Will Coursekit Launch Up-End Blackboard?

This is exactly right. We built our own app for our medical school. Still live, tmedweb.tulane.edu. The professional schools (law, medicine, business) are smaller, and generally have the money and flexibility to move on something like this. We were turning away schools before several of us graduated. Downside of developing in med school: instead of graduating into a self-made job, you go to an internship in a hospital and the whole world outside the hospital ceases to exist.

Tulane has doubled down on the project and hired a developer fulltime to run it. Who got which chunks of code, I still don't know. It could probably stand a complete rewrite though.

points that worked for us:

you (the professor) and your course coordinators, TAs, etc, don't realize how broken the BlackBoard paradigm is, how it clouds your thinking and slows you down, until you try something else. Lets do some click races...

Your students check out every time BlackBoard is involved. Anything would make them like you more.

You really can access usage statistics. Just not with BlackBoard. Hey, dean, you want to know which professor downloads correlate with improvement on board scores? We can ask questions like that.

Just about anyone on HN could write a better lms than blackboard, and sell it for 1/100 of the cost for huge profit margins (okay maybe some exaggeration here, but not much). But blackboard is not unique, almost all institutional level software in universities is terrible and expensive.

This isn't a problem with bad vendors it's a problem with the institution doing the purchasing.

For starters the idea that "Cohen plans to sell Coursekit to professors instead of letting university IT departments slow him down." Is flawed on many levels.

Firstly it's no accident that university IT departments are unnecessarily central to purchasing decisions, they spent and will continue to spend much political capital on campus to remain that way. As soon as campus IT departments catch wind of this strategy, they will fight in every-way to make it as amazingly inconvenient as possible to go this route. Most professors are busy enough that it's not worth their time to fight campus IT over what is ultimately a minor part of their course.

Second faculty don't usually have budgets to purchase product like this for their classes (again institutions have deliberately grown this way to keep central departments powerful), they may have grant money but they would never spend it on something like this. So at a minimum it would have to be a departmental purchases, which mean that someone in the department will have to handle keeping track of making sure everything is paid for, students know how to use it etc. At which point departmental admins will just say "why not just let IT deal with it"

Additionally almost all professors I know already have their hands full with research and just teaching, let alone worrying about the burden of infrastructure. Most professors use Blackboard, not because it's useful, but because their campus IT departments have created university policies that make it a requirement or at least 'strongly suggested'.

I would love to see blackboard taken down, but in the end they're only a symptom of a much larger problem in higher ed.