
On Improving Schools - palish
http://www.classbug.com/idea.html
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hwork
Shawn, I too am very interested in improving the classroom experience using
the web. You might want to check out my buddy Mark's post on creating a viable
blackboard alternative: http://www.markmcgranaghan.com/2006/12/16/idea-
lightweight-blackboard-alternative/

He outlines pretty well the costs of maintaining blackboard for college
campuses (very expensive) vs. the quality of its product (not so hot).

For some feedback, I think the automatic grading system is interesting but
incredibly difficult to pull off. Teachers have a huge, vast array of testing
practices and to create a system to easily check them would be very time-
consuming. Maybe it'll work for very small cases, like multiple choice.

Also, building on top of other suggestions, I would separate the features from
the reasons for making them.

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palish
Extremely informative! I had no idea that blackboard had an annual cost of
$75,000. Ridiculous.

Yeah, the automatic grading will be hard to get perfect, but it can certainly
come close in a short amount of time. One thing that I feel will be beneficial
will be the ability to embed videos, images and hyperlinks directly into the
assignment. Not to mention the fact that whenever someone types an answer,
that answer is saved, so they don't lose their work whenever the browser
crashes (see: Blackboard).

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trevelyan
I'm not convinced there is much use for this. And there are two fundamental
problems.

The first problem is the institutional structure of the US education system.
In my experience, tech-savvy instructors rarely look for a generic CMS
solution. And those without much tech experience resist change unless it is
forced upon them because they are already good at what they do and change
disrupts their ability to get their jobs done. Blackboard gets around this
inertia by selling to university and school administrations, which then push
the technology out throughout campuses. It is a top-down sales regime. The
company has non-compete clauses so that instructors cannot adopt other systems
even if they wanted to. Competing with Blackboard on their own terms would
mean wining and dining a lot of administrators who are not going to be
interested in beta-testing software.

The second problem is more fundamental. A lot of the really interesting stuff
happening in the education field is happening with interest based communities
like Chinesepod or even open source software projects (for an education in
programming...). There are two things that are common to both sorts of
communities: #1 they are interest driven, #2 the materials produced are not
attempts to solve specific institutional needs so much as address individual
"learner" problems.

A project like this should be very clear about whether it is serving
institutional or learner needs. If you don't know exactly how to help
students, what is the point of creating a system simply to automate stuff?

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palish
You bring up some great points, trevelyan. Let me address them.

Blackboard is very much university-centric. They've won the war as far as
universities are concerned. However, universities generally do the job of
teaching very well. You also don't hear of fatal university shootings often
(If ever? I haven't looked.) I'm in it to improve the lives and education of
high school students. If I manage to better just one student's life, then I'll
consider it mission accomplished.

High schools are very much open game. They're open game because they can't
typically afford the huge sums of money that universities can. I plan to
dominate the low end by creating a product that's simple, efficient, and
inexpensive; something that every teacher would want. I'm not competing with
Blackboard. I'm sidestepping them.

I agree that teachers have methods that they've employed for years to teach
students. But part of that is exactly the problem. When something is done
exactly the same for years on end, it gets stale. A teacher would have -fun-
with my product, exploring other's ideas and communities. I plan to make them
happy.

They may be reluctant to use my product, but I plan to be with my two
cofounders, on foot, visiting local high schools as soon as I have a feature
set that's useful, and spending time with individual teachers to show them how
they might benefit from it. Then it's up to the teachers whether or not
they'll use Classbug, but if I've done my job well, they'll most certainly
want to.

Shawn

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ecuzzillo
I am a current user of Blackboard, but only under duress, and would heartily
welcome a replacement written by someone who actually cares about software.
Under their model, even if you write the best software, it is likely that no
one will care, since the users of the software (teachers and students) are not
the people who select the software (administrators). Multiple professors at
CMU have commented that Blackboard is a system designed to annoy professors
and otherwise not accomplish anything that couldn't be done via email and
normal websites. All of my best teachers have rejected it.

This means that if you do, in fact, write even passably good software,
teachers might spontaneously decide to use it. However, from there I'm not
sure where any revenue would come from.

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palish
It's disheartening to hear that teachers are using such horrible tools that
they're refusing to use them. I hope to change that.

As to revenue, I'm not worried. I'm going to focus on making it as useful as
possible first. :)

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jwecker
Thanks for that palish. Wow, what a difficult sector though. I've worked with
schools before and they don't have a lot of money- and when they do you have
practically a year long sales cycle. So if I were to give you one piece of
advice in that market- keep your overhead _very_ low if you want to make a
profit! Oh, and sell the vision. It sounds trite but it is very important to
your target demographic in particular- most are teaching because of the vision
of the difference they are making and if you speak to that it will make a big
difference.

~~~
palish
Thanks for your insight jwecker, I appreciate it. One thing that is
fundamentally different about what I'm doing is that I'm marketing to
individual teachers, not schools. I believe that this may be the right way to
go about this sort of thing; it leaves the decision up to the individual,
instead of the school. Spending time with individual teachers will be very
important too, and I'm genuinely interested in helping them save time.

~~~
jwecker
If you could somehow involve students in virally marketing it to their
teachers it could get interesting. Still, not a big market (especially when
you factor in their spending power). If you're passionate about it, though,
it's an area that can always use a lot of help and I really hope it goes well.
Keep your overhead low and it won't matter how small the market is, and you'll
be making a difference in the world.

~~~
palish
That's something I hadn't really thought about before. If I create some kind
of useful resource for students, then they'd be more likely to involve their
teachers in getting a Classbug, yeah. That's an area to focus on.

Monetary gains aren't my prime motivator. If I can just create a service that
allows me to feed myself, then I'm happy. I want to devote some of the profits
back to students via the competitions I was talking about, and get students to
places where they can work on or create something.

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Alex3917
Start the introduction by describing what your product is, in three sentences
or less.

Eliminate the account creation. Don't bother making a prototype right now,
just make some mockups in photoshop. It's easier to drag images around than it
is to drag code around (at least if you want the code to compile).

Once you get feedback from ten or twenty people on your mockups, THEN code a
prototype.

~~~
palish
Thanks for your input Alex3917, and I agree that I need to refactor the
introduction. But it seems that the "create mockups in photoshop" concept
wouldn't really work. Reddit was able to focus for a solid month and get most
of their site implemented. It's easier for me to express my product in code
than in images. It would be hard to express the power of, say, the tree view
with just plain images.

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hwork
Hmm this extra comment showed up as I was trying to edit my previous post. Oh
well!

