Reasons to be concerned about Blackboard

Good article today in the Chronicle on the Blackboard vs. Desire2Learn lawsuit http://chronicle.com/free/2008/02/1630n.htm

I'm in constant hope that a smarter, bigger company will buy Blackboard (like Google!) - and:

- Make it free
- Make it live in the Cloud
- Make it transparent, searchable etc. for those who opt-in
- Make it a community

Blackboard is way more valuable then it's revenues...as it has a foothold into the course process of IHE's. However, the lawsuit shows how culturally out-of-step the company is with it's market. Blackboard is in serious danger of being surpassed by cloud based and/or open source alternatives that are based on a learner centered (rather then faculty centric) model.