Talk:History of virtual learning environments

General Discussion

It seems to me that there are several fundamental reasons for opposing this patent.

First, but not least, the fiduciary responsibility that universities have toward the taxpayers and private donors who provide their funding, and to the university researchers who actually did develop innovative education technology. As it stands, our institutions are faced with the prospect of paying royalties to a third party for their own inventions. Regardless of how one feels about software patents (and I am personally opposed to them), I hope we can all agree that if royalties are due, they should be paid to those who actually invented the technology, not to those who simply managed to bulldoze a patent examiner.

Second, scholarly responsibilities. Academics have a strong obligation to provide credit where due. Allowing Bb to claim "inventions" that were in fact the work of others is utterly inconsistent with that responsibility. This work has been going on for almost five decades; Blackboard's claim to have "invented" it all in the late 90s is repugnant. One must also consider the chilling effects on future research. If educational technology researchers must work under fear of lawsuits, it's a near-certainty that research and innovation will suffer.

Third, pedagogic responsibility. Academia is ethically bound to provide education of the highest possible quality. Does anyone believe that the current systems represent perfection? Or that this patent won't create a chilling effect on future research aimed at improving on-line education?

Most universities have IP lawyers on staff (or on retainer) to handle the genuine inventions of university researchers:

http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/speeches/05-18.htm

I see several institutions on that list that are well-represented in the lists of prior art that have been compiled. I urge those institutions, in particular, to have their legal staffs prepare amicus briefs in Blackboard v. Desire2Learn.

Several have noted that Bb management is backpedaling on their outrageous claims, using spin-speak with null semantic content (marketroid phrases such as "enterprise" are utterly meaningless in this context). I suggest that, in addition to the amicus briefs, the university IP staff demand a detailed explanation of what, if anything, Blackboard actually invented, and how these claimed inventions can be distinguished from the dozens of examples of prior art that have been cited. Again, this should be done for fiduciary reasons if nothing else. Given the present undefined nature of Blackboard's claims, how can a university guarantee that it won't inadvertently infringe the patent? Are we expected to get approval from Blackboard's legal staff before doing any kind of on-line teaching? Or should we merely forge ahead and wait to see if Blackboard sues? Neither prospect seems appealing. -- G. Bolstrood (who uses "another brand" for teaching, doesn't want to get sued, and, most of all, doesn't want to see his students forced to use the crapfest that Blackboard calls a course management system).

Unknown Dates

• History of any art prior to 1990 with regard to remote teaching and interactive communication.

This is a correction regarding one coomercial computer assistead learning system. The article on the history of virtual learning environments mentions in the late 90's "The Learning Manager (TLM), from Campus America, Inc." I brought the predecessor of TLm to Laurentian University in 1991. It was then called LMS and had been in use in Alberta and Australia for some years at that point. The program was developed at the Southern Alberta Insitute of Technology (SAIT) beginning and it was spun off as a private company, later sold to Campus America, where it apparently failed and returend to the Learning management Corporation

• MIT School of Management's dotLRN (See [1]) Start date unknown - around by at least 2002... anyone have a better date?

In the late 1980's IBM had a system that ran under Novell called ICLASS for MS-DOS based, Token-Ring attached, stations in K-12. The system provided course/class management. The successor program for MS-Windows was called School Vista. I couldn't find many links, but here are a few:

http://www.gp.k12.mi.us/technology/mary/svinstructionalplans/instructionalplans.htm

www-03.ibm.com/industries/ca/en/education/k12/technical/updates/svyearend.pdf --Igoldste 17:28, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

http://web.archive.org/web/20011204023947/http://dotlrn.mit.edu/

• I have an e-mail from Sloan dated 8/1/01 which states "I'm writing because OpenForce is ready to begin porting SloanSpace to ACS 4". I would call this the start of the dotLRN effort. Does anyone have any better info?

• I believe that .LRN grew out of Randy Graebner's master's thesis at MIT, published in May, 2000. That's already referenced on the main article page. Not 100% positive on this, though, as there may be differences between the version in the thesis and what was actually implemented in .LRN. -- anonymous guy who doesn't want to get sued by Blackweb.

• CAI learning environments in the military: The US military has traditionally been the greatest consumer of computer based education as early as the 50's and 60's.

1999

Note that for purposes of prior art against patent 6,988,138, the art must have been used or published one-year prior to the application (1-year grace period) on June 30, 2000. --AriConsul 23:05, 3 August 2006 (PST)

The inclusion of these references does contribute to the case that states that patent 6,988,138 is obvious - see: person having ordinary skill in the art. --Sambauers 09:09, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

1989

I added this is on behalf of one of the authors of the paper, who didn't have a wikipedia account. It's pre-web though, and whilst there are references to it online, we couldn't find a direct source to refer to. --Straycat 20:41, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

The claims section of the patent only specifies client-server. A pre-web client-server system may count as prior art. Mfeldstein 17:04, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

1992

I don't have good information on this product, but here is a start Nils Peterson 15:15, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

• Approximately 1992 Washington State University experimented with a product called Pacer Forum, for collaborative writing. Pacer Forum ran on an intranet in a client-server model; the client would now be understood as a web browser. No published results by WSU. This link indicates use at Syracuse.

(I think it was called PacerForum and ran on Mac. We tried it at the OU but decided in favour of FirstClass. I can find no files from the period but see http://www.pjb.co.uk/8/Exchange.htm. Paul Bacsich 12:39, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

1960

There's just way too much detail on PLATO for this sort of a summary page. Some of this should be moved to PLATO's own entry, while some of it belongs in a separate, non-Wikipedia document that focuses specifically on the Blackboard prior art issue. I understand the motivation for this, but I think it goes to far in terms of turning this page from a list of historic events to specific legal documentation.

This is a fair point but one that is not going to go away; there is going to be a continuing temptation to put more detail than is appropriate for a standard encyclopedia article, since part of the motivation for writing this article is to help in the production of a legal document (as mentioned in the Desire2Learn article). Is there any chance that an exception might be made in this case, bearing in mind a possible (or even strong?) parallel between the motivation for this article and the ethos of Wikipedia? Failing that..."Wikipriorart"?

I see that you (Mfeldstein) did this. However, it would've been nice if you'd a) inserted a link to the new location in the body of the article here, b) cited the original source in the body of the text in the new location, and c) not screwed up the reference list. I spent quite a bit of time formatting that wiki-style (not to mention the time spent poring over dusty manuals in a research library on a nice weekend). :-(

Online Testing

Is online testing relevant?

1995 Online multiple choice quiz script released by Eric Tachibana (Selena Sol) et al. of eXtropia, earliest download page available at the Internet Archive is from 1998 with various educational site examples[2].

1996 Quiztest inspired by Eric Tachibana (Selena Sol)'s multiple choice script above, an online testing system capable of displaying content such as a text prior to the test, was released by Kristina Pfaff-Harris.

Early

I'm posting this because of my surprise and disgust at that appalling Blackboard patent and it's only an observation but I see mostly academic and recent stuff here, yet there was a plethora of what was called CBT (Computer Based Training) software around in the commercial mainframe computing world in the 1980s (and probably earlier) and the article looks grossly incomplete without a mention of it - to me at least. I couldn't dig up anything much from this newfangled Internet thing other than this http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0SMG/is_n15_v8/ai_7206477 but it was a long time ago. --Straycat 20:41, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I think the reason for the relatively recent and academic nature of the history is the current interest around the Bb patent and the web-based nature of current Course Management Tools. I agree that there were client-server or mainframe-terminal systems much earlier and those also foreshadow some of the prior arts, including selective release, quiz/test, and content managment. The one I recall was called PLATO, ca 1980, but probably earlier.

It is not surprising to me that the early history of web-based VLEs comes from academic settings. If you look at the timeline that is developing, the pioneering work happened at universities and then began spinning out into the commercial sector. WebCT is the story I know best. If we are able to get the early history of CBE, I'm guessing it will have similar origins in research labs and universities. Nils Peterson 14:34, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Most of the pre-Internet CBT was self-paced. The patent specifically addresses a networked multi-user environment. Mfeldstein 17:07, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

By this last comment do you think this Bb patent only applies to system where multiple users are collaborating, learning live, etc?

Scope issues

Postings over the August 26-28 weekend period have broadened the scope of this article to include "distance learning". Interesting, because even without a software or algorithmic core, such approaches might have been, or might be, patentable "business methods" (in US anyway). But there are other broadenings of e-learning beyond the VLE/LMS core that are not included: quality, benchmarking, etc. Some other things creep in from time to time but not systematically, e.g. e-learning hardware. A quick scan of Wikipedia suggests that there are no "History of X" articles close to this article - and I detect no drive from elsewhere to create such. So how far should we extend this one? Presumably the working view is "keep broadening till lots of people shout"? Paul Bacsich 08:29, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Keep adding sourced encyclopedic unbiased content until it gets to the point that it makes sense to break pieces out of it. The current timeline might wind up becoming two sets of articles : one based on time (eg pre1980, 80s, 90s, 00s) and one based on conceptual subdivisions (eg benchmarking e-learning, e-learning algorithms, e-learning software suites, e-learning businesses, etc.). Then you can place a navigation box (template) at the top of each article pointing to your suite of articles. WAS 4.250 08:49, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Alternatively, insert a preamble stating that use of VLEs relates other fields of education and technology (distance learning, expansion of education (esp HE), computer networks, Internet, WWW) and point to articles that can deal with the history of those topics more thoroughly. --Philbarker 11:35, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

As long as multiple people are daily using this page to accumulate and organize their data, keeping it all here for now makes sense. I'm expecting continued interest in adding stuff and organizing what is added so long as the patent thing is considered a threat. I could easily be wrong. WAS 4.250 13:58, 30 August 2006 (UTC)