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.)
This is exactly right. We built our own app for our medical school. Still live, tmedweb.tulane.edu. The professional schools (law, medicine, business) are smaller, and generally have the money and flexibility to move on something like this. We were turning away schools before several of us graduated. Downside of developing in med school: instead of graduating into a self-made job, you go to an internship in a hospital and the whole world outside the hospital ceases to exist.
Tulane has doubled down on the project and hired a developer fulltime to run it. Who got which chunks of code, I still don't know. It could probably stand a complete rewrite though.
points that worked for us:
you (the professor) and your course coordinators, TAs, etc, don't realize how broken the BlackBoard paradigm is, how it clouds your thinking and slows you down, until you try something else. Lets do some click races...
Your students check out every time BlackBoard is involved. Anything would make them like you more.
You really can access usage statistics. Just not with BlackBoard. Hey, dean, you want to know which professor downloads correlate with improvement on board scores? We can ask questions like that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
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).
> 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.
Is there really a university IT department out there that's going to prevent students and professors from using an offsite, external website? Especially if it's keeping professors happy (who, let's face it, probably complain a lot about IT's offerings) and doesn't cost them anything? Coursekit in its current form isn't dependent on IT for anything -- they host on their own server, use their own logins. IT can either ban it (and face the whiplash), or politely ask the tenured professors to stop using it (and they wouldn't even know which professors are using it, since it's external). The one thing they could kick up a storm about is student grades being stored on an external server. That's a pickle.
Faculty won't pay for this, true -- thankfully, there are other ways to make money in the industry -- but a much bigger problem is that faculty aren't even looking for it. They've been conditioned that software comes from IT, so while they may hate using Blackboard, most aren't googling for "Blackboard alternatives". That'll need to change. I think Coursekit's strategy of creating student evangelists might actually work though, especially at smaller schools where the relationships between students and professors is stronger.
>Is there really a university IT department out there that's going to prevent students and professors from using an offsite, external website?
Yep. They'll quote policy and if that doesn't work pull out the FERPA card. But it isn't insurmountable. The ongoing push towards more unified assessment systems by the accreditation bodies means that many universities are purchasing third party systems that are hosted off-campus, and that seems to be opening up some avenues.
This is all true and Blackboard probably isn't even the worst of it. Our grad admissions is done using ApplyYourself which is a giant turd. The front office uses Peoplesoft and nobody has ever said anything good about it. This disconnect between the people who purchase the systems and the people who use them is horrible. Of course it happens at companies too...
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.
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.
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.)