
Will Coursekit Launch Up-End Blackboard? - dget
http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2011/11/29/will-coursekit-launch-up-end-blackboard/2/
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briandear
The only problem is that professors don't usually pick the software they use
to deliver their online course -- they can certain pick certain applications,
but the professors aren't the "buyer" it's the schools and cracking that nut
is very, very difficult since Blackboard has heavy investment (and contractual
agreements) with so many of the pick players in higher ed. Even if a professor
wanted to switch, Blackboard integration in higher ed is far deeper than a
single class. Higher ed and enterprise is exceptionally difficult to disrupt
when it comes to institution-level installations. There's a reason many orgs
are STILL using Windows XP and IE 6. Fighting institutional inertia is
massively difficult.

If coursekit wants to accomplish that goal though, they should take a facebook
approach -- one school at a time. Convince some small school that isn't using
Blackboard to try their software. Then expand the school targets outward to
adjacent schools in the geographic region. Build up a core school-base and
then go after bigger targets. It'll take more than great software.
Institutional penetration is far more about sales skill than code quality (see
Windows XP comment above.)

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cvp
I wonder if they would have success by getting the product into community
colleges and other two year schools (who might be particularly keen to save on
Blackboard licenses). As students transferred out to larger four year colleges
and were forced to deal with the mess that is Blackboard, they would probably
be quick to talk up the (ostensibly) superior experience they had with
Coursekit at their old school.

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cwilson
Interesting you mention community colleges. We beta tested Classhive (similar
product that no longer exists) at a large public university, a medium sized
private college, and a medium sized community college.

When we spoke with teachers and students at all three, I believe our feedback
from community colleges was much better due to the fact that they are under-
served in this space.

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cwilson
I headed up the team behind a similar project a few years ago called Classhive
(www.classhive.com). The UI we built for the project is eerily similar to
CourseKit, and we faced a lot of the same difficulties mentioned in this
thread to get it to take off (which it ultimately did not). Even taking the
one school at a time approach, it's still very difficult to get teachers to
completely change which system they use when they know students are using
Blackboard for every other class (even if it's an awful piece of software).

An approach that we didn't have time or the support to explore was building
something that students would champion themselves, regardless of University or
teacher support. This meant jumping into an area that might be controversial,
and support things like the sharing/selling of notes, cheating, gossip, and
more social interaction between students in large classes.

Until someone creates a product in this space that is inherently addictive and
breaks a few rules, I do not think anyone is going to knock Blackboard down as
the king.

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aboyeji
breaks a few rules... that will happen :)

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Homunculiheaded
I worked in academia for quite a few years. This is an industry that could
really use disrupting, but I'm incredibly cynical about the possibilities of
this ever happening (as far as changing internal software).

Just about anyone on HN could write a better lms than blackboard, and sell it
for 1/100 of the cost for huge profit margins (okay maybe some exaggeration
here, but not much). But blackboard is not unique, almost all institutional
level software in universities is terrible and expensive.

This isn't a problem with bad vendors it's a problem with the institution
doing the purchasing.

For starters the idea that "Cohen plans to sell Coursekit to professors
instead of letting university IT departments slow him down." Is flawed on many
levels.

Firstly it's no accident that university IT departments are unnecessarily
central to purchasing decisions, they spent and will continue to spend much
political capital on campus to remain that way. As soon as campus IT
departments catch wind of this strategy, they will fight in every-way to make
it as amazingly inconvenient as possible to go this route. Most professors are
busy enough that it's not worth their time to fight campus IT over what is
ultimately a minor part of their course.

Second faculty don't usually have budgets to purchase product like this for
their classes (again institutions have deliberately grown this way to keep
central departments powerful), they may have grant money but they would never
spend it on something like this. So at a minimum it would have to be a
departmental purchases, which mean that someone in the department will have to
handle keeping track of making sure everything is paid for, students know how
to use it etc. At which point departmental admins will just say "why not just
let IT deal with it"

Additionally almost all professors I know already have their hands full with
research and just teaching, let alone worrying about the burden of
infrastructure. Most professors use Blackboard, not because it's useful, but
because their campus IT departments have created university policies that make
it a requirement or at least 'strongly suggested'.

I would love to see blackboard taken down, but in the end they're only a
symptom of a much larger problem in higher ed.

~~~
lotu
I disagree that selling to professors is a bad idea. Personally, I suspect it
is the only way to enter the market. Now I doubt that if a University
approches you and asks to buy your product that you'd turn them down, but that
will not happen until you've proven you have a much better product. You will
_never_ convince a whole University to switch to your new product unless it,
works exactly the same in every-way, better in every way, and migrates in 10
minutes. There will be people who know Blackboard and oppose it because they
don't want to have to learn a new system. Furthermore, it is unlikely you will
convince a University to buy both Blackboard and your product.

The only people you could convince to buy your product are individual
professors (or small departments) who hate Blackboard, which according to a
quick survey is near 100%. Now many perhaps most are not willing to spend
money for a class but there is a sizable percentage of professors that do care
about teaching and would be willing to spend their own time/money to improve
their students education. Even if a professor is acting selfishly Blackboard
is such a pile of crap I see some professors paying money to not have to
interact with it on a daily basis.

(On a side note my classmates wrote a program called Ben in High School back
in the early 2000's that was used by the whole school, it was better than
Blackboard. So I have a special personal hatred of the towards it.)

~~~
cel
Coursekit is free for professors to use. There is no purchasing decision.
People seem to be missing that point here. Wouldn't the main difficulty for
the professor, besides adding the course content, would be to input the grades
back to Blackboard or whatever system the school uses?

~~~
dubya
Using something other than the officially supported system creates friction
for the students, who generally are not as computer savvy as one might expect.
We use Blackboard at my school, and it links into the the time schedule and
grading. So the default course page students see is the one on Blackboard
(mine redirects to my regular department page), and you can't officially post
grades other than on Blackboard. I also have to go into Blackboard to see
who's still registered (although this information is out of sync with whatever
the official system is).

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genieyclo
No disrespect to CourseKit, but what's so special about this LMS vs all the
other new ones on the market every year? BBBB suing you is not the biggest
issue LMSes have, it's actually getting traction.

~~~
teyc
Cohen is doing customer development by being on site. If BB is so atrocious,
they probably haven't been doing enough.

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timdorr
Isn't Blackboard known for being a very litigious company? I wonder if that's
come to be an issue for Coursekit yet or not.

I've talked with at least two folks that wanted to start up something in this
space, but had fears about lawsuits from Blackboard.

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dget
Oops - accidentally submitted link to the second page. For the first page, go
here: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2011/11/29/will-
cours...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2011/11/29/will-coursekit-
launch-up-end-blackboard/)

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callil
Can't wait to see where this goes. The world needs a game changer in this
space.

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ericmsimons
I just went through the ordeal of creating, launching and failing at building
a successful LMS. The good news is that I learned what teachers/professors
really need, and it took falling on my face to learn it. If Coursekit fails, I
hope they figure out a better route as well.

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joshu
Articles with question marks in the title are inevitably answered "no".

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drivebyacct2
Jesus I hope so. Blackboard is probably the worst piece of software I have to
use with any regularity.

