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.
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.)