The BlackWeb Opportunity
Ben Watson has posted an industry analyst’s report on the Blackboard-WebCT merger in his comment on the Learning Circuits blog. The analyst’s perspective may be correct, but I see another opportunity. According to this report, there are about 562 current WebCT clients who do not use the enterprise version. These institutions have opted for the cheaper flavour of WebCT and may be willing to try out an open source platform instead of upgrading to "BlackWeb" enterprise.
Now is the time for the OS user/developer/services community, such as Moodle.com, to get the word out about open source learning platforms. For starters, here is the Edutools feature comparison of the soon to be defunct WebCT Campus (the non-enterprise version) compared with .LRN, Moodle and ATutor. And don’t forget about ELGG 
Filed under: Learning, OpenSource, Technology
[...] Via Stephen Downes, is this post by Michael Feldstein that Blackboard (aka BlackWeb) has been granted a US patent on the learning management system (LMS). My initial reaction was indignation that a greedy corporation was once again trying to stifle innovation in education. Then I read Brent Schlenker’s reaction to my post on the lack of open source learning applications, and Brent correctly noted that there are a lot of learning applications, just not that many “educational” ones; My point is that we don’t need any specific open source learning applications. That would be just another thing that people need to learn…another interface to learn…another login id and password to remember. We are at our best when we evaluate the existing technologies and leverage them for the purpose of learning. We are at our worst when we try to create our own little system and call it the Learning thingy. [...]