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Class.comIn 1998 the University of Nebraska formed a for-profit corporation to market and distribute the CLASS™ courses called Class.com. Their mission is "Quality education over the Internet to learners world-wide." Class.com provides content, systems, and support for
e-learning. Their Virtual School Network links model programs
throughout the United States. Find a way to reach your students, any
way they want to learn.
Class.com grew from a development project at the University of Nebraska. By 1998 Class.com was founded to deliver the revolutionary, media-rich courses to schools everywhere. Still headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska, the privately held company is committed to the development and distribution of quality secondary school courses. Class.com's complete e-learning solution:
It is possible that class.com should have been class.edu. They are really an education service provider. It was probably a mistake to go with the .com because of very different expectations. The culture between education and business is very different. There were issues in the class.com startup as to which entity controlled which pieces of the process and product development. The initial management of class.com didn’t fully understand the difficulty of the task. Their focus then was just to get the courses out of the door, no matter what, instead of offering the courses that were tested and complete. Expectations were different – business and education operate on different timetables and with different goals. Class.com was not prepared for the long lead time to make sales to schools. They didn’t understand that the foundation for the sale must be made well in advance of the budget setting time for the school. This is all well in advance of the actual sales transaction – a year or more in most cases. At the time class.com was starting their sales approach, the school systems were not ready for the ‘dot com’ sales approach which is quite different from a text book sales. Class.com found that the school board to the Superintendent must all be support of taking in on line courses – they must have a vision. The visions can be quite different from one district and state to another. School representatives want the courses to have the ‘feel’ for their district or school, so they need the capability to make changes to the ‘front end’ as well as add content. Most schools did not have a policy in place for online learning at the time that CLASS™ and class.com were trying to make an impact on education. The for-profit company learned early on that their sales were not going to be ‘package deals’. They needed to accommodate many different departments to sell the courses – curriculum, technology, teachers, students, support services, administration, and the school boards. Class.com also found hurdles to leap on the technology side of the courses. Schools were installing firewalls and most were being installed by the ‘techno’ teacher on staff – not a trained networking technician. Class.com also had misconception early on about what the school market was ready to accept in technology and web based education. There was a difference of perspective on the definition and description of the actual client for the courses. The University based Independent Study High School sold courses mainly to independent study learners. Class.com was marketing more to schools, districts and state boards. There was no market analysis of customer wants, needs, hardware, connectivity, computing savvy or technical expertise. A divergence of ‘research’ and ‘commercial production’ also came to play. CLASS™ was a research and development product that was being used as a commercial production line. Courses were going to market that were not market ready. Timelines for completion of courses were based on sales projections rather than content readiness and testing. There was no time allowed to get a ‘research and development’ product up to ‘industrial strength’ due to the commercial forces placed on the research environment. The technology was in research and development mode which means the product was in flux and change when the commercial side was taking it to market. Deadlines were a point of disagreement between the commercial and academic. The commercial side would set deadlines for the development side based on their sales requirements which seldom matched with the research or production needs. Timelines need to be realistic based on available resources. Another big lesson came in the licensing of copyrighted materials. CLASS™ courses were developed as University –owned which means for use by a non-profit educational institution. When class.com was established to market and distribute the courses and sell such licenses for a profit, the licensing issue changed very dramatically. Every permission and waiver acquired for each and every work or element included in a course had to be renegotiated. In some cases, the owner of the work would not re-license an element for use in a course sold by a for profit company. Many others raised the fee charged for such permission. This was a very time consuming and expensive lesson. Copyright 2004 - University of Nebraska Board of Regents - All Rights Reserved |
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