New Course-Management Software Promises Facebook-Like Experience

November 29, 2011, 1:40 pm

Three University of Pennsylvania students who recently dropped out to start an upstart course-management system today unveiled their software, called Coursekit, after having raised more than $1-million in venture capital.

The trio, frustrated with the systems offered by universities, such as Blackboard, decided to team up and design their own online course platform, which emphasizes social networking and an easy-to-use interface. By May, the founders, Joesph Cohen, Dan Getelman, and Jim Grandpre, had raised so much start-up cash, from sources including the Founder Collective and IA Ventures, that they decided to quit school to focus on developing Coursekit.

Thirty universities tested Coursekit this fall, including Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania.

Coursekit offers a platform for hosting discussions, posting grades and syllabi, sharing calendars and links, and creating student profiles. The company has hired 80 student ambassadors to introduce the new course-management system to students at colleges across the country.

The software is one of several new challengers to Blackboard, which is used by a majority of U.S. colleges. In October, Pearson announced OpenClass, a free course-management system, and last year a Utah company called Instructure unveiled Canvas, which is available under an open-source license.

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http://twitter.com/emosterd Eric Mosterd

That’s all well and good, and I am excited to take a look at this, but if it–like so many other upstarts–fails to address boring things like analytics, this will go nowhere. Instructure is releasing their package next year, so that is a good start, but so many of these startups focus on what’s new and what can differentiate themselves from the establishment by focusing purely on student engagement using what is new and hot in student circles, but not on assessment. There needs to be a balance.
greeneyeshade

I hope the comparison to Facebook is superficial given today’s settlement of a complaint by the FTC which said that Facebook’s actions had been “unfair and deceptive.”
haohtt

Mr. Mosterd is right on target. While student interface and instructor tools are, of course, critical, most course management systems are just that COURSE management. The assumption is that all of the tools, reports, analytics, etc., are only important at the individual course level. Other than being able to load students from the campus student information system, there is usually little thought given to those who need to manage hundreds of online courses across multiple disciplines (or campuses) and need to be able to tell what is happening or to deploy resources across multiple courses (or across the entire system). It’s time for a true LEARNING management system!
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=693297679 Fernando Pernica

Mr. Mosterd and haott are right!

If you are looking for a place where you can manage several courses and disciplines at different universities, create and join research projects, casual study groups and so on, you should check out http://www.iversity.org

It’s true that the emphasis is on the content of the course and on what students and tutors make of it, rather than on the analytics or grading aspect that characterises most systems. So @haott:disqus In a sense, iversity is the kind of learning system you just asked for.

Now @twitter-29271670:disqus , which aspect of ‘assessment’ is missing from most Edu startups? I’d be very interested to know!
http://www.linkedin.com/in/cshunt312 Courtney Hunt

Though I commend these founders for their efforts and wish them the best of luck, it appears that Coursekit is too narrowly defined. If they really want to be innovative and offer universities something of value, I suggest they create what I refer to as a Private Digital Network (PDN) platform. @chronicle-99927ed3f11c0f361bd4c0c7d61d246f:disqus rightfully notes that universities need systems that go beyond individual courses. Though I don’t disagree with his/her assertion about the need for learning management systems, I think there’s also a need for a digital community in which students, faculty and staff can interact throughout a student’s tenure at a given school. A PDN would offer the social networking functionality of platforms like Facebook, but in a private, secure environment that can be managed by the institution. It should also support blogging, micro-blogging, file sharing, video sharing, messaging, chatting and other activities that are currently being conducted on a wide variety of public platforms beyond the institution’s purview and control. Social and 2.0 tools are certainly important for individual courses, but faculty, students and staff need the ability to engage with one another outside of the specific boundaries of a course while still staying inside the boundaries of the institution.

Courtney Shelton Hunt, PhD
Principal, Renaissance Strategic Solutions
Founder, Global Center for Digital Era Leadership (GCDEL)
Founder, Social Media in Organizations (SMinOrgs) Community
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000216689465 Nathan Zebrowski

As a professor, I would say that almost anything that would free my campus from Blackboard would be welcome. It is arcane and difficult and ugly and frustrating to use. For a user like me, the design seems utterly stupid (as well as ugly). Even the simply menu headings seem to have been thought up by Martians. It has wasted plenty of my time. My guess is that the students will come much closer to designing something that will meet on-the-ground educational needs. The degree to which that has ever been a strong concern of the IT system heads and administrators has always been a question. They have other overriding concerns, perfectly legitimate from their point of view. As for myself, I am cheering for the student Blackboard slayers.
daddyprof

The Borg are undoubtedly preparing an assimilation (Resistance Is Futile). The Borg are likely already aware of these exciting new features, and are in the process of tripling the number of clicks and screens required to use them. Soon they’ll have figured out the most counter-intuitive menu setup in which to bury said new features. Any malfunctions will, naturally, remain an “end-user issue.”
“Meaningful technological innovation” is just a code phrase for “harder to use new version here it comes like it or lump it.” What a bummer prospect for these dudes to have to spend their 20s in court.
Pardon my grouchiness. I’m what my institution refers to as a certain LMS “power-user.” Bleargh.
bonniekyburz

Good Lordy! I’m so glad you intro’d CourseKit, here! I am testing it out for a Spring 2012 new course. So far, very nice!!
econproph

Eric Mosterd and haott are both definitely right. I took a look at this startup and it’s demo. As a 9-year veteran of heavy online teaching (and f2f and hybrid) at a community college, it doesn’t cut the mustard and it doesn’t live up to it’s hype.

Yes, it’s newer and shinier than BB and it has a Facebook-like social “wall”. What doesn’t these days? But it commits the same sins as BB. It reflects some students’ views of what the LMS should be. The difference is BB was developed over 10 yrs ago and hasn’t fundamentally changed. This startup is most definitely NOT designed for the professor to manage. There’s little there to help us do what we really need to and it’s not designed to do our tasks productively.

It’s not ready for either teaching fully online courses or for situations where a professor has a heavy load of classes. It is designed to do one thing: act as the electronic supplement to an upper-division or graduate seminar or lecture course taught at a large R1 school. Unfortunately, that’s a limited universe.

If they or anyone else is interested, I’ve put a lot of thought into what tools we professors really need to be more productive or effective. Contact me by email at jol2 (at) plansolution (dot) com to start a conversation. I’d be glad to help.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Gutierrez/20002222 Robert Gutierrez

Facebook like social networking additions to a course software package may build student buy in. However it presents a lot of potential privacy and information issues. There seems to be a growing crop of competitors, my university recently switched to Desire2Learn. No real complaints.
cebryant

I agree with Robert Gutierrez that CourseKit seems to present privacy issues. For example, CourseKit courses are visible to the entire Web by default. I’m no attorney, but that alone strikes me as a FERPA violation in spirit if not in letter. Also, the Terms of Service make it seem like CourseKit plans to make money like Facebook–by selling user and usage data to marketers. I wonder about the FERPA implications and how institutions that are testing CourseKit are handling privacy.
http://www.facebook.com/gbswales Clive Richards

The course menu in blackboard is entirely customisable and renamable by instructors – so you are able to create the menu in whatever form you wish. I am not a particular fan of Bb but so far I have not seen any product out there which successfully combines, course management with the more open social network approach. The forms method of building everything can be very tiresome for lecturers who are competenet web users – not in my experience the majority of lecturers who want an interface that takes them through everything in easy steps every time.

What is being discussed here seems on face value to be more open than many lectures and senior managers would want – It may closely resembe what the students “want” – but needs are not wants. After all I am sure most students would argue for an assignment and test free way of studying.

I think there is room for all things and for different tools to be deployed in different courses, equally I hear some people say there should be more uniformity of presentation and studenst can become lost in interfaces which are too free flow (albeit they might enjoy them more).

However I really just wanted to comment that Blackboard, like many other systems, can be flexible if people take the time (or are given the time) to learn how to use it properly. I find it very interesting for example that many staff plead to come on training courses while postgrad students doing teaching usually just play with it to find out how it works and get on with it.

One other factor is that any learning management system depends on how well it is deployed at local level and how much effort the technical and eLearning teams put into developing it to meet their own institutional needs.
http://www.facebook.com/gbswales Clive Richards

I tend to sympathise – even programmes like Word have become complex beyond comprehension sometimes – but this comes about because companies are constantly trying to add to a system the things that people ask for – giving 6 different ways to do something where there was previously only one. Blackboard for example redisigned in version 9.1 so that users could access more from the page using context sensitive menuse – essentially what many had asked for, now I get complaints that there are too many options and people preferred the previous layered menu structure. Not sure what the answer is here as one size never fits all.
cogi7303

I would like to see an LMS architecture that is student-based not
course-instructor based. This would need to have robust analytics. If an LMS allowed students/advisors to focus on a
student as the central unit of analysis, rather than a course, then we might be
able to think about student planning and progress differently. For example a report/analysis on how the student was doing on essays across multiple courses would be invaluable. This could be accomplished by having a tag placed categorizing the contributions to each course score, e.g. exam,
essay, homework, lab, project, then across multiple courses a LMS could
indicate a student’s performance on these different components, i.e. an advisor
would be alerted to the fact that in all the courses, a student’s “essay”
components were very low. In such a case, this might lead to a recommendation
for remedial or tutoring work on writing.
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