Education sales combines all the wonderful fun of multi-year Big Freaking Enterprise consultative sales cycles with the vast untapped budget of your local pizza shop. Your product, if it is going to be effective, is virtually certain to threaten the continued employment of a stakeholder who has veto authority over deploying it. Educational institutions and educators are not rewarded for doing education well -- indeed, if they have greater than minimal competency, improving just gets their budgets cut.
That's why I think education is especially the most important area where startups should focus obsessively on making something great, rather than making money off it. Go directly to the user; if you don't bypass the system, you won't succeed.
Like most other big changes, the most effective one for education might be to make the old system irrelevant rather than fight it head-on.
It doesn't really matter, the patent they used to sue Desire2Learn got invalidated last year as part of the legal battle and a couple of weeks ago Blackboard announced they were abandoning their appeal:
