Thomson Learning (TL) has recently released full year figures, the headlines of which were sales of US$2.4bn (£1.25bn) and profits of $383m (£199m). While an announcement is expected shortly about the sale of TL, the business has not been standing still, announcing a significant tie up with open source firm Sakai.

The deal will see TL adopting Sakai’s open source collaboration and learning environment for their learning products and services. TL has also become an associate of the Sakai Foundation which is a major boost to the open source community and something that will be watched closely by their competitors.

TL has a very broach church of partners in the e-learning environment, including Blackboard, whose e-learning patent directly threatens open source organisations like Sakai and Moodle. Another partner is Desire2Learn, the Canadian firm being sued by Blackboard for infringing their patent, the same patent (6988138) currently being re-examined by the US Patent Office because of ‘a substantial new question of patentability’. If TL ever has a meeting with all their e-learning partners, it would make interesting theatre.

Finally, while most analysts are betting on TL falling to a private equity bid, there are rumours that Bertelsmann may also be considering a late bid. The sale of all the educational media companies was apparently one of the features of the recent Bear Stearns Media conference held in Palm Beach.

www.bertelsmann.com

www.desire2learn.com

www.moodle.org

http://sakaiproject.org

www.thomson.com