Blackboard is indeed an bothersome program with a lot of usability problems, so any competitor in this space has to be a good idea. The article points out that even brick-and-mortar schools with face-to-face interaction in class desire to increase student engagement outside of class, and student engagement outside of class is even more important for online education. My son the hacker has been startup-minded since before he started high school, so he was part of the pioneer class of an online high school. It was EXTREMELY annoying to him and to me that the online high school, when it was founded, didn't have a pan-school way for students to maintain online conversations, nor did it have an online communication environment for parents who lived all over the world. That was a really bad school community-building fail. My son did get to see both the successes and failures of a startup enterprise by attending that school, which was the goal, and over the long haul will surely be good for his career development, but the "sucktastic" (another parent's term) communication with families at that school put me off from signing up any of my other children there. I note that even our local brick-and-mortar high school in our local public school disrict is going heavily into online communication with families, largely through the Schoology product, and it's crazy that online high schools (in some cases, at least) haven't been leading the way in this regard.
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