More shoulder to the wheel

One of the things that’s most exciting for me about going from a small organization to a bigger one is that there are certain areas where scale can have a really big, really clear impact.  Standards, a topic I personally have a lot of passion for, is one of those areas.  So in joining Blackboard, I saw and hoped for a big opportunity to do more.  The fact is Blackboard’s long been involved on a number of standards fronts and has made some really important contributions.  But I think it’s fair to characterize our involvement to date as more about participation than about leadership.  I want to change that.

So, as I shared with our client community in a letter today, we’re going to ramp up our commitment to standards.  Starting with a specific commitment to a standard I helped author and care a lot about, IMS’s Common Cartridge.  Let me state it plainly here, we will fully support both the import and export of this format, working closely with Rob Abel, the IMS and its Board of Directors, of which I am a member. 

Why?  eLearning Systems like Blackboard are an important part of educational delivery.  But they’re a part, one that needs to easily interact with lots of other parts, including learning content, to provide their full benefit to educators. Publishers, institutions, instructional designers, faculty, all are creating great learning content, at no small investment in time and resource.  They want to create content once, have it be able to play anywhere, and preserve their investment by making sure it’s not “locked in” to a particular vendor’s system due to proprietary formats.  Common Cartridge emerged to address these goals.  I’m thrilled to have us get more involved, and also to get more personally connected with our ongoing support of other important standards like LTI, SCORM, LIS and SIF. 

Once standards like these get implemented, creators of learning content and tools will of course still need to have formal partnerships (for example in our case participating in the Blackboard Building Blocks™ program or the Blackboard Content Provider network) with platform providers like us in order to connect their standards-compliant tool or content to eLearning platforms through supported interfaces.  That’s the same as it is today and a key part of continuing to ensure stability and accountability once platforms are extended.  But the power of these standards will be knowing that you can build a piece of content or tool once, then leverage existing partner relationships you have with various eLearning platform providers to have that content or tool serve teachers and learners through multiple supported systems.

In closing, an invitation.  This is important work for teaching and learning.  Work that I hope more will join us in doing.  I know many have been taking a wait and see approach before fully diving in.  I think we need to change that.  Collective inaction is delaying important benefits to educators worldwide.  

So I invite our publishing partners, our technology partners, our competitors and our community to engage with us to drive adoption of open standards.  Specifically join us in working with the IMS Global education standards organization.  Michael Chasen, our CEO at Blackboard, and I have both committed to participate.  We’re going to bring some of our best technical minds to the dialog and hope to see you there.  Ultimately the proof will be in shipped software, I understand that.  But I hope you get a sense of the commitment you can expect from us in this important area for industry collaboration.

Comments

[Rob Abel]

Ray,

This is great news and - once again – I thank you for your leadership in helping to drive forward standards into the marketplace – for the mutual benefit of buyers and sellers. In my opinion, standards are not an end in themselves, but rather a means to an end. The goal here is to increase the usefulness of technology in achieving the strategic goals of institutions and schools. Standards enable that by allowing and encouraging more investment in innovation. For those organizations involved in educational technology – including some very large and prominent ones - that may have been making excuses for not participating in the core IMS initiatives you mention, this announcement should be a wake-up call.

For those readers who may not be familiar with the IMS standards you mention – Common Cartridge, Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI), and Learning Information Services (LIS) – I invite them to get an overview, including screencasts, at:

http://www.imsglobal.org/digitallearningservices.html

Perhaps most timely is that IMS will be holding a hands-on public workshop in Montreal (at TELUQ – the Tele-University of the University of Quebec) on Thursday, July 16. This will cover Common Cartridge v1.1, which includes the long awaited Basic LTI – enabling a seamless teacher and student experience with Web 2.0 learning applications. For the agenda and sign-up see:

http://www.imsglobal.org/july2009montreal.cfm#Thursday

I’ll also be happy to jump in here and answer any questions the readers may have on how IMS works. Our web site is:

http://www.imsglobal.org/

[Charles Severance]

Ray - I am really glad to see this post. I hope to see you at DevCon in a few weeks and catch up. The real value of being part of Blackboard is the reach that you can have when we all deploy high impact standards. I think that there is a very strong value proposition for a company with a dominant market share to participate and strongly contribute to interoperability standards. When market-dominating products do not solidly support standards - people get a feeling of lock-in - in a sense there are likely many organizations which will not consider a commercial offering that does not support real and interoperable standards because (a) it does not play well when there are multiple learning solutions on a campus, and (b) the sense of vendor-lock-in is particularly distasteful in a teaching and learning context. And as you say, it is not enough for Blackboard to participate - it is necessary to lead and to add significant horsepower to the building of standards. In a sense, I would like to see Blackboard build on the leadership you have shown in the IMS LTI 2.0 group. Working closely on LTI 2.0 with Lance Neumann, George Kroner, and John Fontaine has been a delight. Now lets move it to the next level with leadership participation-levels in standards like IMS LIS and IMS Common Cartridge. I would say "welcome to the jungle" - but you have years of experience in the jungle already :).

[Philip Hutchison]

I applaud your personal efforts in this area and believe that you are sincere, but considering Blackboard's history of litigation and intimidation in the industry I cannot take this news with a straight face.

If Blackboard truly wants to show leadership in the industry, it will stop pursuing competitors with frivolous (and often laughable) patent claims in court. Patent lawsuits are antithetical to open standards.

Blackboard's history of intimidation and aggressiveness in the market is not conducive to standards creation and may wind up driving potential collaborators away.

[Rob Abel]

Hi Philip,

I thought I'd jump in here just to clarify from the perspective of a standards organization like IMS (IMS operates under pretty much the same IP policies as 100's of other standards setting consortia around the world).

First, we agree that most participants in standards organizations want to make sure that the IP rights in a potential standard are well known - to avoid getting trapped into a situation where they are beholden to another organization's patent. That's why most standards organizations, including IMS have an IP policy that requires full disclosure upfront of any claims by participants. I can tell you that Common Cartridge has no such claims made by any party. I can also tell you that Blackboard has been very generous in providing significant input into the Learning Tools Interoperability work, based on work they had already done, without making any claims. This was before Ray's arrival into Blackboard.

Now, IMS has been very proactive in encouraging the disclosure of all the prior art that our members may be aware of relative to the Blackboard case. That's because we want to make sure that those who make decisions on such matters have all the available information. However, patents in the world of technology are a fact. We don't expect patent claims and suits to go away any time soon.

So, while patents and standards are a related topic, the willingness of Blackboard to participate in the standards process should be seen as a positive sign . . . I'm more concerned about the many organizations that DO NOT participate in the standards process - those are the ones that may jump in at a later date with claims. Take a look at our Contributing Member list and you will see many leading companies - but you will also notice several large organizations missing - some of which are locking customers into proprietary technology on a daily basis - as a buyer I'm more concerned about those organizations.

http://www.imsglobal.org/members.html

Best,
Rob

[Roddy Warnock]

"Once standards like these get implemented, creators of learning content and tools will of course still need to have formal partnerships (for example in our case participating in the Blackboard Building Blocks™ program or the Blackboard Content Provider network) with platform providers like us in order to connect their standards-compliant tool or content to eLearning platforms through supported interfaces."

Doesn't sound like much of an "open" standard to me if "you still need to have formal partnerships" to connect "standard-compliant content" to a "standard- compliant" LMS.

"That’s the same as it is today..." seems to sum it up.