Patent Fight Rattles Academic Computing
The Associated Press
By JUSTIN POPE
August 29, 2006
Increasingly, we see these systems as the foundation of academic computing. In an Aug. 27 story about a patent dispute in the academic computing field, The Associated Press gave an erroneous title for Alfred Essa of the Minnesota state college and university system. He is associate vice chancellor and deputy chief information officer, not CIO.
Every day, millions of students taking online college courses act in much the same way as their bricks-and-mortar counterparts. After logging on, they move from course to course and do things like submit work in virtual drop boxes and view posted grades _ all from a program running on a PC.
It may seem self-evident that virtual classrooms should closely resemble real ones. But a major education software company contends it wasn't always so obvious. And now, in a move that has shaken up the e-learning community, Blackboard Inc. has been awarded a patent establishing its claims to some of the basic features of the software that powers online education.
