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Comment by moxiemk1 | Hacker News Reader

This announcement in particular stood out as meaningful to me, because it seems with the iTunes U app, Apple is taking on Blackboard.

There are few products that, as a student, more directly inhibit education than Blackboard. Ripe for disruption? More like rotting on the ground.

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The reason Blackboard doesn't have competition is due to the patents they hold. They have made a commitment not to sue free, open source projects, but as soon as you start charging money they are ready to protect their IP rights.

If they can't sue you, then they just buy you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANGEL_Learning

That's standard practice in education. It's very hard to sell new products in that market, and customers rarely switch products regardless of how badly they're treated. Acquisitions are the only way to grow quickly. Every large company serving the education market is a patchwork of milch cows acquired over the years and squeezed until dry.

That's something I suspect Apple doesn't have to worry about.

We can only hope. My university use(d|s) a competitor (sorry, name escapes me, though I supported it for a year or two) that was also crap. It's terrifying just how horrible these systems are.

Was it Moodle by chance? That's the only competitor to Blackboard I've ever seen.

The university I attend recently switched to using Desire2Learn, a competitor which for many years was fighting a legal battle with Blackboard. I haven't used the software extensively yet, but my first impressions are that it's considerably better than the embarrassingly poor system employed before.

D2L: That was the one, thanks :) It did a lot, but we also had to do an enormous amount by hand because it was simply impossible to automate <x>. And rather mind-numbing pain whenever someone got married, and their name and/or email address changed.

http://coursekit.com/ has been advertised a bunch at my school lately, I haven't used it, but their design and implementation seems interesting

I don't think they are really taking on Blackboard. They purchased PowerSchool in 2001, but then sold it in 2006. I think that shows they have no interest in this space, even though if they could sell a system that integrates the iTunes U app into the SIS.

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