D2L. I chaired the committee in 2002-2003 that made the recommendation to adopt D2L throughout MnSCU. I consider John Baker to be a friend and have known him for over three years now. 

Technorati Tags: , ,

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ed2Go is NOT Higher Education

Image
For several years now I have railed against the use of ed2go courses when they are affiliated with a college or university. During my time on the Minnesota Online Council I was especially adamant against the listing of the ed2go courses at the MnOnline website as though they were endorsed courses from a member institution. There is no way that I think the brand should be diluted by including courses like this in our offerings. Why not? Glad you asked. NOTE: most of this post was written after I discovered that my own school had recently signed on with ed2go. This saddens me to no end since I spent the past five y ears railing against the use of ed2go in Minnesota Online and our colleges. Our VP in that division assures me that they will do what they can to not harm our reputation for quality online offerings - and I believe that, I'm just not sure how much of that we can actually control. I waited a couple of weeks before posting this to see whether my opinion would be changed by...
Read more

Another Switch from Blackboard to Desire2Learn

Image
As many of you know, I am always interested in the comings and goings of the LMS wars. Who's leaving Blackboard and what are they going to? I rarely have to ask the opposite question - who's migrating to Blackboard from a non-Blackboard platform - because it almost NEVER happens. The latest one to catch my eye was the University of Surrey in the UK. Here's their press release about choosing D2L . Nowhere in the release do they mention what platform they've been on - but it doesn't take much effort to find this on their current website: So, yes, this is another school switching from Blackbeard to Desire2Learn. I find portions of their press release to be revealing about their previous experience with BlackCT Vista. "A new hi-tech system is being introduced at the University of Surrey to enable students to learn on computers and mobile devices via a more personalised platform ." "The new Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), replacing and vastly improving...
Read more

New Netiquette Guidelines for LSC Online

The LSC Online Programs Advisory Committee decided to craft a set of netiquette guidelines that would serve as the recommended list that faculty could use for their online courses. It's not a full policy or anything like that, just an attempt to give them some useful information to post in their online courses. Faculty are free to use them, change them, add to them, not use them at all, or whatever. The list is posted in the LSC wiki . This project was taken on because many of our online faculty had been using a particular web resource for many years as a netiquette guide. That web page began carrying less-than-attractive banner ads and quite frankly was always more about general online netiquette rather than focused on online learning. There are quite a few other sets of guidelines out there, but many of them are rather lengthy or include items that we don't feel are needed, and occasionally we just disagreed with them. So, we decided to write a relatively short list of our ow...
Read more