I develop free software because of CUNY and Blackboard

I certainly agree that Blackboard is overpriced and somewhat painful to use. I don't use it much. I mainly create my own web pages from scratch, which I find to be about as easy as using BB, and rather more conducive to my aims (which include making most course materials available to the public).

But then there's this:

> It forces, and reinforces, an entirely teacher-centric pedagogical model.

Um ... that assumes that the BB area is the class, which I find rather silly. I use my websites (and BB now & then) to get information to students, including handouts, announcements, solutions, links, and source code. I could do all this on a physical bulletin board, but the paper cost would be excessive, and it would require students to type in source code, instead of simply downloading it.

But my website is not intended to be some collaborative space where students learn together. On the contrary, the model I follow is to provide my students with resources, and allow them to learn as they see fit (together, if they wish; sometimes I require it). After all, high school is over. My students are adults. They run their own lives. And there are plenty of collaborative learning spaces around here. They are called "tables", and they are used a lot.

This is not to say I'm against the online-collaborative idea. Certainly, if someone figures out how to enhance the educational experience with some kind of computerized thingy, then I say more power to them. Let's get lots of start-ups in this area to come up with lots of interesting things. But in the mean time, I don't feel obligated to somehow "manage" my students' total educational experience.

> The very concept of a “learning management system” may itself be wrongheaded.

Oh, certainly. But after all, "learning management system" is just a term invented by marketing people. We don't have to take it to heart.

These days as a society we have collectively accepted certain economic ideas as gospel. Public activity == parasitic. Private interests == the american way. It's refreshing to hear a different story.

Everyone gushes over the Kahn Academy approach of expecting perfection and permitting failure; they're right and I can run with it in Blackboard.

What I do: Write random question pools using Blackboards obnoxious question writing web interface.

Randomly generate quizzes from a series of different pools by subject.

Let my students take the quiz as many times as they want; offer zero partial credit

Blackboard automatically puts the latest grade into grade center (which is almost always the highest since they stop taking it when they're satisfied with their grade) which they can then access with their university login at any time without revealing confidential information about other students

There is a terrible, ridiculous, hackery way to dump to question log files into excel, clean up the data (takes about an hour) and get feedback on how often each question in each pool is answered correctly, so I know which subjects the students are struggling with. We go over those topics in later lectures.

This has had a huge effect in my sections because it feels like the students work twice as hard but are half as stressed about it. They can fix just about any result for the better by learning the material.

So tl;dr I love learning content management systems and by implication Blackboard despite its many egregious flaws.

In terms of startup ideas, I think there's plenty of space to work with Blackboard rather than try to replace it i.e. I don't think their proprietary quiz formats would be difficult to decipher at all, which means a clever startup could make a "We make making Blackboard quizzes easy!" product and do big enterprise sales with it. Universities love to feel they are on the cutting edge of "technology" and clearly have deep pockets for this stuff (if you didn't click on the expensive link in the article you should)

When I was still in school the students attempted to push the administration to go for an open source alternative called Moodle which is miles ahead of anything else.

Speaking of Blackboard, apparently some security vulnerabilities were found: http://www.scmagazineus.com/zero-day-holes-found-in-blackboa...

Press: http://cl.ly/AGRE

For developers interested in the space, we're hiring: http://coursekit.com/jobs/engineer

I understand that Bb is very litigious and has a pretty broad patent on "eLearning" but that doesn't seem like it's stopping its competitors.

Doesn't anyone think that this is the perfect market to be entering these days? The market has a ton of potential (as evident by all the money that is being spent on it) and the satisfaction with the current leaders is seriously lacking.

Are there any YC companies that are tackling this area?

Is there any particular reason undergraduate courses prohibited?

Faculty and instructors, I think, sometimes forget when they have academic freedom to teach their course whatever way they see best (sometimes they really don't have this choice though, like for much government/military/corporate training). They can use stuff outside of blackboard if they wish. Also though, they may not have the time or skill to set up their own online course tools.

There are alternatives that many faculty are embracing such as wikis (wikispaces, etc.), blogs (wordpress), and even some universities are exploring more decentralized or cloud-based alternatives that don't box you into a walled garden, like wordpress hosting, drupal tools (harvard's openscholar), google apps, and see what BYU is creating (although I'm not sensing that it will be open sourced): http://learningsuite.byu.edu/ (described in the educause article below)

The newest LMS tools like Instructure (and the newest version of Blackboard) are basically trying to emulate Facebook, for better and for worse, with dynamic streams of information and connections to social networking tools. Some believe Blackboard will not dominate the market for much longer: http://mfeldstein.com/emerging-trends-in-lms-ed-tech-market/

Anyway, there are plenty of articles exploring the effects (negative and otherwise) of learning management systems like Blackboard: http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterly... http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ar... http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ar...

Unfortunately many academic IT departments are primarily just consumers of vendor technologies, they aren't big enough nor do they have enough money to develop custom software tools. Purdue and others are some exceptions: http://campustechnology.com/innovators

An even bigger problem is probably that most faculty have no training in instruction and pedagogy and learning theory and design. As one person put it, "College teaching may be the only skilled profession for which systematic training is neither required nor provided–pizza delivery jobs come with more instruction." See http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/50-examples-of-the...

Online education is of great interest and importance to me. I started working in this field in 1983, and have had the opportunity to help shape it, study it, and I continue to contribute to the field. I come from the education side, and have written some books on this topic. I have had a company that developed online environments to support learning, and the result was a pretty excellent collaborative learning environment software that 16 years later I still use and which students are pretty positive about. However, my company put our dollars into development rather than marketing, and eventually found that the competition had a crappy product but alot of marketing dollars. So, I wound down the company in 2002. The market was primarily educational institutions, schoolboards, etc and they were buying into the 'lms' solution, where learning is viewed as something to be managed and packaged.

Primarily, I am a prof. and I have been teaching online since 1985: I taught one of the very first totally online courses, and it was based on collaborative learning. In fact, online education in the 1980s was almost all about group learning, team project, knowledge building---whether in secondary or tertiary or training education.

Phew...long lead it. But I provide it as a framework to my message which is that: online education can and has served as a major game changer in education, and is likely the key to the 21st century Knowledge Age.

I don't see much reference to that in this discussion. Most of the comments so far seem to be referencing old paradigm ways of teaching and learning...i.e., lms stuff. None of the software mentioned has achieved great or even mildly interesting or important learning gains. Mainstream elearning software are mostly associated with groans and frustration and anxiety, not excitement at new ways to teach and learn. Moodle is really a muddle, let's be clear. Like BB, Moodle was not designed nor developed for learning or teaching. Education was an add-on to this 1990's moo (aka mud). Educationally, Moodle is just a bunch of things added on without rhyme or reason--anything goes, sort of. BB was initially and largely remains an administrative software. This was not about technologies designed to address learning activities but a slap dash kind of commercial "solution" (the fact that Moodle is open source does not, imho grant it dispensation or holiness). It is making a mess of online education and undermining and distracting the field.

Let's focus on learning, which should and could be really exciting and relevant adventures. About inventing! Innovating! Solving problems! ENgaging in Knowledge communities. Addressing realworld conundra! Let's talk about learning theory. WHat learning methods work best? How can we, educators and technology developers) support 21st century pedagogies and discoveries with new technologies?

The 21st century is a new paradigm and it is about Knowledge building. Our learning approaches and technologies need to support collaboration and knowledge building. That vision can help orient us to new ways of learning, to supporting new paradigm learning pedagogies and strategies.

Let's stop kicking around the 20th century can of learning strategies primarily based on 19th century factory-needs and models (lecture halls, rows of student desks bolted to the floor, obedience, memorization, repetition, etc.). BB and Mooooooodle take us backward. They waste time, money and talent.

Its time to innovate and make a difference, and the world of teachers and learners will thank you for investing your time and energy in designing real solutions.

Cheers, Linda