Comment Further meat (Score 1) 186
(Disclaimer - I don't know the patent in detail, I haven't read it, only the summaries here.)
I worked for a small UK-based LMS vendor between October 2000 and March 2006. We deployed a huge number of bespoke and off-the-shelf LMSs to customers, mostly in the UK but a few overseas. For the first year, I was their sole developer, and was responsible for maintenance of what was already in the wild. I'm not saying who they are here just in case Blackboard's lawyers are bored ;-)
Not one of these systems prohibited administrators from running courses, and I can't think of any reason why we would have done - I met near enough all our clients in the early stages of their projects and I don't remember any ever querying this. It'd have been more work to reduce functionality and (through likely user habits) security. Admins had all the normal tools you'd expect, could do any monitoring, mentoring etc, and could also run courses.
The idea that a jury of my peers could consider my _not_ doing something stupid to be an amazing innovation is frankly horrifying. Something has gone horribly wrong here.
I worked for a small UK-based LMS vendor between October 2000 and March 2006. We deployed a huge number of bespoke and off-the-shelf LMSs to customers, mostly in the UK but a few overseas. For the first year, I was their sole developer, and was responsible for maintenance of what was already in the wild. I'm not saying who they are here just in case Blackboard's lawyers are bored
Not one of these systems prohibited administrators from running courses, and I can't think of any reason why we would have done - I met near enough all our clients in the early stages of their projects and I don't remember any ever querying this. It'd have been more work to reduce functionality and (through likely user habits) security. Admins had all the normal tools you'd expect, could do any monitoring, mentoring etc, and could also run courses.
The idea that a jury of my peers could consider my _not_ doing something stupid to be an amazing innovation is frankly horrifying. Something has gone horribly wrong here.
