10th
Post-launch Update (cc Blackboard)
Hello everyone,
On August 31, 2010 Enrolled.in went live and welcomed everyone with a .edu or .ca email address to sign up to become the foundation of the social academic network for their school’s domain. Thank you to all of the early adopters who have been following the company since nearly the beginning - many of whom had the pleasure of being introduced to the business via This Week in Startups, hosted by well-known entrepreneur Jason Calacanis. I would also like to specifically thank the few who humbly pointed out an occasional bug along the way and/or suggested some features they would like to see in the future. It is truly an honor to have a community with a shared interest in making Enrolled.in the best it can be.
Launching a new website is extremely exciting to me, and it is even more so when one’s ultimate goal is to push aside a company with an outdated and malfunctioning product which currently dominates the market space, namely Blackboard. As a student myself, I have spent far too much time dealing with the poor user interface and lack of community-driven collaboration offered by Blackboard, not to mention the time they lost my final project which nearly caused me to fail a class I was doing very well in… and I’m not the only one to experience such frustrations.
I gave Blackboard 3 academic years to fix their problems and offer high-education students and faculty a better, more reliable academic platform, but they obviously don’t care about creating an academic community or providing tools which actually work as long as they receive their annual licensing checks from their customers (that is, universities). Based on reports I’ve read, it is typical for a school to pay an average of over $50,000 PER YEAR for Blackboard’s crappy “solutions”. Absolutely asinine.
I could go on for quite some time, but what I’m trying to say is this:
Blackboard, your time is up. Enrolled.in is taking your seat.
Regards,
Founder, Enrolled.in LLC
