Blackboard and WebCT to merge

The two biggest electronic learning platform vendors for higher education have agreed on a merger/takeover deal. Blackboard are to acquire WebCT by early 2006 in a deal that will give the new company about two thirds of the world market in learning management system (LMS) or virtual learning environments (VLEs), as we have come to call them in the university sector.

This gives me some concern, not because my own university uses either of these platforms (we don't yet), but because Blackboard have demonstrated a will to censor inconvenient research. In the Spring of 2003 they rolled out the lawyers to prevent two students presenting a research paper on security flaws in the Blackboard campus ID card system.

The two, Billy Hoffman of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Virgil Griffith of the University of Alabama had decided to publish a paper on the problem at a security conference in Georgia but Blackboard’s lawyers stepped in and got a court to issue an injunction preventing the disclosure of the details of the problem.

The students eventually reached an out of court settlement with Blackboard apologising to the company for their actions and agreeing to "refrain from any further unauthorized access to or use of the System," including "any transaction designed to better understand or determine how the System works." They also agreed to do 40 hours community service.

Now Blackboard got their injunction preventing these students from presenting their research, so they had an arguable legal case. However, the builders of one of the widest deployed platforms for the creation and delivery of higher education digital content were prepared to go to court to block the publication of inconvenient research and extract a settlement whereby a couple of techie students agreed to refrain from “any transaction designed to better understand or determine how the System works."

Blackboard is a business and has a duty to protect the interests of the company’s shareholders. These interests, however, may not necessarily coincide with those of their education institution customers.

So, universities should think carefully before locking themselves into propriety VLEs. The corollary of that is that the architecture of higher education VLEs should be:

• based on open standards
• modular
• flexible
• expansible
• interoperable with other systems

If a small number of players with closed systems come to dominate the HE market for VLEs in the long term we could face restrictions on information development and distribution which we take for granted today. Restrictions built into the architecture of the systems we use, backed up by force of law.