I know for definite su8ch things would be frowned on in a lot of institutions here in the UK: probs in the US too.

Another major problem I suspect your going to face is that there are quite a few full on school management systems coming into use (there is a big one kicking about that plenty of schools in the UK have but I forget the name offhand). It's kinda hard to see the advantages of a one off system like this in that context.

Dont get me wrong it's a nifty system if you can convince people to use it. But I think that might be hard.

In terms of commerical prospects that might be even tougher - will you charge per teacher? (possibly unpopular) or will you allow a school/institution to license a bulk lot of accounts to hand to it's teachers?

Don't worry too much about your bloated competition such as Blackboard. I am currently a college student and I hate having having to check blackboard. I would much rather have assignment and announcements emailed to me. Most students are lazy like that too. However there are several things that schools need.

-roster page where students can email the whole class or select number of students

-discussion board

-some communication channel for parents, parents heavily invested in their child and a lot of them have zero clue of what they are learning

-A simple class page incase the student wants to login and get their assignments without their clutter of their email.

-Clear subject lines for emails that are sent out

submit to http://AppUseful.com

As for the finer details of the monetization scheme, we are open to suggestions. Our current line of thinking is to offer a freemium model to teachers at a price subsidized by enterprise sales. We've got some ideas for features which will only be activated when a school buys into the system for all of their teachers and students, as well as some features that would benefit from being hosted and linked with other schools.

How would you approach it? Why?

I agree most solutions are fairly complicated (dashboard, moodle). A lot of UK schools are starting VLE (virtual learning environments) with this kind of functionality (albeit more complicated).

I agree about data protection issues although this must be possible to circumvent (probably with the school's consent). Students are typically blocked from accessing outside email at schools.

Selling in to the UK publicly-funded system is a pain. Distributors and VARs may help.

My mother is a primary school teacher and so not quite what your after but her experience would probably scale to higher level education. So hopefully my ideas count as semi-insightful :)

I could see this being adopted by university professors in certain circumstances - but the idea of shelling out for it will definitely put them off (trust me - our lecturers claimed for EVERYTHING :D). Plus many universities already have custom portal software that the lecturers have to use (for whatever reason: usually in case of disputes etc.).

Same probably applies to (UK) secondary school (US = high school) level teachers (i.e. they wont want to pay). BUT in their case getting the school to pay for it on "expenses" would be next to impossible (budgets are super tight atm). As I see it this is probably your target market (definitely in the UK anyway) so if you can market it to the schools themselves you might have more success.

Some ideas for you (I apologise I only briefly scanned your app so they could be in place already :) plus some of this is relevant to UK schools and I have no idea how it works in the US - though I would bet it is similar). This also assumes your interested in grouping teachers by school :)

Firstly allow collaboration. In schools usually assignments are designed by one or more subject heads/organisers. If you let said co-ordinator upload all the assignments to somewhere all of the subject teachers can access and send them out to their students this would probably get you a lot of interest. Mostly because if the teachers / subject heads change the historical data is already there to make use of :)

One other idea is to allow some kind of grouping of gradings for a specific email address. One of a teachers BIGGEST gripes is collating reports for their students. If they could see all the awarded grades by subject in one click I bet you would get piles of "we love you" email.

But yes: the main way I see of selling this is pitching it as a "whole school" thing. Individuals, of course, might make regular use of it (perhaps this is your freemium model - free individual, pay-for school-wide collab features) but it is to schools I think you have to pitch it.

Sorry to ramble - it's too hot again :) hopefully something there is useful.

We see this as a major advantage. Most current systems provide (at best) mediocre solutions to the problems their users face. Instead of doing everything and having it all be mediocre, we took a single problem teachers have and solved it the best way we could.

I think my main point was that it is a 8great* way to approach this problem - but it needs a bit more on top of it to really sell it to a mass audience (IMO).

I could well be wrong, I have been many time before :)

Again, the feedback is really appreciated, if you think of anything else be sure to let us know (founders@classlet.com)

SIMS.net

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMS.net

I work with one of the biggest "supplemental education" companies in US on a regular basis to design / develop their software solutions.

One thing I have learned is that teachers and students don't have control over what system the district/university wants them to use. The sale has do be done at the higher level. In some organizations the teacher's employment contract forbids them from introducing new tools that is not "supported" by the organization.

This is how companies like Blackboard, etc. have made it big because they sold their system to the decision-making groups and circumvented teachers and students.

You need to think about this as you market and sell your product, find a school district or university willing to give your service a shot.

Good Luck!

Also, maybe you should include a description of what Classlet actually is (in addition to the history of it).

Classlet makes handling assignments easier for teachers and students. We've got a whole bunch of features that most of the competitors don't have:

1. Students never need to register, only the teacher does 2. Students never even need to visit the site, they can do everything through email 3. Anything that can be passive, is. In most other systems, you constantly need to check if you've gotten a grade or if an assignment has been posted. We don't make you check, instead we let you know by email (and working on other channels too) 4. The teacher can do all of the grading within the web browser. They don't need to download a hundred individual doc files and open each one in word. Instead, they do it all from one page. 5. We keep a timeline for each student for each assignment. You can see any submissions they've made, if they submitted late, if they submitted an older version, then a newer version (teach has access to all versions), we mark if it was submitted late, etc... 6. And we try to make it easy to facilitate a discussion between the teacher and student.

Those are 6 of quick things off of the top of my head that set us apart from the competition.

Thanks for the feedback.

A potential idea would be to have students do there assignment online, and have a "playback" button to show the student working. A crude cheating measurement (or genius measurement) would be the time between answer submission and the time to completion.

From my friend's point of view, your service will not be considered without cheat-protection so I don't think it should be appropriate as a premium feature. I may be wrong, but my take on freemium is to allow the user to recognize the value when under the free plan and the use of premium to make things faster, larger, or better. In that vein, I would suggest automated grading for absolute or relatively absolute answers as a premium feature (i.e. integral x = (x^2)/2 or a single US founding founder would be part of a set {Thomas Jefferson, James Adams, ... }). That way, grading is completely automated. I'm sure teachers will pay for such a feature.

E-mail may be super effective, but you may have more luck selling to teachers if their students don't need an e-mail address; if they can put in their (pseudo)name or 'school number' and a passcode or some such to upload to an online interface. (w/o an e-mail... w/o storing personally identifiable information of students online, etc)

Let students do the pitching for you.

This first "application", Classlet Assignments, doesn't even require students to create their own account or visit the site (they can, if they prefer). How would you integrate the Facebook API or other social platforms with this application?

We'd also like to build other applications, including ones which target students, but we'd like to get one application right before we build others. Do you have a suggestion for a student-centric application (or features) which would drive viral adoption and could help convince schools to buy?

However, you guys could try several approaches:

-Bottom Up: Ask students to submit their .edu email or login via Facebook connect, and you will notify them once a class is added (this is a bit of false advertisement because at this point you don't even have ties with their professors). But as the number of students for each school becomes significant the school board will be more willing to listen ("75 students at XYZ sign up to ....").

-Top Down: Close the registration process and start to pitch to one school at the time. In other words, adopt an enterprise sale's model. It may take you much longer to close one sale, but you are guaranteed to have revenue from every client.

Include a check option for "corrupt document uploads" when attaching assignments (just in case I need a few more days to finish my assignment). Otherwise, nice work!

Thanks for the compliment too.

I am a part of a startup Watermelon Express and we are developing a platform Web/Desktop/Mobile which syncs, has chat rooms, secure system and content. Even if the universities don't accept it as a universal platform, we are hoping students will use it because of the convenience factor. It is not mentioned anywhere on our website, because it is still 2-3 months away from beta launch.

As an aside: Angel was recently acquired by Blackboard.

Be sure to submit it to http://AppUseful.com also!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679018

Thanks!