Michael Feldstein

Not on Online Education - but I have done a fair amount of work in the industry and this is one of the more referenced books: https://www.amazon.com/Smartest-Kids-World-They-That/dp/145165443X This is a good blog on the state of online education: http://mfeldstein.com/ And a really good article: https://www.fastcompany.com/3062958/how-google-is-schooling-apple-and-… To answer why top Universities bet on MOOCs: this is partly an attempt to get around Education's Iron Triangle (ref: http://www.adaptivelearningworld.com/?p=110)

Mobile is important to students, and I like the time planning focus. OA managed not to mention that little issue about patents some years ago which made me smile... http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-invalidated-by-u… UK: many colleges use the open source Moodle as a 'virtual learning environment'. A tad less clunky than classic Blackboard in my personal opinion. Universities mostly have something and last time I checked the split was 50:50 Blackboard and Moodle. The acquisition of WebCT by Blackboard caused some annoyance in some HE circles I recollect. All ancient history now and I hope the new people can come up with something easier.

In my humble opinion, blackboard and the like (moodle, sakai...) are mainly useful for core classes that have a lot of students taking quizzes or writing papers or doing readings. Faculty and instructors, I think, sometimes forget when they have academic freedom to teach their course whatever way they see best (sometimes they really don't have this choice though, like for much government/military/corporate training). They can use stuff outside of blackboard if they wish. Also though, they may not have the time or skill to set up their own online course tools. There are alternatives that many faculty are embracing such as wikis (wikispaces, etc.), blogs (wordpress), and even some universities are exploring more decentralized or cloud-based alternatives that don't box you into a walled garden, like wordpress hosting, drupal tools (harvard's openscholar), google apps, and see what BYU is creating (although I'm not sensing that it will be open sourced): http://learningsuite.byu.edu/ (described in the educause article below) The newest LMS tools like Instructure (and the newest version of Blackboard) are basically trying to emulate Facebook, for better and for worse, with dynamic streams of information and connections to social networking tools. Some believe Blackboard will not dominate the market for much longer: http://mfeldstein.com/emerging-trends-in-lms-ed-tech-market/ Anyway, there are plenty of articles exploring the effects (negative and otherwise) of learning…

Sakai continues to put out releases on a fairly orderly schedule, but it's lost several of the core, founding institutions as their IT departments move away from customized FOSS software hosted in local datacenters to SAAS software hosted by commercial providers. For example: Indiana University was a core member of the Sakai Foundation that was rumored to have a $1mm+ budget devoted to heavily customizing Sakai for IU purposes and for running the software. IU seems to have moved away from the customized open-source approach to a consortial "buying club" approach to try to have influence in the commercial, higher-ed market. 10+ higher-ed institutions (many of them public institutions) have put $1mm each in a pot to try to better control their software destiny: http://mfeldstein.com/unizin-indiana-universitys-secret-new-learning-e…

Yes, an analysis here: http://mfeldstein.com/blackboard_patents_the_lms/ The executive summary is "any groupware that involves student interaction."

There's a strong team behind a new competitor to Blackbord, http://www.instructure.com/. Decent article about them: http://mfeldstein.com/instructure-canvas-a-new-lms-entrant/

I wouldn't call them a patent troll, but their patent's claims (http://mfeldstein.com/images/uploads/Blackboard_Patent_Claims.pdf via Wikipedia) are on the level of Amazon's one-click patent. And Blackboard HAS used them offensively (unsuccessfully, I might add). The patent was eventually overturned, but at non-insignificant cost to all parties involved. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc.#Blackboard_legal_issues) As business, the choice to use your patent offensively to go after a competitor may come at the expense of, y'know, actually improving your product,which it seems Blackboard has chosen to do.

They ended up losing a lot of those claims recently if I recall correctly, but that being said I agree for a long time it did and still does hurt the LMS environment. http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-invalidated-by-u… (2008)

A Wikipedia citation [1] states that all 44 patent claims were non-finally rejected on March 25th, 2008 upon re-examination. Does anyone know what ever came of this? [1] http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-invalidated-by-u…

#6,988,138 Internet-based education support system and methods http://www.google.com/patents?id=RX94AAAAEBAJ&dq=6,988,138 In plain english: http://mfeldstein.com/images/uploads/Blackboard_Patent_Claims.pdf * I'm a BB competitor, so it's in my area (that is, I hope I don't get sued)

I think some of these have been invalidated: http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-invalidated-by-u…

I can't seem to find an overview of all of them, but here are the ones Blackboard said they wouldn't enforce against pure open source software. http://www.blackboard.com/patent/FAQ_013107.htm I believe that their patents together meant that any commercial Blackboard-like software was infringing on their IP. This is a list of companies that were probably infringing on Blackboard's fortunately invalid patents. http://www.mfeldstein.com/the_blackboard_patent_claims_in_plain_englis… http://www.google.com/patents?id=RX94AAAAEBAJ&dq=6,988,138 That's their first and biggest one and it's obscene.