All your e-learning systems belong to Blackboard

... at least in the US. Seems like there is yet another great US-patent around, granting the Washington based company Blackboard basically exclusivity on e-learning platforms. [Michael Feldstein] has a nice quote from that patent which seems to be written general enough to threaten applications like Moodle, Claroline or "Your School/University's e-learning platform".

But since the patent was filed in June 2000 I don't think this will hold that long thanks to some probably existing Prior Art claims as Seb Schmoller mentioned on his blog. He also mentioned, that the patent seems to be pending in the EU ... good luck with that ;)

I can remember from my days in the e-learning business ;) that back then already blackboard was one of the best and most important e-learning platforms available, next to Lotus LearningSpace, which I think is older than Blackboard in the first place.

stefan on July 30, 2006 at 11:14 +0200

Comment on this

You can use Markdown here.

Please answer the question in this field. It should help keeping spambots out ;-)