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Showing posts from September, 2006

D2L Trial and Clients

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I've been talking with Stephan Meyer (left) from D2L today at the Beyond Boundaries conference in Grand Forks, ND. This conference has a modest vendor area and D2L has a modest booth there. Stephan gave me a couple of tidbits to chew on today. First, D2L will be announcing a new client very soon, although the contract is not signed yet (knock on wood). This is a major statewide consortium and will be another very visible victory for D2L over their competitors (think Blackboard, BlackCT, or whatever else you want to call them). Probably the most important thing is that this client obviously was not put off by the black cloud of litigation that many people have opined would keep D2L from signing new clients. Apparently there are enough safeguards (indemnity, etc.) built into the contracts to help mitigate the perceived risk on the part of potential clients. Second, Stephan told me that a court date with a jury trial has been set and will be announced very soon. I'm already makin

Desire2Invest

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I received an email and subsequent phone call today from a securities analyst working for the investment arm of a major U.S. bank. Blackboard is one of the stocks that she covers for the bank and she had been reading my blog post (directly below, or go here ) about the number of higher ed institutions that have selected D2L over Blackboard during the past few years. She wanted to chat a bit about Blackboard's prospects for the coming years from a securities perspective. She clearly realized that she was speaking to someone with more than the usual dose of anti-Blackboard sentiment, but she was interested in what I had to say all the same. As she was analyzing their stock prospects, she seemed to be concentrating on the following factors: How difficult (costly) is it to change vendors? How long do most contracts run (how soon could schools consider making a switch)? What affect will the ongoing patent lawsuit have on D2L's ability to sign new clients? How does the higher ed mark

Black Market

There has been a fair amount of speculation lately about why Blackboard has taken a strategy that has clearly been ill-received by the education community that it so dearly depends upon. Some have indicated that it is the mark of desperation ... but most don't buy that argument since they have somewhere between 70-80% of the CMS market currently locked up. Why would the dominant player in the market be concerned, especially when it is widely thought to be such a tough thing to change from one CMS to another? Others have asked why they chose to attack D2L as opposed to eCollege, or Angel, or any of the others. It was amusing to read some posts where the authors didn't even consider D2L to be a contender in the market, some even admitting that they had never heard of D2L. Below is a partial list of the reasons why I think BlackCT is suing Desire2Learn (not necessarily in chronological order): Wisconsin (UW system) switched to D2L in 2003 Minnesota (MnSCU) switched in 2003 (BB n

Age Differences

In the previous post I suggested that we needed to compare the demographics of the LSC PSOL students with the students in the peer group to see if there were any significant differences which might make the results not perfectly comparable. My conclusion was that there are several demographic factors where the groups differ, but in total they appear to just about even out without a huge bias either in favor of or fighting against one group or the other. One of the factors of possible differences has to do with the larger percentage of younger online learners (46.2% vs. 34.2%) that we have at LSC. At the Noel-Levitz conference this summer I learned that their research has shown that the younger students generally show significantly lower satisfaction rates than the older students. It finally occurred to me that I do have the data to study for evidence of this phenomenon, at least for the LSC students. The LSC data does show a huge difference between the two groups of learners. Those 24

PSOL Demographics

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I posted recently about our 13-school peer comparison group for the PSOL and how this would be our best group for benchmarking since they are all two year schools. It is also necessary to look a little deeper to make sure that the respondents are similar so I compared the demographics of the two groups. Ours were 81.6% female, theirs were 78.7% female. Females generally give more favorable satisfaction ratings on such surveys (unless they are being surveyed about their husbands). Ours were 46.2% age 24 and under, theirs were 34.2% in that age range. Younger students tend to give lower satisfaction ratings than the older age groups. 58.2% of ours indicated that they were primarily online students, compared to 59.7% of theirs. It has been my experience that those who identify themselves as mainly online tend to look more favorably upon their experience learning online than those who consider themselves to be primarily on-campus learners just taking an online course or two. 61.2% of our s

Desire2Disagree

Desire2Learn has filed a response to the Blackboard patent lawsuit. Full pdf here. It's pretty safe to say that D2L disagrees with all the important stuff in the lawsuit. Many of the paragraphs in the suit are answered as follows - "ANSWER: Desire2Learn denies the allegations in this paragraph." As far of the affirmative part of their defense (meaning their attack mode), they say the following (selected pieces from a much longer list): 1. Blackboard’s claims are barred, in full or in part, because the claims of the ’138 patent are invalid under 35 U.S.C. §§ 101, 102, 103, and/or 112. 2. The ’138 patent is unenforceable because Blackboard failed to disclose all non-cumulative, material prior art of which Blackboard was aware to the Patent Office during the prosecution of the ’138 patent. 5. Upon information and belief, Blackboard, including every individual having a duty of disclosure, disclosed no prior art to the Patent Office during the prosecution of ’138 patent. 12

New PSOL Results

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Today I received some new data from Noel-Levitz regarding the PSOL (Priorities Survey for Online Learners) that we gave for the third year in a row during spring semester 2006. The data have always been useful but the report received today is the most useful for benchmarking that we have ever received. Coming from a two-year public institution, our comparisons with the national results were interesting but not terribly useful for benchmarking purposes. Many of the schools included in the national results are very dissimilar from LSC. It includes graduate schools, for-profit schools, schools that are completely online (not blended as we are with both F2F and online), and overall just a hodge-podge of different schools that have used the survey during the past several years. This spring we received better data because 16 of our sister institutions in MnOnline also gave the same survey at the same time. This was definitely better because it gave us comparison data with a group of scho

Open Source Integration

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Very interesting project started about a month ago over at OpenAcademic.org in an effort to integrate four useful open source tools into an environment that would have lots of features for e-learning. The tools they are working with are Elgg , Drupal , Moodle , and Mediawiki . This integration should result in the following features being offered: a public facing web presence departmental intranets club/extracurricular sites online class sites a personal workspace for all members of the school community; this workspace includes web-accessible file storage, social bookmarking, a blog, a podcasting platform, and a presentation/portfolio creator a single user base -- no duplicate data entry, no need to synchronize users between multiple databases Additionally, these technologies/approaches are supported: Podcasting Safe social networking Tagging Informal learning Learner centric ePortfolios Personal Learning Environments Blogging Wikis They are still looking for development help in the

Missed Opportunity

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At the time that MnSCU adopted Desire2Learn (D2L) as our IMS there was some conversation about developing a unique system-wide branding for the tool. This conversation never really went anywhere and soon everyone was busy with installation, conversion, training, and so on. I think that was a tremendous opportunity that we missed to build some brand identity for Minnesota Online and MnSCU. Ohio State uses D2L but calls it Carmen. Excerpt from syllabus article : "To create identification with the new learning environment, TELR branded D2L at Ohio State “Carmen,” a reference to the OSU alma mater song, “Carmen, Ohio.” The TELR visual design team came up with an appealing graphic identity, revising it in response to feedback from students, faculty and staff. The Carmen icon is now instantly identifiable across campus, and anchors not just the CMS interface, but also our campus communications and advertising campaign. We believe this attention to brand has been a

Educause on Blackboard Patent

A message from Brian Hawkins, President of EDUCAUSE See full text pdf "Like all of you, EDUCAUSE is concerned about the vitality of the supplier marketplace for tools and solutions that are essential to higher education. And, like you, EDUCAUSE is deeply concerned that laws and regulations recognize both the rights of intellectual property (IP) holders (our universities are significant producers of IP) and the incentives to invest in innovation. Our positions on advanced networking, CALEA, and Net Neutrality are just three examples where we have worked hard and well to promote and protect innovation in information technology." "With respect to the issues of course management systems, we have been actively engaged in conducting necessary due diligence; that is, we are trying to understand the situation so that we can educate our members and, if appropriate, establish an advocacy position. We at EDUCAUSE have consciously avoided any public statement about a position per se

D2L Hit Hard

On Tuesday, September 5, MnSCU set a new single day record with 13,114,524 hits on our D2L installation. There were a total of 70,095 unique visits from 43,173 unique IP addresses. We knew that this fall would be record setting, but we still weren't sure what to expect when all 32 institutions (actually only 31 active user sites) hit the ground full steam for fall term. As Deputy CIO Al Essa proclaimed, "Let's keep our fingers crossed." Actually, I think it is necessary to note that the MnSCU staff have done much more than crossing fingers/toes and reciting voodoo chants. A major effort has been conducted over the past several months to upgrade and expand hardware and to begin addressing staffing needs at the Office of the Chancellor. This will probably be the kiss of death....but so far this is the best fall term we have had in terms of system performance, speed, and reliability. Now I'll start holding my breath and wait for the other shoe to drop. Technorati T