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Comment by ksvs | Hacker News Reader

Anyone have a link to the patent Blackboard claims they're infringing?

Having had to use Blackboard several times in the past, I have a hard time believing they have any IP that should be protected. As I recall, their functionality is similar to any number of portal-type applications (groups, discussions, document postings, different access levels, etc.) It looks to me as if their patents rest on the fact that they are applying obvious processes/technology to a specific vertical: education.

Of course I'm not an IP lawyer, this is just my layman's opinion.

Not only that, last time I used it, Blackboard was a sad, sad excuse for a web app. Poorly designed, poorly executed, bad usability overall. But Blackboard is the type of app IT managers love. It's what everyone else is using, so it must be Ok. No IT manager ever lost her job for buying something too conservative.

What really makes me disillusioned about the current state of IP law is that you mostly see the poorly performing incumbents go after the innovating start-ups with patent lawsuits. I know I'm biased about this, but I really can't remember the last time some fledgling start-up was trying to protect itself with its patents. With patent portfolios, size matters, as long as you've got plenty of tricks up your sleeve, you can always settle in a reasonable manner.

You're right. It's because the laws are designed to protect the big guys.

Pretend you are a patent lawyer. 98% of your business comes from big firms. Are you going to donate money and lobby to create laws that protect 98% of your revenue or are you going to push for laws that help small innovators?

When they first started pitching, we were a local school (Alexandria Va) and somewhat on the forefront of using tech in the classroom (for back then). I was co-chair of what you might call a "User group" (it was called the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable) back then, so I got to see their stuff and we came on board as an early adopter.

That said, I almost never used it. Yahoo provided all the functionality I needed that I didn't have on my web site or couldn't do with email (like chat for office hours, etc.).

It was just too cumbersome. I thought maybe they were better by now.

When I moved to the MA area, WebCT was in the area and I had an idea for them. Alas, they were bought by BB before I ever got anything organized. I figured at that time that BB was circling the drain. When the lawsuits started, I knew I was right.

#6,988,138 Internet-based education support system and methods

http://www.google.com/patents?id=RX94AAAAEBAJ&dq=6,988,1...

In plain english: http://mfeldstein.com/images/uploads/Blackboard_Patent_Claim...

* I'm a BB competitor, so it's in my area (that is, I hope I don't get sued)

Wow, that is a completely bogus patent. It is just a description of their software, translated into a patent. There's not one aspect of it that's non-obvious.

Students should organize a boycott of them. That would put pressure on them to stop this nonsense.

Students should organize a boycott of them. That would put pressure on them to stop this nonsense.

I agree, but I think students probably care as much about this as consumers did about Amazon's 1 click patent..

Also, in some cases they need the BB software for academic work.

As a student, I disagree. The professors think this is the best way to upload documents to the web. They spend a good 5 minutes every time they try to upload a document, thinking their labor is going into providing a consistent user interface for the students, but they generally dislike it also. Of course, they aren't. It's so hard to find content in BlackBoard that it causes students anxiety. Which they take to their professors, who are themselves frustrated with BlackBoard. Those conversations never go well.

What we are finding is that a lot of medical school students are setting up their own community sites off campus in part to provide an alternate way to access the material.

In general, the professors also dislike it. They have already moved to different software for grading. They only keep BlackBoard because they think the students want it. There are an essentially infinite number of ways to get documents to students electronically.

Many of these comments are legit, but as someone who works with faculty in a system that uses Blackboard, I must say that many instructors who use the software are indifferent, disorganized, and inconsistent. I find it hard to believe that a different software would magically solve these problems.

Blackboard can be frustrating and there's a learning curve, but this is true of virtually any software. (Ever used Photoshop, for example?) If content is "so hard to find in Blackboard that it causes students anxiety" the faculty member should seek some help. In that case, the problem isn't Blackboard--it's the user.

Why does something this "simple" (compared to photoshop, at least) have a learning curve?

The problem, especially when it comes to web-based apps, is never the user when it's a question of findability or usability. The onus is on the software interface designer and information architect to make things usable and findable. Especially for something so easily organized as "Courses, users who can access the course, assignments and turned in assignments, tests/quizes and grades, communication between students and students, and students and teacher."

Blackboard is an incredibly inefficient and confusing user interface for what it is.

The concept of blaming the user for usability problems is disheartening...

In this case it's blaming the professor for problems encountered by students, and I agree wholeheartedly with that. There are professors who were dragged kicking and screaming into the e-mail age five years ago and immediately forced to basically manage a web site. They go through what is to them a series of meaningless magic rituals, the chapter 10 section 3 homework assignment gets uploaded to the chapter6/Mondays/quizzes/attic/old/personal_photos/onion_on_my_belt/tarnation directory, one foreign student with an exaggerated impression of the consequences for missing a homework assignment actually clicks through every folder on the site until she finds it, and the professor gives a 0 on that assignment to every other student in the class because they didn't turn it in. And that, my friends, is a true story (merely the worst of many) though directory names have been changed because I can't really remember.

That said, Blackboard was really awful when I used it, which was six or seven years ago. It was archaic and felt like a careless amateur effort. Even on the best-organized Blackboard class site, everything was a few clicks further away than it should have been. It doesn't sound like they've had much incentive to improve it since then.

As someone who has had to work with BlackBoard as staff and then as student, and then as student rep on the curriculum committee, and then designing a new way to manage content at my school, I strongly disagree that there should be any learning curve. Our system is set up so you see the edit button as soon as you roll over the event, and then you login, and the login takes you to the event edit. Full disclosure, we're solving the problem for a med school, not a full on university, but there are a lot of med/law/business/etc schools at universities that would be much better served by a more focused system.

The user isn't the problem. The mind boggles that you even said that.

Google Apps for Education is much cheaper, and they know something about search. I showed just regular Google Apps to a few people in academia, and even the free version would be better than what they are doing. There is the annoyingly low file size limit though, that made uploading large data sets quite painful.

Students should organize a boycott of them. That would put pressure on them to stop this nonsense.

As a software developer, I completely agree.

As a student I care more about my grades and, dubious patents or not, my school and professors mandate that in order to pass I have to use Blackboard.

Most professors/departments (at least, in my experience) are very open minded, but often unaware about these things. Just let them know (nicely).

The schools make the buying decision, and the software is (in my understanding) usually compulsory for the course, so a boycott would put their academic success at risk. The best students can do is put pressure on their schools to switch.

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-invali...

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