Posts tagged coursekit
One of the Most Creative Addresses on Earth
I recently took the team to watch a documentary about the Eameses, the story of a design powerhouse that shaped culture and form in mid-century America.
I left the theatre convinced of the magic of putting insanely talented people together in the same room.
The Eames office on 901 Washingtion Blvd. in Venice Beach, CA was “one of the most creative addresses on earth,” recited the narrator. “Dozens of gifted young designers cut their teeth within the walls of the studio.”
Out of it came brilliant, iconic furniture designs, products, films, and artwork.
In 2012, I want to make 70 Lafayette Street, our address, one of the most creative addresses on earth.
At Coursekit we’re building a platform for learning, experimenting, and ideation of all sorts: from chemistry to typography to music to computer science, people around the world are using Coursekit to turn their classes into learning communities.
That’s where breakthrough ideas come from. At Coursekit, our job is to showcase them.
Alice Lee blew me away with her work profiling professors who used Coursekit this fall. You must check out the whole series of Case Studies.
“The interactivity creates a particular dynamic that you wouldn’t necessarily get in class. People’s personalities come out differently online than in class, and often students go beyond what’s asked of them.”
“The History Buff” - Samuel Moyn, Columbia University
See more of our Case Studies here. Alice Lee did a phenomenal job photographing and interviewing four fascinating professors at some of the best schools in the country.
Fast Company: The Ingenious Business Model Behind Coursekit, A Tumblr For Higher Education
Cool article about us in Fast Company:
Blackboard, and other LMS, are like the BlackBerry—they rely on wholesale adoption by large organizations, much as the PDA was once approved by corporations and issued en masse to their employees for free or at a discount. Coursekit is more like the iPhone: designed to appeal directly to the end consumer. In this case, Coursekit is betting that individual professors will find it more streamlined and easier to use than the reviled Blackboard. They piloted with profs at 30 campuses this fall, including Stanford, and currently have students serving as evangelists at 82 campuses.
Like this part too:
When you look at Coursekit as a potential Facebook or LinkedIn for education, it’s not just a piece of the $500 million LMS market they’re gunning for; it’s a chunk of the $500 billion higher education market. Online institutions could operate entirely through the site; brick and mortars could use it to enhance recruitment, retention, and student services.
Represent Coursekit at Your School
Coursekit will be available to any instructor in the world, for free, in a few weeks. To help spread the word at schools, we’re hiring “Campus Founders” to evangelize the product and represent us. These are students who are passionate about improving the academic experience.
It’s an awesome way for students to get a taste for life at a startup while making some money. More importantly, you’ll be on the frontlines of a major change in education.
Read more here: http://cl.ly/BaPM
Apply here: http://cl.ly/Bbxa
Questions: hunter.horsley@coursekit.com
Be Our Fall Intern
It all started with me carrying a hulking 6ft-wide desk from Ikea to the apartment in the NYC Financial District that doubled as the Coursekit HQ. Since then, my internship for Coursekit has been everything I’d hoped.
We’re hiring an entrepreneurial intern. Hunter, who started as an intern but is now a key part of the team, wrote a great post about his experience.
Here’s the job description. Reach out if you’re interested: jobs+intern@coursekit.com.
Lead Design at Coursekit
We’re hiring a design director at Coursekit. This person will be my partner in building a delightful product and a leading design team. Design is a central part of Coursekit: everyone here considers themselves a designer – our UI people and our engineers. All decisions are made with thought and purpose.
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Overview
Coursekit is looking for an exceptional designer to lead visual design/user experience and build a world-class design team. This is a rewarding opportunity to create a product that aims to reshape the landscape of education.
The ideal candidate has significant experience creating large-scale interactive products and is equally comfortable working hands-on as they are managing a strong design team towards simple, innovative, and beautiful solutions.
Coursekit is a fast-paced and collaborative environment with highly dedicated, passionate, and creative people. We’re shaking up an industry that’s notorious for poor design. Design is therefore a pillar of our business. It’s embedded in every decision we make – whether visual or not.
You’ll work directly with our CEO. You will be paid competitively, receive equity in the company, and do the best work you’ve ever done. You’ll also be tasked with building an incredible team design team – this should be exciting.
Responsibilities
- Create effective user interfaces and design solutions based on user feedback and overall product goals and vision
- Lead product branding and the development of the company’s visual identity
- Establish and document design patterns, applications, behavior, and variations across multiple platforms
- Work with engineering to ensure product is built to spec
- Provide mentorship and feedback on design team work, leading iteration towards simple, elegant, and innovative design solutions
- Stay abreast of current design innovations, technologies, and trends and continually share this knowledge
- Lead in the creation of key marketing materials
Requirements
- An exceptional portfolio showcasing clever design solutions across platforms
- 5+ years experience in design consulting, spanning multiple industries and at least 3 of following project types: product interface design, print communications, brand & identity, and interactive web applications
- Experience creating product specifications (IA, work flow, page functionality and layout, style guides, etc.)
- A strong understanding of grid systems, composition, and color, with a keen eye for typography, and meticulous attention to detail
- A passion for simple, smart, timeless design
- Strong leadership and communication skills
- Highly competent with Adobe Creative Suite, HTML/CSS/JS. Knowledge of Adobe Flash, Adobe After Effects, and 3D design software is a plus
- Experience effectively managing project timelines and schedules
- BFA in Graphic Design or equivalent experience
If you’re interested, send your resume and portfolio to jobs+design@coursekit.com.
Coursekit: Our New Visual Identity
As part of the larger Coursekit redesign, we set out to create a new visual identity. We chose to work with the amazingly talented Ed Nacional. Today, I’m happy to introduce our new identity to the world.
I’ll walk you through its design. The hexagon above is actually a four walled cube. Here’s how it’s made:
The two front walls are translucent blue, and they overlap the back yellow and red walls to make green and purple. The colors and shapes are meant to symbolize the confluence of ideas in a vibrant academic environment. We start with the primaries – red, yellow, blue – and end up with a beautiful spectrum. It represents the idea that basic elements – colors, shapes – can come together to make something sophisticated and deep – a cohesive cube with a handful of visual conundrums.
The logotype is set in Calibre, a beautiful typeface designed Kris Sowersby. It’s handsome and modern and sharp, and it has subtle elements (like the rounded dot on top of the i) that make it memorable.
I wanted to create a visual identity for our brand that had the potential to be iconic, emotional, and elegant. It had to represent what we aspire to be. I think Ed nailed it.
A brand is a vessel. The company, and its actions, give it meaning. We’ve got the vessel, now we need to fill it.
This new visual direction marks a giant shift in our aesthetic – expect to see big changes that incorporate this style in the coming days and weeks. You can download the high-resolution assets here.
The Social Internet
While I don’t remember the first dotcom bubble, I know that it was the result of wild exuberance for this new thing called “the Internet.” The Internet (but really the world wide web) would change the world, and you could get a piece of it. Just call your stock broker. No one really understood what it was – just that it had the power to change every part of your life.
This proved to be the problem. While the net did fundamentally change the world, it did so in ways people didn’t expect. It fell short in most areas and skyrocketed in others. Online economics played out differently. Web pages became web apps. The internet of the late nineties brought great things – Amazon, Google – but it completely missed the real power of the internet: social.
While people understood that the internet was a network in which anyone in the world could connect to anyone else, the early internet was way more about businesses, or “web properties,” interacting with people than people connecting to people. I guess this thinking was inherited from the centuries-old logic of professional (as if) publishers feeding content to stupid consumers.
But Facebook has shown us the true power of the internet – what we call “social networking.” It can facilitate revolutions and put people in business. It turns amateur writers into journalists and basement hackers into wizzy entrepreneurs. When you combine identity systems with content creation and the right relationships structure, magic happens.
In fact, I’d argue that the social internet is much larger than the dotcom internet. Humans are social creatures. Our lives are our relationships: at home, at school, at work. Social networking augments our existing relationships and helps us create new ones.
I think we will see a very similar parallel play out in the financial markets. We’ve gotten a taste already, but there’s much more to come. Social networking is magical – but it’s magical in the same way the dot-com era internet was magical. We know there’s tons of potential to build great businesses, but we don’t know how those businesses will actually look.
I’m not worried about companies like Facebook. Facebook should be valued at $100B+, with its 750mm active users. The problem comes in with irrational exuberance that will follow hundreds of other businesses.
But the last thing I want to see is people discounting the ideas of social networking. While I’m sure the markets will react erratically, the fact is that by giving people a presence in a network with a defined mission and the tools to create and engage, amazing things happen.
Introducing Coursekit 2
If you look at the consumer internet and then you look at what universities use to manage their courses, something doesn’t add up. These schools are paying up to a million dollars a year for their learning management software, but no one is satisfied. The products look and feel terrible. They’ve got lots of features, but rarely are they used.
Today we’re releasing the second major iteration of Coursekit, at Penn. It takes all that we’ve learned from the consumer web, from our lives as students, and from countless conversations with teachers.
The core premise is simple: why does the class experience end when lecture is over? When you’re in a course — say, financial accounting — every time you see an interesting article on a company’s earnings report, you’re thinking about what you’ve learned in class. More often than not, you’ll forget about it and miss an opportunity to learn in the best way possible, by applying it to daily life.
We’ve designed a product that facilitates discussion. That allows students and teachers to post the most interesting articles, questions, files, and photos from around the net to their class’s Wall. We’ve made it possible for users to comment on anything — assignments, exams, blog posts, photos, files. It’s hard for any teacher to facilitate a truly open conversation, but the internet gives us the tools to do that, and we’re finally bringing them to the classroom. We like to treat each class as a micro-community.
Because the university sales process is difficult, we’re experimenting a little bit. We’ve imported about 150 publicly available Penn course syllabi and turned them into sites on their own. We took it further and rolled out a “Class Captains” program. We hire students to be the managers for their classes on Coursekit. They’ll add all relevant content — upcoming assignments, what happened in lecture, maybe even notes. We think it’ll be a great way to kickstart the adoption process. If your class has a captain, he/she will be letting getting in touch soon. If you’re interested in becoming a Captain, click here.
But back to the product. Each class has a page. When you get to it for the first time, you’ll see one upcoming assignment, exam, and class meeting. Underneath is the class wall. Click on calendar, and all upcoming class items are there. If you click on an calendar item, right there, you’ll see a description of it, all the associated files, and the related comments. We like to think of each item as a sort of module with content in it.
Head to the Syllabus page and you’ll see what we think is the most elegant and effective text syllabus ever. The Resources place is the spot to see what semester-wide books, websites, and files you need for your course.
As a student, you sign up for the site and enter all the courses you’re in. From there we gather all your relevant calendar items and social content onto your Dashboard. This is the place to go at the end of the day. Oh, and with one click, you can export your whole calendar — with descriptions of each item — to iCal or Google Calendar.
As a teacher, we make it really easy to add and update content on your course page. Find your class on the site and “Claim it.” We’ll approve you quickly. From there, you can go into Edit mode, which let’s you simply change and edit what’s on your site.
This is where we start. We’ve got a lot to build: grading, robust teacher privacy settings, assignment submission. But for teachers who want a web presence to share course information and facilitate discussion, and for students who want to easily communicate, there’s no better option. Check it out: Coursekit.com.
Here’s a class we’ve been testing it in: Typography.
Dan, Jim, Chris, and I have worked long and hard on this for the last couple of months, so we’re really excited to go live. Please send your thoughts, questions, and comments to me at jc at coursekit dot com.
