Google Releases CloudCourse - Blackboard killer? | Hacker News Reader

Google Releases CloudCourse - Blackboard killer?

code.google.com

126 pointsmaco02275 comments

This is not a Blackboard killer by any means:

"We actually didn't design this system with universities in mind - we designed it as a course scheduling tool for enterprises."

Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_releases_cloudco...

This article, and the ReadWriteWeb article that I referenced both read too much into this. From what I can tell, CloudCourse was designed to solve the resource management problems that Google had coordinating internal talks and training courses. Google is releasing this internal tool as open source as an example of Google Apps integration and for businesses using Google Apps. The requirements of schools are dramatically different.

I'm particular interested because I am building http://www.classlet.com -- Luckily, it does not appear that Google is competing with us (yet).

Classlet has a new version with loads of new stuff in the pipes coming soon. Contact me at brandon@classlet.com if you'd like to know more.

Why not build off of this base specifically for schools? Blackboard is always going to be hanging over you. Why not get Google in your corner by relying on their open code?

We're relying on a number of Google services already. This project is somewhat orthogonal to what we are building. Many of these features don't apply, so it is not really directly valuable to us to built on top of it.

I hope/wish so. Blackboard is one of the most unpleasant user experiences out there. It's not even well implemented in the back-end, too.

Oh, please God. I hope Google does to Blackboard what Rome did to Carthage.

Ceterum autem censeo, Blackboardinem esse delendam!

Too soon.

Getting a course management system set up took me 33 minutes last semester: 30 minutes failing to get blackboard working, and 3 minutes setting up a google group.

I completely agree. At my school Blackboard gets more and more unstable as the semester passes. By the end of the semester we begin to get bizarre and meaningless error messages, and it slows to a crawl.

I bet you any novice with a little bit of experience in web frameworks could write something better than Blackboard Educational Suite.

Unfortunately I feel like Blackboart/LMS has entangled itself within my University's systems such that it will have to be removed with fire... I don't see it happening any time soon. :\

Are you kidding? Universities HATE it, but they sue all the competitors into oblivion via patents.

Methinks this will not be as successful vs google.

They are also patent trolls.

The term patent trolls gets thrown around too much.

Did Blackboard put together a patent portfolio, and use it dissuade potential competitors? Or do they have a separate business unit that writes patents without actually producing any valuable product and seeking to make money from lawsuits?

The latter is a patent troll; the former is a business best-practice.

(I feel compelled to say that I don't agree with software patents in any form, but until the system is reformed, it's stupid not to play by the rules.

You are correct in that I'm using the term loosely. Blackboard introduced a product which was marginally better (even that is arguable- I didn't use it and I was one of the first people they pitched, to my knowledge, as I was chairing a technology committee at a huge community college with a lot of tech funding just a few miles from their offices) than what we could do with excite/yahoo at the time.

They went public early and were quickly on the ropes trying to make their stuff work. They then turned to intimidation of their competitors by trying to (so I understand, but probably not in an unbiased way) stretch the coverage of their patents rather than giving the teachers the system that they need.

They were(are?) way overvalued and trying to defend their position, not by getting better but by stifling innovation. The one they couldn't intimidate they bought (webCT) to the detriment of us all.

IMHO, what is stupid about what they did was to not innovate once they had the financial advantage after going public. They were the only public player at that time, and raised quite a bit of capital as I recall.

I wouldn't call them a patent troll, but their patent's claims (http://mfeldstein.com/images/uploads/Blackboard_Patent_Claim... via Wikipedia) are on the level of Amazon's one-click patent. And Blackboard HAS used them offensively (unsuccessfully, I might add).

The patent was eventually overturned, but at non-insignificant cost to all parties involved. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc.#Blackboard_lega...)

As business, the choice to use your patent offensively to go after a competitor may come at the expense of, y'know, actually improving your product,which it seems Blackboard has chosen to do.

If you don't want to call them patent-trolls, they are certainly very litigious.

I was excited for a second.

This thing is extremely limited, and wouldn't get adopted by an institution for about 74 distinct reasons (e.g. data is stored in the cloud, which is illegal...)

Blackboard is a terrible terrible service, and all their customers hate them. They persist because they have ties to all the major schools and satisfy all the regulatory criteria required for LMS's.

LMS software is about 90% about sales, deployment and support and only 10% about the quality of the software itself.

"data is stored in the cloud, which is illegal"

Which data is illegal to store in the cloud?

Could you please provide a source?

In Japan, where the laws are different from the United States but not in a very material fashion, the personal information privacy law means you have to treat anything with "personally identifiable information" as toxic and anything regarding a few types of enumerated data as nuclear waste.

Your students' names or email addresses are toxic. (Do you offer them blogs? Do they have commenting features? Tied to email? Toxic!)

Their grades, counseling reports, religious affiliation (do I have to explain what kind of universities need this info?), etc, are nuclear waste.

Just because something is in the cloud doesn't make it illegal, but (to pick one example of many) it is going to make that biannual in-person inspection of your facilities they're going to demand a wee bit tricky now won't it. You can argue until you're blue in the face that Google knows what they're doing regarding physical security and that the university stores equivalent data in servers that are in unlocked rooms in a building housing 1,000 transients, but you will not prevail in that argument.

I don't know if CloudCourse allows it, but so long as the data is encrypted in transit and at rest, physical security can be overlooked.

No, that is categorically not true.

Physical access to the machine means the attacker has root if they want it. Physical access to the machine means you can physically steal it, which is sort of problematic for most of my ex-clients. Physical access to the machine also means you can steal the hard drive and, since you won't leave a note saying "I didn't actually get access to this", the user has to treat the data as compromised anyway, and that means (among other things) that the university and their IT contractors (i.e. my employers) are front page news the following day.

In Canada it is illegal to store student information on servers outside of Canada. At least that is what I was told when I was asked to create a CMS.

There is at least one Canadian school amongst the 8 millions students using Google Apps as their official suite.

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/case_studies/lakehe...

I'm betting that Google or a 3rd party will eventually piggy back a for-pay educational tool on the existing Google Apps school customer-base through their Marketplace.

That just seems like a business opportunity - dealing with regulatory hurdles.

Grades, and almost any student info in general.

Come on, if you've spent any amount of time in the education industry you know this.

There are hurdles, for sure, but none of it is outright illegal to store. You need permissions and protections, but I don't think any of the legal problems are unsolvable.

> They persist because they have ties to all the major schools and satisfy all the regulatory criteria required for LMS's.

You forgot that Blackboard keeps a healthy portfolio of software patents and leverages it to keep out competition.

Well, Desire2Learn managed to beat them off with a stick, and is doing quite well these days actually.

But yeah, they're pretty evil in general.

And they bought out their most powerful competitor, WebCT.

Just to the cloud point, as of early May, 8 million students and counting use Google Apps as the official choice of their school.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/schools-are-almost-ou...

Blackboard persists because they sue every competitor out of existence.

They're crap and everyone in academia knows it.

Agreed. Blackboard offers a bazillion (unnecessary) features, and institutional buyers crave features, not elegance.

yeah, me too. i hate blackboard. everyone does. but this thing isn't nearly fully featured enough (yet?) to be anything more than a blip.

As much as I would love to see Blackboard killed by Google, CloudCourse is a "course scheduling system" whereas Blackboard (and Moodle) are "learning management systems". An LMS will have a huge number of features that CloudCourse won't...

Exactly, they are different products.

I doubt this will cause problems for Blackboard. I say that because schools don't go to Blackboard for their software; they go for their services and the CYA aspect of it. Like they say about Microsoft, "Nobody ever got fired for buying Blackboard".

If anything this poses more of a threat to Moodle.

I really wish this gives a good competition for Moodle. Moodle has been the only decent course scheduling system for years. Competition in this area will advance the technology.

Sorta on topic but it's on my mind tonight so here it goes:

If someone has experience with integrating their application with Blackboard I'd be interested in hearing about it. My sales people are telling me that people really want our product to integrate with Blackboard (without defining what that means).

How do people go about doing that? Are there consultants who just do that kind of thing?

It seems like the most interesting part of these services is the 3rd party integration capabilities.

Everybody hates Blackboard, any anybody could blow them away if it weren't for one thing: Blackboard sues most of their competition and buys the rest.

I was going to say. Doesn't Blackboard own like a bazillion patents?

Forget Google, Blackboard, or any player looking to personally benefit from dominating learning management systems. This is the project we should be supporting: http://sakaiproject.org/

Indiana University uses Sakai (http://oncourse.iu.edu/). At the time I used it ('04-'08), it was...better than Blackboard, but still generally a pain. The design was poor, the UX was awkward - just a deeply unsexy experience overall.

It might be better now, but I have a feeling that most LMS software is doomed to being, well, LMS software.

Is it a "Blackboard killer" because it is by Google or because it is OSS? http://moodle.org has been around for a long time, has attracted many Blackboard defectors, and yet Blackboard is still around...

Its not, but if it was it would be because it had Google backing it. Lack of a known corporate support system is Moodle's weakness, and Blackboard's sole reason for success.

Good god I truly fucking hope they kill blackboard.

What a horrible service

I was gonna say, isn't Blackboard it's own killer?

Sadly - not fast enough. Moodle is interesting but non techie edu folks don't touch it.

It's okay, but it costs a fortune yeah?

Blackboard knows how to do enterprise sales. I'm not sure Google does. Until then, Blackboard's not going anywhere.

Google should acquire blackboard, keep their sales, fire their engineering.

Blackboard is a publicly traded company worth ~1-2 Billion Its so not worth it.

Google has the engineers and the legal department to take on Blackboard. If they took 6 months for a dev team with this as their primary task and were willing to have actual tech support they could demolish blackboard with a single sales rep in 5 years.

  single sales rep in 5 years.

That's what google thinks about sales and that's why they keep getting it wrong. They thought for the longest time they can get away with dealing with big ad agencies without having an office and sales folks in NYC. Luckily they realized that wouldn't work.

Look, a great consumer product like google.com can spread virally. But enterprise requires a very focused and elaborate sales effort.

While I agree in general, my point is that this market is an exception (at least in the US, I have no idea what the situation is like in other countries). Universities are dying for an alternative to Blackboard that has some reputable company behind it. If google had a suitable product they would have to work hard and hold hands to get the first couple of major universities to deploy (not even that if the product was deployable rather than google hosted). After that faculty at other universities would begin quietly demanding relief from the bane of their student's and their instructional lives now that there was a justifiable alternative.

Universities are dying for an alternative to Blackboard that has some reputable company behind it.

What exactly do you mean when you say "universities"? There is the IT dept, the students, the staff, the budgeting people--each with their own motivations. My experience has been that Blackboard has the IT depts. and the budgeting people across the schools in their pocket. The only people that hate Blackboard are students and professors. Unfortunately they dont seem to have much pull or motivation to force a change.

There are good and even free alternatives to Blackboard but that's not enough to kill or even injure blackboard.

Anyone able to set up a demo (never used Google app engine or I would) to check out?

I have this set up on my local machine in an appengine dev environment. I'll try to push it to appengine now. (Full disclosure: this is my girlfriend's project at Google.)

My demo is here, but it's not working fully: https://cloud-course.appspot.com/. I'll need to figure out what's going wrong. As posted, a demo that actually works is here: https://cloudcourseio.appspot.com/

that was one of the best full disclosures ever.

https://cloudcourseio.appspot.com/ demo from Google I/O

it is not Google but two Google engineers working on this in their 20% 'side project' time

Blackboard is terrible, hopefully this takes off quick

Blackboard's biggest feature is document and grades management, which this does not provide.

I currently attend a high school with 800 students looking to use a simple and efficient organizer for teachers, classes, and students. Because it integrates with Google Calendar, I'm hoping future versions include support for assignments; it will be a huge help to our teachers and students. Would it be very difficult to add support for assignments/homework?

Couldn't those feature easily be added to this code base? Why not turn it into an open source Blackboard competitor?

Blackboard may just be the only piece of software I despised more than ExpertsExchange...

News items that contain the word "killer" in the title are usually composed by uninformed local TV news writers, or by hack bloggers who want to drive easy fanboy traffic to their site with cheap rhetoric. We see the same motive in headlines that start with "Top Ten Reasons That...", and "Is My Karate Better Than Your Kung Fu?" or "Python is Dead!?". Sensationalism has its place---the tech gossip media is built on it---but it's disappointing to see it finding unquestioned acceptance on HN.

This is mildly off-topic, but has been on my mind recently because I've spent a little decompression time recently hacking on my study system project.

I may be alone here, but I'd really like to see some sort of online community learning site, where students can organize based on the topics they want to learn, and collectively hire a teacher to assist them. Does this sort of thing even exist?

The closest I can think of is http://edufire.com/

I'm building an open-source online community software package based on Drupal. You could use it to build your own community site like you want. Check it out at eduglu.com

I'd love to read about Blackboard's sales process. It's mediocre software at best, but nearly ubiquitous in US schools.

Looks to me like this app is a relatively simple scheduling app that in no way comes even close to the features and functionality of a full LMS such as Blackboard or Desire2Learn (or the other dozens-odd major players)

Not even close.

It will not kill Blackboard.

If anyone can defend against the over-litigious company that Blackboard is, it's Google.

Hopefully. With Google behind it they have a better chance of fending off the patent trolls masquerading as an educational services provider.

I really hope so. Blackboard is unbelievably horrible. It's destructive.

Yay, finally someone large enough to OUT PATENT the patent trolls.

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