Eddie Cohen | An online home for class

Steve Jobs famously said, “It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”But Blackboard, the dominant learning management system, falls short on all these counts.

Blackboard was released in 1997 as the first commercial LMS on the market. With a first-mover advantage, it built a sales-focused organization that drove it to become an industry leader by the time it went public in 2004. The sprint to gain market share made sales the priority and product development an afterthought, leaving us today with a product that is very similar to what was first released well over a decade ago.

Needless to say, Blackboard’s neglect to make much-needed improvements has frustrated students and professors around the country. In recent years, this disregard has compelled many professors to simply not use the site for their classes, and some universities (including Penn) have even purchased one of the many other LMS 2.0 solutions like Desire2Learn, Canvas or Moodle. For Blackboard, the impact has resulted in a 14-percent decrease in market share over the last five years, as it has become more and more clear that their tool doesn’t serve the needs of classes today.

Like many of their peers, my brother Joseph Cohen, Dan Getelman and Jim Grandpre were fed up with Blackboard. So they started work on a better way to manage classes. After working on the problem for a year, they realized not only that Blackboard has become an outdated tool but also that the existing notion of an LMS as something universities purchase and install has become an outdated way to help professors manage classes. So they founded Coursekit.

Inspired by consumer websites like Tumblr and Facebook, Coursekit is an intuitive online home for your class where you can easily find your files and, beyond that, your classmates. Coursekit gives students and professors profiles and a class wall where everyone can post, comment and “like” content throughout the day.

To facilitate this interaction, they’ve made the interface elegant and delightful to use. Joe would tell you that Coursekit is a design company and every detail of the product, from the shadows to the typesetting to the technology stack, has been designed with the user’s experience in mind.

At the moment, Coursekit is testing at universities across the country, including several trials at Penn. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. In the words of photography professor Tony Ward, who is piloting Coursekit at Penn, “I think Coursekit has something marvelous going on.”

The focus on creating an incredible experience for students and professors is fundamental to the new vision Coursekit has for education. Its founders believe universities shouldn’t have to spend their scarce resources to buy and install a clunky tool like Blackboard that classes don’t want to use. Instead, Coursekit goes straight to the students and professors. Starting this month, anyone can go to coursekit.com and create their class for free.

Coursekit is hoping that by building a site that users love where classes can become communities, it can become the social network where education happens. As a student fed up with Blackboard, I’m hoping to use Coursekit in my courses this spring and see how it changes the way we can interact with the class.

Eddie Cohen, a Wharton freshman, is the brother of Joseph Cohen, a founder of Coursekit. His email address is eddiec@wharton.upenn.edu.

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