Ask HN: E-Learning Startup

One thing to keep in mind - educational markets are like enterprise markets - very difficult to sell to. Products don't generally catch on and spread virally there - you'll need a salesforce. The decision makers aren't the users of the product, but its administrators.

Now is a very ripe time for disruptive innovation in the e-learning space. This is especially true as the raw stuff of learning - think video lectures, wikis, forums - is increasingly accessible for free, while college tuition rates keep rising.

However, the key phrase there is "disruptive innovation". Perhaps you may be able to serve the lower end of the market, such as tutors and individual students, schools be damned. And once you do manage to get some traction, you're likely to have a lot more success down the road with institutions.

The preeminent scholar in the field of disruptive innovation has actually just published a book specifically about education:

http://www.amazon.com/Disrupting-Class-Disruptive-Innovation...

I've been reading it in the last few days and publishing some of my favorite passages to my blog:

http://bit.ly/mad82

As a TA forced to use such systems for course management, I agree that they are ugly and inefficient.

Unfortunately, I believe the leader in this market has sued a bunch of competitors for "patent-infringement."

I would caution you against looking at e-learning as a single market - there's the K to 12 market and then the post-secondary market. You also need to look at geography and the educational direction of countries, regions, states, etc. For example, the UK market is very different than the US or AUS markets, and potential clients in each country are looking for very different things.

Blackboard doesn't really play much in K to 12, but virtually owns the post-secondary market in North America. I think you could spend a lot of time and effort trying to build a Blackboard competitor and not get very far.

However, if you take a look at what teachers are doing with Moodle http://moodle.org/ or Joomla http://www.joomlalms.com/, there's probably a niche there to get your hands onto.

In reference to some of the sales comments - if you can connect with teachers, professors or curriculum oriented staff and get them excited, there's a good chance to find some budget.

How would you compete with Moodle, which is Open source, free, and has a lot of momentum? It's also pretty crappy, but I'm not sure that matters in this case - don't forget it isn't the users of the software who are the buyers.

I worked on an e-learning app for a while, and may return to it after some time. Here is what I've learned: if you really want to create a killer e-learning app, you have to approach it from the UI point of view: make it really really really easy to teach and to learn. That, imho, is the biggest roadblock to an explosion of innovation in the education space. Once you have that, you can scrape open education content into your app, open it up to users, and they'll take it from there. Feel free to contact me if you want to chat more.

I administer Moodle for a private college (~1500 clients) and find that it works very well; one free / open source package gives us web-enabled classes (of course I also spend a lot of time training and supporting the instructors to make this a success).

What shortcomings have you found in Moodle and other FOSS offerings? Maybe improvements and support to one of those is a good business model.

If you do start coding from the ground up, I recommend targeting private schools where you might find less bureaucracy/resistance.

I think you'll find two major problems with a blackboard competitor.

1. Low value of products to users

Blackboard, WebCT, and other similar 'Learning Management Systems' are products of a standard response to new technology in an established area. Essentially attempting to copy the existing way of doing things into the new mode and thus make them more efficient. Moving from the existing systems to internet systems might reduce costs by half or so, if you have a really good system, but it isn't 'disruptive'. This isn't spreadsheets or email. It isn't 1000 times better than the alternative.

2. Institutional inertia

Mentioned by others already, you're going to have a hard time selling to institutions. You're competing against a bunch of giant vendors with existing relationships, and FOSS solutions which are backed by and used by multiple universities. My university struck a committee of a dozen people with little to no knowledge of eLearning and spent probably $50,000 in employee time before deciding to maybe try moodle, or just stick with WebCT.

If you've got an idea for how to meet the real needs of educational users several times better than blackboard go for it. Personally I'd love to see something blow the existing junk out of the water, but think carefully about what people actually need and how you can serve that need don't just make a better blackboard.