By Leslie Walker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 16, 1999; Page
F1
Like many an Internet tale,
this one is told by the users.
Call it the birth of Karaoke
U., a school where everyone
is a teacher.
It started when educational
software company
Blackboard Inc. put its
professional course-creation
tools on the Web for free.
The idea was to show
teachers how they could
enhance their classroom instruction with automatic quiz
builders, electronic test grading, chat, calendars and
discussion boards. Blackboard's founders were hoping
teachers would fall in love and persuade their schools
to buy the company's $5,000-to-$100,000 software.
But within weeks after Blackboard ran an ad touting its
tools at another Web site, more than 1,000 people came
and created full-blown courses at Blackboard.com,
including hundreds of teachers who were not affiliated
with schools. "We had a course on how to play contract
bridge, a Cisco certification class, a Series 7
stockbroker exam," said Michael Chasen, co-founder of
District-based Blackboard.
So in May, Blackboard revamped its Web site to add a
dollop of e-commerce and let people search for courses.
Now anyone who creates a course there and is willing
to pay $100 can charge tuition, sign up students, bill
them through Blackboard and keep 80 percent of the
revenue. So far, more than 9,000 live courses are hosted
at Blackboard.com, including one on infertility that a
doctor created and one about town planning crafted by a
community group in Gaithersburg.
Blackboard.com is at the forefront of a grass-roots
movement in education, even though most of its courses
are still linked to offline schools and it is barely
beginning to explore the free-lance teaching world.
Blackboard has no plans to abandon its core software
business, either. After all, more than 300 universities,
including Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Georgetown, have
bought its electronic tool kit to create Web sites that
supplement their traditional instruction.
But on the Internet, strategies shift as fast as the mind
can wrap itself around new ideas. And so it is that
Blackboard, eCollege.com, DigitalThink and dozens of
other start-ups are tinkering with new online learning
environments – even partnering to make their products
work together.
Some are helping traditional educational institutions go
online. Others are creating entirely new virtual schools,
taking advantage of the global computer network's
ability to break through the time and space limitations
that have long governed the country's $740
billion-a-year educational market.
Inside this swirling new educational galaxy, a few firms
are vying to become the central stations where
self-directed students might start their learning journeys
by finding and signing up for courses from far-flung
sources. One is HungryMinds.com, a San
Francisco-start-up that is launching an educational
portal in two weeks. Another is a "personal learning
community" called SmartPlanet that Ziff-Davis Inc. is
launching on the Web this month. Both will offer free
tools for people to teach courses and share information
in nontraditional formats.
Many of the new players share a broader goal: "We
want to be the Yahoo of online learning," said Stuart
Skorman, the founder of Hungry Minds. "We are helping
to start a new industry – something called online
learning that did not exist before."
The idea is to create virtual communities with registrars
where people can mix and match courses from different
institutions, including personal how-to training, career
development and academic studies. In the same way that
Yahoo offers two distinct Web directories – one listing
its own content and the other cataloguing content at other
people's Web sites – HungryMinds.com will wrap a
comprehensive directory of tens of thousands of
Web-based courses around a smaller listing of services
created and hosted by its own staff and partners.
Hungry Minds announced partnership deals last week to
market Internet courses taught by online pioneers
University of California at Berkeley, UCLA-Extension
and University of Maryland University College. The
company also said it will carry new Web-only courses
from women's network iVillage.com, employment
supersite Monster.com and financial advisor
SmartMoney.com.
But most interesting will be what Hungry Minds calls its
people's university, a Karaoke U. of sorts, where anyone
will be able to create a course. Hungry Minds is
screening the more than 1,000 submissions it has
received from would-be teachers to figure out how open
the system should be, what kind of quality controls are
needed and how much of the tuition free-lancers should
be able to keep.
Skorman, a second-generation Internet entrepreneur who
sold his Web video store Reel.com for $100 million last
year, said his game plan is "like an airplane we're
designing while we are building it."
That plane arrives none too soon for Jason Roberts,
whose own mini-learning portal has been feeling lonely
in cyberspace for several years. Learn2.com, which is
partnering with HungryMinds, offers thousands of short
instructions on life's basics, like changing tires and
getting a "clean, close" shave. "It's been a problem in
the past because people have never been able to classify
us," Roberts said. "There was no learning category in
the search engines."
The big worry, of course, is that without official
accreditation systems it will be hard to tell which
free-lance courses are worthwhile or whether teachers
are who they say they are. It is not easily addressed,
even if sites adopt reputation-feedback systems similar
to what online auctioneer eBay uses to let buyers rate
sellers.
While such worries may slow down the democratization
of education online, they cannot stop the Internet from
empowering students to structure their own learning
paths. In the learning markets of the future, you can bank
on students, no longer constrained by geography or
clocks, reaching out to sample more classes from around
the world on their own need-to-know timetables.
***
Send e-mail to Leslie Walker at
walkerl@washpost.com.