On Improving Schools | Hacker News Reader

On Improving Schools

classbug.com

9 pointspalish14 comments

Shawn, I too am very interested in improving the classroom experience using the web. You might want to check out my buddy Mark's post on creating a viable blackboard alternative: http://www.markmcgranaghan.com/2006/12/16/idea-lightweight-blackboard-alternative/

He outlines pretty well the costs of maintaining blackboard for college campuses (very expensive) vs. the quality of its product (not so hot).

For some feedback, I think the automatic grading system is interesting but incredibly difficult to pull off. Teachers have a huge, vast array of testing practices and to create a system to easily check them would be very time-consuming. Maybe it'll work for very small cases, like multiple choice.

Also, building on top of other suggestions, I would separate the features from the reasons for making them.

Extremely informative! I had no idea that blackboard had an annual cost of $75,000. Ridiculous.

Yeah, the automatic grading will be hard to get perfect, but it can certainly come close in a short amount of time. One thing that I feel will be beneficial will be the ability to embed videos, images and hyperlinks directly into the assignment. Not to mention the fact that whenever someone types an answer, that answer is saved, so they don't lose their work whenever the browser crashes (see: Blackboard).

I'm not convinced there is much use for this. And there are two fundamental problems.

The first problem is the institutional structure of the US education system. In my experience, tech-savvy instructors rarely look for a generic CMS solution. And those without much tech experience resist change unless it is forced upon them because they are already good at what they do and change disrupts their ability to get their jobs done. Blackboard gets around this inertia by selling to university and school administrations, which then push the technology out throughout campuses. It is a top-down sales regime. The company has non-compete clauses so that instructors cannot adopt other systems even if they wanted to. Competing with Blackboard on their own terms would mean wining and dining a lot of administrators who are not going to be interested in beta-testing software.

The second problem is more fundamental. A lot of the really interesting stuff happening in the education field is happening with interest based communities like Chinesepod or even open source software projects (for an education in programming...). There are two things that are common to both sorts of communities: #1 they are interest driven, #2 the materials produced are not attempts to solve specific institutional needs so much as address individual "learner" problems.

A project like this should be very clear about whether it is serving institutional or learner needs. If you don't know exactly how to help students, what is the point of creating a system simply to automate stuff?

You bring up some great points, trevelyan. Let me address them.

Blackboard is very much university-centric. They've won the war as far as universities are concerned. However, universities generally do the job of teaching very well. You also don't hear of fatal university shootings often (If ever? I haven't looked.) I'm in it to improve the lives and education of high school students. If I manage to better just one student's life, then I'll consider it mission accomplished.

High schools are very much open game. They're open game because they can't typically afford the huge sums of money that universities can. I plan to dominate the low end by creating a product that's simple, efficient, and inexpensive; something that every teacher would want. I'm not competing with Blackboard. I'm sidestepping them.

I agree that teachers have methods that they've employed for years to teach students. But part of that is exactly the problem. When something is done exactly the same for years on end, it gets stale. A teacher would have -fun- with my product, exploring other's ideas and communities. I plan to make them happy.

They may be reluctant to use my product, but I plan to be with my two cofounders, on foot, visiting local high schools as soon as I have a feature set that's useful, and spending time with individual teachers to show them how they might benefit from it. Then it's up to the teachers whether or not they'll use Classbug, but if I've done my job well, they'll most certainly want to.

Shawn

I am a current user of Blackboard, but only under duress, and would heartily welcome a replacement written by someone who actually cares about software. Under their model, even if you write the best software, it is likely that no one will care, since the users of the software (teachers and students) are not the people who select the software (administrators). Multiple professors at CMU have commented that Blackboard is a system designed to annoy professors and otherwise not accomplish anything that couldn't be done via email and normal websites. All of my best teachers have rejected it.

This means that if you do, in fact, write even passably good software, teachers might spontaneously decide to use it. However, from there I'm not sure where any revenue would come from.

It's disheartening to hear that teachers are using such horrible tools that they're refusing to use them. I hope to change that.

As to revenue, I'm not worried. I'm going to focus on making it as useful as possible first. :)

Hmm.. This ended up as a double post.

Thanks for that palish. Wow, what a difficult sector though. I've worked with schools before and they don't have a lot of money- and when they do you have practically a year long sales cycle. So if I were to give you one piece of advice in that market- keep your overhead _very_ low if you want to make a profit! Oh, and sell the vision. It sounds trite but it is very important to your target demographic in particular- most are teaching because of the vision of the difference they are making and if you speak to that it will make a big difference.

Thanks for your insight jwecker, I appreciate it. One thing that is fundamentally different about what I'm doing is that I'm marketing to individual teachers, not schools. I believe that this may be the right way to go about this sort of thing; it leaves the decision up to the individual, instead of the school. Spending time with individual teachers will be very important too, and I'm genuinely interested in helping them save time.

If you could somehow involve students in virally marketing it to their teachers it could get interesting. Still, not a big market (especially when you factor in their spending power). If you're passionate about it, though, it's an area that can always use a lot of help and I really hope it goes well. Keep your overhead low and it won't matter how small the market is, and you'll be making a difference in the world.

That's something I hadn't really thought about before. If I create some kind of useful resource for students, then they'd be more likely to involve their teachers in getting a Classbug, yeah. That's an area to focus on.

Monetary gains aren't my prime motivator. If I can just create a service that allows me to feed myself, then I'm happy. I want to devote some of the profits back to students via the competitions I was talking about, and get students to places where they can work on or create something.

Start the introduction by describing what your product is, in three sentences or less.

Eliminate the account creation. Don't bother making a prototype right now, just make some mockups in photoshop. It's easier to drag images around than it is to drag code around (at least if you want the code to compile).

Once you get feedback from ten or twenty people on your mockups, THEN code a prototype.

Thanks for your input Alex3917, and I agree that I need to refactor the introduction. But it seems that the "create mockups in photoshop" concept wouldn't really work. Reddit was able to focus for a solid month and get most of their site implemented. It's easier for me to express my product in code than in images. It would be hard to express the power of, say, the tree view with just plain images.

Hmm this extra comment showed up as I was trying to edit my previous post. Oh well!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com