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