Why Blackboard's Plan to Buy a Rival Sparked a Campus Uproar | Hacker News Reader

Why Blackboard's Plan to Buy a Rival Sparked a Campus Uproar

chronicle.com

29 pointscrocus14 comments

Blackboard started as two separate companies, one of which was called CourseInfo. This is the part that forms the core of Blackboard's software offering.

One of my professors at Cornell told us a bit about how CourseInfo came about; if I remember correctly, it started as work one student was doing for a particular professor to keep said professor's class website organized, and it grew from there. At some point, Cornell's administrators deliberately chose not to employ the student who was building what was evolving into CourseInfo in order for him to legally keep all the rights to his creation. It's really kind of a heartwarming story of higher education fostering entrepreneurship right on its own campus.

Flash forward about a decade and my professor was telling us they were concerned Blackboard was considering suing not just its competitors, but universities who built their own educational software in-house for patent infringement. Well, it was almost a heartwarming tale of student entrepreneurship.

I would like to point out that the leadership of Blackboard now came from the Blackboard side, not the CourseInfo side. Still, the Blackboard software really is horrible. I used to complain all the time that our top rate CS department students could definitely build a vastly superior system, and then I found out that we actually did build the god damned thing. Oops.

At least the CS department at Cornell doesn't use Blackboard though; http://cornellsun.com/node/21160 We have something called CMS instead that's worked on by Cornell undergrads and graduate students.

Hmm. One of my startups Classleaf (http://classleaf.com/) is a semi-Blackboard competitor, which is based on the idea of a lighter learning management system. Since those that read this article might be familiar with the learning management scene, what could schools want to give them the push to use Classleaf's product? I'm going to side with the fact that many schools have existing grade management systems, and perhaps a monolithic "all-in-one" app isn't the best idea.

Mark,

I just clicked on your profile and took a look at your work. I would have put you in 35-55 age bracket, considering what you have done and the image you have successfully projected. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw you were 16.

Take this from me; you're destined to great things my friend. The sky is the limit. But don't let this get into your head; someone like you is obviously driven and very competent, try to keep yourself grounded on the side. Discover spirituality or philosophy just to keep your sanity. On behalf of the rest of humanity, let me say that "We" want you to do Good, since whatever you do you will do it to perfection. You have the golden-touch, and with great power .. comes great responsibility.

Regards.

Thank you, Obi-Wan.

All I have to base my opinion on is some familiarity with Blackboard/CourseInfo and a few friendships with schoolteachers, but I think you would need to approach marketing to high schools and colleges differently. Most high schools, even fairly good ones, are going to have a dearth of technical knowledge present in the administrative staff, so lightweight is good. They need software that is as easy to set up as possible, and they need be assured that it's reliable--schoolteachers and administrators are deathly afraid of parents and lawsuits, and something that loses grades is anathema.

(And I second what mahmud said above; the accomplishments in your profile make my head spin)

You'll never get them to switch with something small. You need something that's uniquely better than the competition.

Just remember: It's one thing to get school faculty and students to want you to use your product. It's another thing entirely to make administrators want to buy it.

From what I remember of Blackboard, the biggest (usability) improvements would be things that let you integrate with existing university infrastructure: things like LDAP integration, e-mail integration (submit assignments through e-mail, post messages, etc), possibly pubcookie. Blackboard may well have improved since then.

Haven't read the article, but just a general observation about Blackboard: from the perspective of a student and someone who is interested in education, Blackboard's products are garbage. An introductory computer science course could put something comparable together at the end of the term, and a competent Rails/Django developer could blow them out of the water. Blackboard is like the Internet Explorer of the education world.

I've taken a couple of classes that used Blackboard. It's terrible software. I'm not surprised that they resort to suing competitors to gain an advantage. They certainly seem incapable of coming up with a decent product.

I would participate in an open source project competitor to them just because of my dislike for their product.

Blackboard is the ultimate in enterprisey software for academia. You thought design-by-committee was bad, now you can experience design-by-committe when that committee knows the purchase decision will also be made by another committee. As long as all the little boxes get ticked then no-one cares about anything else.

Also, between mergers, acquisitions and plain old bankrupcy I can see this economic downturn being very good for "unkillable" open source alternatives in various markets.

Blackboard is a classic example of a product with a long list of desirable features that looks great on paper and to the kind of bureaucrats who make purchasing decisions. Unfortunately all the features are implemented so terribly that it's a constant battle to actually use the thing and becomes almost worthless.

Where I work (Cal State Long Beach), they decided to switcy form Blackboard (called Beachboard here) over to Angel another competitor. A month or so later, Blackboard buys Angel. Gotta love it. I was hoping our school would select Moodle, which is open source and used by some very big Universities.

You can stitch together most of Blackboard out of Google's services. All Google really needs is some secure site for posting grades, but in reality, the old "web site with student ID number instead of name" is more widely used at my school than Blackboard anyway, so perhaps not.

What you guys are missing while you're arguing about how shitty Blackboard, is the sales process. The list of features, yeah... but the sales process is key to selling to any kind of institution, whether it's a big company or a big university. Or a school system.

It doesn't matter if a college class could build a better competitor by the end of a semester. Of course they could. A dedicated, lone programmer could.

But that wouldn't get anywhere without the sales process.

(As a interface auteur, I'd like to say something about how improving on something like Blackboard is not about the programming, it's about the design. But it could be the easiest thing in the world to use and still not sell at all to universities.)

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