Supporting Open Source Software for Education
This is a guest post by Jim Farmer. Jim is Chairman of instructional media + magic.
Analysis of data recently released by PayScale Inc. and published in Bloomberg Business Week show starting salaries for graduates of Party Schools begin fifth of seven sectors moving up to third place by mid-career. Party Schools have a rate of salary increase exceeded only by graduates of Ivy League universities:
The data comes from 611,000 surveys completed as profiles on the PayScaleWeb Site.
As promised, here’s the interview:
Click here to view the embedded video.
(cc) photo credit: zolierdos
I’m a little late on this one, but late last week the U.S. Court of Appeals denied Blackboard’s rehearing petition. Their only recourse now would be to appeal to the United States Supreme Court and hope that the court miraculously decides to hear their case. As a result, Blackboard will have to return roughly $3.3 million to Desire2Learn, wiping out 100% of the company’s earnings for 2008.
A while back, I wrote a post giving advice to small schools about selecting a new LMS. That post turned out to be reasonably popular. Today somebody sent me a link to a study done by the North Carolina Community College System comparing Blackboard to Moodle and, in particular, talking about the experience of some small colleges that had migrated from the former to the latter. The results are pretty consistent with the advice I gave.
Today Blackboard announced that ANGEL’s Ray Henderson will be the new President of the Blackboard Learn division. This is great news. Ray is one of the best executives in educational technology today, known for both his competence, his integrity, and his leadership in supporting open standards and openness in general. Does this mean a new beginning for Blackboard?
This is another one I’ve been meaning to post for some time. Last year, I wrote a post called Bad News for Blackboard, Good News for Moodle that talked about changes in LMS market share among American community colleges according to a survey done by the Instructional Technology Council. The headline number was that Blackboard’s market share in this customer group was declining rapidly, with Moodle being the primary beneficiary and ANGEL being the secondary beneficiary.
As you might imagine, Blackboard and Desire2Learn have somewhat different interpretations of what the recent USPTO ruling means in the bigger picture. And there certainly is plenty of room for interpretation, given the complexity of the situation. There are now no less than three separate, parallel, but not entirely unrelated fronts in the legal war between Blackboard and Desire2Learn. There are many possible permutations of outcomes based on how each is resolved and in which order.
Update: Turns out I was incorrect about the relationship between the old patent and the new one. The ruling may (or may not) have some influence on the suit over the new patent, but it is not determinative.
This is getting very complicated. I’ll try to get a post up about at least some of the many permutations of possible outcomes soon.
Some big news on the edupatent front:
