DETAILED ACTION
Response received on December 26, 2025 has been acknowledged. Claims 1-12 have been amended. Therefore, Claims 1-12 are pending.
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013 is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Status of Claims
This Non-Final Office action is in response to the application filed on 05/22/2023 and in response to Applicant’s Arguments/Remarks filed on 12/26/2025. Claims 1-12 are pending.
Priority
Application 18321377 was filed on 05/22/2023 and has a provisional application 63/322,349 filed on 03/22/2022.
Applicant’s Reply
Applicant's response of December 26, 2025 has been entered. The examiner will address applicant’s remarks at the end of this office action. Applicant' s amendment’s filed December 26, 2025, with respect to Claim 1-12 have been fully considered.
Continued Examination Under 37 CFR 1.114
A request for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, including the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e), was filed in this application after final rejection. Since this application is eligible for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114. Applicant's submission filed on 12/26/2025 has been entered.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claims 1‐12 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to judicial exception (i.e., a law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea) without significantly more.
Claims 1‐6 are directed to a system (machine/apparatus) and claims 7-12 are directed to method (process). Thus, these claims fall within one of the four statutory categories of invention. (Step 1: YES).
For step 2A, the Examiner has identified independent method Claim 1 as the claim that represents the claimed invention for analysis and is similar to independent claim 7. Claim 1, as exemplary is recited below, isolating the abstract idea from the additional elements, wherein the abstract idea is set in bold:
A system for facilitating online education through collaborative learning and learning by teaching, the system comprising a processor and a memory storing instructions that, when executed by the processor, cause the system to; creating, by an authentication service, a user record in a user database; establishing a messaging service, configured to facilitate announcements, notifications, and communications among users of the system; verifying, by an educational credential validation service, credentials of prospective students for admission to a courses; facilitating, by a meet service, communications between the users, wherein the communications comprise video conferencing, initiated through a student service; rendering an interface, by a search service, for searching courses by the users; identifying, by a dropout service executing as a distributed microservice, one or more dropout students based on course-specific retention criteria and student activity data stored in a student service; generating, by the dropout service , dropout information comprising identifiers of affected students and corresponding course identifiers; processing, by a group formation service executing as a distributed microservice, a batch recomputation of mentor groups across a plurality of student records based on the dropout information and a predefined mentee-mentor ratio, wherein the batch recomputation comprises reassignment of mentors and mentees for an active course unit; and transmitting, during the batch recomputation, an explicit cache-invalidation signal to a cache layer associated with the student service to prevent retrieval of stale mentor-group data and to provide reduced latency and consistency across distributed replicas.
These limitations under its broadest reasonable interpretation, under the broadest, covers certain methods of organizing human activity i.e., managing personal behavior or relationships or interactions between people, (including social activities, teaching, and following rules or instructions) but for the recitation of generic computer components. That is, other than reciting a process implemented by an “online education”, “processor”, “memory”, “authentication service”, “the messaging service”, “educational credential validation service”, “meet service”, “student service”, “search service”, “dropout service”, and “group formation service”, “signal to a cache layer” nothing in the claim precludes the steps from practically being performed manually by a person. The system facilitates communication, mentor-mentee grouping, and collaborative learning, which are all directed towards managing how users (students, mentors) interact, behave, and relate to one another in an educational setting. For example, for the generic computing components, this claim encompasses broadcasting communications among users, verifying credentials of prospective students for admission to a courses, facilitating communications between the users, searching courses by the users, generating dropout information based on dropout students from the courses and rearranging mentor groups based on the dropout information for predefined mentee-mentor ratio in the manner described in the identified abstract idea, supra. Furthermore, the claim involves steps all of which involve cognitive tasks like decision-making, comparison, and evaluation that are traditionally associated with certain method of organizing human activity. A person could manually perform the cache-invalidation aspect by instructing all users and administrators to discard any saved or printed copies of the old mentor-group lists and to rely only on the newly issued assignments, thereby preventing use of stale data. If a claim limitation, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers managing interactions between people, but for the recitation of generic computer components, then it falls within the “certain method of organizing human activity” grouping of abstract ideas. Accordingly, Claims 1 and 7 recite an abstract idea. (Step 2A- Prong 1: YES. The claims are abstract).
This judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application (2nd prong of eligibility test for step 2A). In particular, Claim 1 recites online education”, “processor”, “memory”, “interface”, “authentication service”, “the messaging service”, “educational credential validation service”, “meet service”, “student service”, “search service”, “dropout service”, and “group formation service”, “signal to a cache layer”. Likewise, Claim 7 includes the same additional elements as Claim 1. These additional elements are all considered nothing more than generic computing devices to perform generic communicating functions such as storing data and instructions, transmitting and receiving data between computers. The computing devices are recited at a high-level of generality (i.e., as a generic processor performing a generic computer function of communicating data between users) such that they amount no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using a generic computer component. Accordingly, these additional elements do not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application because they do not impose any meaningful limits on practicing the abstract idea and are at a high level of generality when considered both individually and as a whole. See MPEP 2106.05(f). Thus, Claims 1 and 7 are directed to an abstract idea without a practical application. (Step 2A-Prong 2: NO: the additional claimed elements are not integrated into a practical application).
For step 2B, the claim(s) do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception because they do not amount to more than simply instructing one to practice the abstract idea by using generic computer components to carry out the steps that define the abstract idea. This does not render the claims as being eligible. See MPEP 2106.05(f). The additional elements perform only their ordinary functions by carrying out standard roles of generic computer components, such as signaling caches to refresh data, recomputing groups, storing records, and transmitting updates, exactly as they conventionally do in any system, without improving how the computer or network itself operates. The additional elements when considered both individually and as an ordered combination did not add significantly more to the abstract idea because they were simply applying the abstract idea using generic computer components which cannot provide an inventive concept. Accordingly, these additional elements, do not change the outcome of the analysis, and claims 1 and 7 are not patent eligible. (Step 2B: NO. The claims do not provide significantly more).
Claims 2-4, 6, 8-10, and 12, recite limitations that further define the abstract idea noted in claims 1 and 7. The claims recite a course material microservice search is configured to generate a copy of course material data, the course administration to check active courses, receiving, dropout information, determining student enrollment and activity information for each active course, wherein the dropout information is generated based on the retention criteria and the student enrollment and activity information, and student records to reflect dropout status and group reassignment eligibility. In addition, they recite the additional element of an “admission service”, “search service is operatively coupled to a course material microservice”, “interface”, “course administration service”. These additional elements are recited at a high-level of generality such that it amounts no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using a generic component. Even, in combination, this additional element does not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application and does not amount to significantly more than the abstract idea itself. The claims are patent ineligible.
Claims 5 and 11, recite limitations that further define the abstract idea noted in claim 1 and 7. The claims recite receiving prerequisite course completion information; upon receiving proof of prerequisite course completion, querying the educational credentials validation service using the proof of prerequisite course completion and creation of a student record associated with a corresponding course identifier. In addition, they recite the additional element of an “user device” and “admission service”. These additional elements are recited at a high-level of generality such that it amounts no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using a generic component. Even, in combination, this additional element does not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application and does not amount to significantly more than the abstract idea itself. The claims are patent ineligible.
Response to arguments
Applicant's arguments filed 12/26/2025 have been fully considered but they are not persuasive.
The comments regarding the 35 USC 101 rejection are noted. On page 9 of Applicant’s response, applicant asserts that while the Examiner has accurately identified that the claims fall within a statutory category (Step 1), the Examiner's analysis under Step 2A and Step 2B is premised on an overgeneralized characterization of the claims that ignores the amended technical limitations and the problem addressed by the claimed architecture. Examiner respectfully disagrees. Examiner notes that even when the amended limitations are considered, the claims still recite results oriented use of generic services (such as authentication, messaging, recomputation, and cache invalidation) to organize and manage mentor-mentee group information, which constitutes an abstract idea under Step 2A and the alleged “technical architecture” merely reflects conventional distributed system functions that do not provide a specific technological improvement or inventive concept under Step 2B. Applicant further asserts the Examiner characterizes claims 1 and 7 as being directed to "certain methods of organizing human activity," asserting that the claimed steps could be performed manually and that this characterization fails to consider the claims as a whole and improperly abstracts away computer-specific limitations that cannot be performed in the human mind or by manual processes. Examiner respectfully disagrees. Examiner notes that when the claims are considered as a whole, the recited computing components and operations merely automate activities that can be performed manually using pen and paper recordkeeping and human coordination, and therefore do not alter the conclusion that the claims are directed to organizing human activity rather than to a technological improvement.
Applicant further asserts the limitations of claims 1 and 7 do not describe how people organize relationships; they describe how a distributed computing system maintains data consistency and responsiveness during large-scale, dynamic reconfiguration events and that the Examiner's assertion that "a person can clear a cache manually" is inapposite. Examiner respectfully disagrees because the claimed data consistency and responsiveness are achieved only through high-level functional recitations of known operations, such as recomputing groups and invalidating caches, that merely automate the underlying task of updating and distributing relationship information, and the fact that a computer performs these steps faster does not transform the organization of relationships into a technological improvement. Applicant further asserts that, when the claims are properly construed in their entirety, they are not directed to an abstract idea, but to a computer-centric solution to a distributed-systems problem. Examiner respectfully disagrees. Examiner notes that the claims do not recite any specific improvement to distributed-system technology but instead generically apply generic computer components to implement relationship management and information updating, which remains an abstract idea under 101. Applicant further asserts even assuming arguendo that certain claim elements relate to organizing educational activity, the Examiner's conclusion that the claims are not integrated into a practical application is erroneous. Examiner maintains that position because the claims merely apply the abstract idea using generic computing functions in their ordinary manner, without a specific technological improvement or meaningful limitation that integrates the abstract idea into a practical application.
Applicant further asserts that the claims do not merely "use a computer as a tool”, instead, they recite a specific interaction between microservices and a cache layer that alters the operation of the underlying system itself. Examiner respectfully disagrees. Examiner notes that the alleged interaction between microservices and the cache layer is recited only at a functional, results-oriented level and reflects commonly known cache messaging performed in their conventional manner, which does not alter the operation of the computer system or constitute a technological improvement. Applicant further asserts that the specification expressly identifies this problem and explains that cache invalidation during group formation is necessary to maintain correctness while providing quick response times, this is not a generic data-processing function, but an architectural control mechanism that improves system behavior under load. Examiner respectfully disagrees because the claims themselves merely recite invalidating a cache at a high level without any specific technical mechanism or improvement to cache system operation, which is a commonly known practice in distributed computing. Applicant further asserts that the Examiner further asserts that the claims do not recite "significantly more" because they allegedly rely on generic computer components, this conclusion overlooks the ordered combination of elements and the non-conventional coordination recited in the claims. Examiner maintains this position as the ordered combination merely combines conventional functions of generic components in their expected sequence to automate an abstract idea, which does not constitute a non-conventional arrangement or provide an inventive concept under Step 2B.
Applicant further asserts that the ordered combination is not routine or conventional and that It is expressly disclosed as solving scalability and consistency problems that arise only in large-scale, distributed online platforms. Examiner respectfully disagrees for the same reasons e set forth above. Applicant further asserts that the Examiner's reliance on the assertion that "these steps could be performed manually" is legally insufficient. The examiner respectfully disagrees because the fact that analysis of whether something can be done manually is used to confirm that the claims are directed to an abstract idea (CMOHA) under Step 2A, and even independent of that consideration, the claims still recite only generic computer implementation lacking a specific technological improvement or inventive concept under Step 2B. Applicant further asserts that the Examiner's analysis improperly abstracts away critical technical limitations and conflates the purpose of the system (education) with the means by which the system operates (distributed computing mechanisms). Examiner respectfully disagrees because the analysis properly considers the claim as a whole and recognizes that the recited distributed system components are merely the means for implementing the educational relationship concept, not technical limitations that improve computer functionality or change the abstract character of the claims. For the reasons mentioned above, the argument to the contrary is not persuasive. Thus, the rejections of Claims 1-12 under 35 USC 101 are maintained.
Conclusion
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/A.W.H./
Examiner, Art Unit 3626
/DENNIS W RUHL/ Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3626