Blackboard-killer Instructure.com Closes Initial Funding Round | Hacker News Reader

Blackboard-killer Instructure.com Closes Initial Funding Round

adamchavez.net

8 pointsadammichaelc16 comments

#1 - I'm a BYU alum and retired Blackboard-hater, so I'm proud that BYU students are tackling this.

#2 - My first thought was "Blackboard's strengths aren't technical, they're in enterprise sales. These guys are going to have to sell, sell, sell if they want to win." Then I read it and they first did a nationwide selling tour before they began developing. That's a team to bet on!

Other HN threads about Blackboard:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109984

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=56229

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=247955

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315281

It's pretty exciting. The founders are sharp and know what it's going to take to break into this market. It'll be interesting to see how it all turns out.

Do you have any background on the founding team and their "nationwide selling tour"?

I couldn't find much about Mike Chasen or the team. I'm interested in how they built the business (definitely not the software).

It seems we can't get any glimpse into what their product looks like, so I can't answer my question:

How would this be any better than Moodle?

The most I can presume is that Instructure would be more purposely anti-Blackboard and would probably charge to develop features on a per-client basis, which would be very helpful for small institutions that just don't have the staff to implement their own functions in Moodle.

I don't know much about Moodle, but from what I can tell they aren't playing the enterprise sales game... at least not yet.

With universities and other large, corporate organizations, salesmanship (not necessarily technical polish) is what wins.

Moodle is definitely targetted for smaller shops, like private colleges, schools, etc.. There's nothing restricting it from being used in large organizations, though, and it has a bunch of automation (automatic enrollment in Moodle courses based on enrollment status in another database, integrate logins with existing LDAP or other directory, etc.), but like most open source projects it's very much a community product and not the product of a for-profit entity trying to sell service to customers (that's available through third parties, though).

Major universities are already contributing to the Sakai project, which will become the de facto learning management system over time. It's built by universities for universities and is open source. The project is sponsored by the same organization that sponsors uPortal, which is becoming the standard web portal framework for universities.

http://sakaiproject.org/portal

Is there another instance of a "by universities for universities" project really being successful? Just saying, a product's market doesn't always know what they really need or want.

I'd donate money and beer to the startup that can kill Blackboard.

Its the Windows ME of enterprise software.

The founders being from BYU, the beer would go undrunk. But I'm sure the money would be appreciated ;)

At University, I liked Blackboard, except it was a little complex.

What's wrong with Blackboard? (I wouldn't know, never used it).

Their UI is terrible. Simple operations take far too many clicks. Every single thing you do refreshes the page which can make the system incredibly slow, especially if you use it while everyone else is using it (during class sign-up times for example).

I would just like echo the same sentiments. Poor UI, particularly with respect to menu navigation.

From a technical administration standpoint, the system is extremely fragile and absolutely crumbles under load.

It is a big frustrating pile of enterprise (noun 1. excrement) that doesn't leverage any modern or widespread technology to make students' or instructors' lives easier. It is slow, confusing to get access to, easy to hack anyway, unnecessarily complex, and ends up being a parody of whatever web communication paradigm it tries to mimic (forums, etc.).

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