Blackboard gets a "C-" from open-source leaning education market

Ah, to be proprietary and free from those pesky open-source projects! This is almost certainly the feeling at Blackboard, the "Microsoft of Higher Education" which is coming under increased pressure from Moodle, Sakai, two open-source alternatives for course management, as The Chronicle of Higher Education suggests.

It used to be so easy to throw one's proprietary weight around. Blackboard has launched patent attacks on competitors and has been a tough competitor in a range of different ways. Still, open source is thriving.

Blackboard is heading for a showdown with the free-software movement, according to some observers. Although Blackboard remains the clear market leader -- about 66 percent of American colleges use its software as their standard... -- there are signs that open-source alternatives are starting to gain ground. [One] survey found that the proportion of colleges using Moodle as their standard rose from 4.2 percent in 2006 to 7.8 percent in 2007, and that about 3 percent of colleges have selected Sakai.

Another survey by the Instructional Technology Council, found that its member colleges have increased Moodle adoption from 4 percent in 2007 to more than 10 percent in 2008. Blackboard, of course, will continue to compete, and should do so. But it's going to struggle in an already open-source friendly Higher Education market.

I spoke at a Higher Education conference a year ago and was surprised by how wide and deep adoption of open-source software was. It wasn't just the MITs of the world, but also community colleges, state colleges, international institutions like Oxford, as well as online-only universities. Blackboard and other proprietary vendors have their work cut out for them. Open source isn't perfect for every institution, but it's apparently more than good enough.

[The_Decider]

Blackboard is absolute crap. It is better than the abomination known as myitlab.com that I was forced to use the classes I taught last year.

[jerseyralph]

I have been a Moodle user for years. I continue to be astounded at how it has become more and more robust with every release.

I taught as an adjunct professor for several years. The university, a state institution, used Blackboard, which after a few months, I abandoned. I set up my own class Moodle site and the students loved it. My wife is also a student at one of the major online universities. Her experience with WebCT and the Blackboard has been less then good.

Open Source projects such as Moodle, or Open Office, should be protected by the government and the private sector. It is in the private sectors, those that use open source products, to keep these project protected and thriving.

[aaron_williamson]

Thanks, Matt -- as a disgruntled Blackboard user through both undergrad and law school, it's great to hear that my children have a fighting chance of using decent software when they're in school.

Something I think the Chronicle article missed is that Blackboard's patent threats, though directly aimed at commercial competitors, created stifling uncertainty for these free and open source alternatives as well. To clear the way for the excellent work of Sakai, Moodle, and ATutor, my colleagues at the Software Freedom Law Center successfully sought a reexamination of Blackboard's patent claims by the USPTO: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2007/jan/25/blackboard-reexam-ordered/

Hopefully the re-exam will allow competitors of all stripes to enter the course management market. But it should be clear that FOSS is not a path around patent threats, and any proprietary software vendor asserting software patents against anyone is a threat to FOSS development.