#1 - I'm a BYU alum and retired Blackboard-hater, so I'm proud that BYU students are tackling this.
#2 - My first thought was "Blackboard's strengths aren't technical, they're in enterprise sales. These guys are going to have to sell, sell, sell if they want to win." Then I read it and they first did a nationwide selling tour before they began developing. That's a team to bet on!
It's pretty exciting. The founders are sharp and know what it's going to take to break into this market. It'll be interesting to see how it all turns out.
Their UI is terrible. Simple operations take far too many clicks. Every single thing you do refreshes the page which can make the system incredibly slow, especially if you use it while everyone else is using it (during class sign-up times for example).
It is a big frustrating pile of enterprise (noun 1. excrement) that doesn't leverage any modern or widespread technology to make students' or instructors' lives easier. It is slow, confusing to get access to, easy to hack anyway, unnecessarily complex, and ends up being a parody of whatever web communication paradigm it tries to mimic (forums, etc.).
It seems we can't get any glimpse into what their product looks like, so I can't answer my question:
How would this be any better than Moodle?
The most I can presume is that Instructure would be more purposely anti-Blackboard and would probably charge to develop features on a per-client basis, which would be very helpful for small institutions that just don't have the staff to implement their own functions in Moodle.
Moodle is definitely targetted for smaller shops, like private colleges, schools, etc.. There's nothing restricting it from being used in large organizations, though, and it has a bunch of automation (automatic enrollment in Moodle courses based on enrollment status in another database, integrate logins with existing LDAP or other directory, etc.), but like most open source projects it's very much a community product and not the product of a for-profit entity trying to sell service to customers (that's available through third parties, though).
Major universities are already contributing to the Sakai project, which will become the de facto learning management system over time. It's built by universities for universities and is open source. The project is sponsored by the same organization that sponsors uPortal, which is becoming the standard web portal framework for universities.
Is there another instance of a "by universities for universities" project really being successful? Just saying, a product's market doesn't always know what they really need or want.
#2 - My first thought was "Blackboard's strengths aren't technical, they're in enterprise sales. These guys are going to have to sell, sell, sell if they want to win." Then I read it and they first did a nationwide selling tour before they began developing. That's a team to bet on!
Other HN threads about Blackboard:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109984
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=56229
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=247955
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315281
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