

Ask HN: E-Learning Startup - zxcvb

After being linked to this thread [link at bottom] on reddit which describes many college/university students anger at how bad the "blackboard e-learning" suite is I started to think about my experience with blackboard at my university. If you haven't used it, imagine web appplications from the late 90's!<p>This got me thinking, there are no 'really' good contenders in the e-learning market, of course blackboard has a few competitors in the open source and propietary markets but none of them are a great deal better.<p>I'm pretty sure me and a couple of guys from my comp sci school could create something significantly better than the current market leader (blackboard) within the space of 3 months (summer holiday).<p>Unless we go all out and run this like a startup business it will obviously go nowhere, do you think this is something we should run with or would getting other schools to use it be to much of an uphill battle?<p>http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/81bk3/i_submit_a_paper_on_blackboard_called_hw_2docx/
======
aklemm
I administer Moodle for a private college (~1500 clients) and find that it
works very well; one free / open source package gives us web-enabled classes
(of course I also spend a lot of time training and supporting the instructors
to make this a success).

What shortcomings have you found in Moodle and other FOSS offerings? Maybe
improvements and support to one of those is a good business model.

If you do start coding from the ground up, I recommend targeting private
schools where you _might_ find less bureaucracy/resistance.

------
nl
How would you compete with Moodle, which is Open source, free, and has a lot
of momentum? It's also pretty crappy, but I'm not sure that matters in this
case - don't forget it isn't the users of the software who are the buyers.

------
ible
I think you'll find two major problems with a blackboard competitor.

1\. Low value of products to users

Blackboard, WebCT, and other similar 'Learning Management Systems' are
products of a standard response to new technology in an established area.
Essentially attempting to copy the existing way of doing things into the new
mode and thus make them more efficient. Moving from the existing systems to
internet systems might reduce costs by half or so, if you have a really good
system, but it isn't 'disruptive'. This isn't spreadsheets or email. It isn't
1000 times better than the alternative.

2\. Institutional inertia

Mentioned by others already, you're going to have a hard time selling to
institutions. You're competing against a bunch of giant vendors with existing
relationships, and FOSS solutions which are backed by and used by multiple
universities. My university struck a committee of a dozen people with little
to no knowledge of eLearning and spent probably $50,000 in employee time
before deciding to maybe try moodle, or just stick with WebCT.

If you've got an idea for how to meet the real needs of educational users
several times better than blackboard go for it. Personally I'd love to see
something blow the existing junk out of the water, but think carefully about
what people actually need and how you can serve that need don't just make a
better blackboard.

------
thehickmans
I would caution you against looking at e-learning as a single market - there's
the K to 12 market and then the post-secondary market. You also need to look
at geography and the educational direction of countries, regions, states, etc.
For example, the UK market is very different than the US or AUS markets, and
potential clients in each country are looking for very different things.

Blackboard doesn't really play much in K to 12, but virtually owns the post-
secondary market in North America. I think you could spend a lot of time and
effort trying to build a Blackboard competitor and not get very far.

However, if you take a look at what teachers are doing with Moodle
<http://moodle.org/> or Joomla <http://www.joomlalms.com/>, there's probably a
niche there to get your hands onto.

In reference to some of the sales comments - if you can connect with teachers,
professors or curriculum oriented staff and get them excited, there's a good
chance to find some budget.

------
ph0rque
I worked on an e-learning app for a while, and may return to it after some
time. Here is what I've learned: if you really want to create a killer
e-learning app, you have to approach it from the UI point of view: make it
_really really really_ easy to teach and to learn. That, imho, is the biggest
roadblock to an explosion of innovation in the education space. Once you have
that, you can scrape open education content into your app, open it up to
users, and they'll take it from there. Feel free to contact me if you want to
chat more.

------
snewe
As a TA forced to use such systems for course management, I agree that they
are ugly and inefficient.

Unfortunately, I believe the leader in this market has sued a bunch of
competitors for "patent-infringement."

------
babyshake
Now is a very ripe time for disruptive innovation in the e-learning space.
This is especially true as the raw stuff of learning - think video lectures,
wikis, forums - is increasingly accessible for free, while college tuition
rates keep rising.

However, the key phrase there is "disruptive innovation". Perhaps you may be
able to serve the lower end of the market, such as tutors and individual
students, schools be damned. And once you do manage to get some traction,
you're likely to have a lot more success down the road with institutions.

The preeminent scholar in the field of disruptive innovation has actually just
published a book specifically about education:

[http://www.amazon.com/Disrupting-Class-Disruptive-
Innovation...](http://www.amazon.com/Disrupting-Class-Disruptive-Innovation-
Change/dp/0071592067)

I've been reading it in the last few days and publishing some of my favorite
passages to my blog:

<http://bit.ly/mad82>

~~~
mcdowall
Im actually in the process of working on a site for this at the moment, theres
a couple of sites already up and running but in my opinion still much more
work needed to offer a compelling all in solution

Hopefully I will be back here in a month or so to demo it!

~~~
zxcvb
I was thinking more in the way of creating a product that would be installed
on the universitys server and hosted on their intranet, just like traditional
e-learning suites.

I can't imagine many schools would want to keep their data on a third party
server.

~~~
goodgoblin
Maybe post the idea on Mark Cuban's open source funding page - see what he
thinks.

------
goodgoblin
One thing to keep in mind - educational markets are like enterprise markets -
very difficult to sell to. Products don't generally catch on and spread
virally there - you'll need a salesforce. The decision makers aren't the users
of the product, but its administrators.

~~~
zxcvb
Yeah, I can't really think of a way to break into the market. That could just
be because I'm not in marketing?

I just have a picture in my mind, cold calling university administrators, it
just wouldn't work.

~~~
goodgoblin
Cold calling will work, to some extent, but there are just so many decision
makers involved, and they in turn have to get buy in from so many teachers,
administrators, etc, that each sale just takes a long time.

~~~
trapper
Agreed. You will have sales cycles of > 1 year, with references,
demonstrations, visits, proof of concept delivery, tenders etc etc..

It's hell.

