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Comment by nazgulnarsil | Hacker News Reader

Blackboard and other proprietary software that colleges use. Blackboard sucks and could be easily replaced by hacking together open source solutions and presenting it in a slick package (like 37 signals) but tailored for college instead of business.

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Funny you say that—I'm a startup partner with the submitter of this Ask HN, who linked me your comment, and I'm working on another startup that's trying to do that.

Screenshot of general page:

http://screenshots.markbao.com/bbcd72149092d041f5aa310f2f2d3...

http://screenshots.markbao.com/c637d2dc73f4b51c5e74111b86d7e...

One of the biggest problems with LMS (USPTO Blackboard patent 6,988,138) is that they're often hard to use, so teachers don't use them. I'm trying to change this by making things mindlessly simple, and using words they're already familiar with (Attachments, like with email):

http://screenshots.markbao.com/cecd9f592564abe2cd5cac2ae8060...

It's certainly not to the caliber of Blackboard, but I'm trying to target the long tail who just want websites and not huge, bloated LMSs, and scale up from there. Release early iterate often! It's going to be charged on a yearly basis by school, which includes unlimited teachers, file storage included.

It's mostly going to be a sales and marketing learning experience for myself.

Let me know if you think there is a market for this in middle schools/high schools/college... contact email/AIM is in profile.

one of the simplest things that blackboard manages to screw up is the message board. each class should have a board generated for it for that specific semester with a message area, a collaborative blackboard (auto generated for each thread and saved!), and assignments posted all on one page. I suppose you need a widescreen monitor to really get it all laid out nicely.

I couldn't agree with this more. I work with Blackboard's software on a daily basis and it is a aweful, unstable mess. The only problem is that Blackboard seems intent on sueing any competitors out of business using patents (see desire2learn)

d2l is awful in its own right - the University of Arizona uses it and I'm absolutely boggled as to how this software was ever sold. It's not terrible from the student's perspective, but the professor/TA interface is abysmal. It reminds me of interfaces from the 90s, before we had figured out things like going to the next page without a specific button to save the current page.

I think some of these have been invalidated:

http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-invali...

There is an open source competitor - Moodle (moodle.org)

My university currently uses Blackboard. Some of the computing subjects are trialling moodle to see whether the whole university could switch from Blackboard.

Moodle is simpler to use and less buggy.

Blackboard and other proprietary software that colleges use.

Absolutely. My son is a student in an online high school and has taken online classes from other providers. All the competitors in that space are abominably user-unfriendly.

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