(2012-03-16) Good Semester Learning Platform

Michael Feldstein profiles the Good Semester learning platform. We started with a few tools, moved to an all-in-one, all-you-can-eat LMS model, and now are moving back toward more specialized systems... Jason Rappaport doesn’t know what to call the product category the Good Semester falls into, but he is emphatic that it is not an LMS. He describes it as “EverNote meets GoogleDocs meets Drop Box.” One thing those three products have in common is that they approach collaboration from the perspective of the utility for an individual... The Good Semester team has started by focusing on the student rather than the teacher. And your content is yours forever. Your courses don’t disappear at the end of the semester... This isn’t just an improved Grade Book. It’s a complete rethink of the application category. The classic LMS grade book is all about tabular data. It basically re-implements Microsoft Excel—badly. But MsExcel is an extremely poor model. Teachers don’t want to manipulate category weightings and write formulas. They want to use their assessments of students’ performance on individual assignments to derive an overall progress indicator (in the form of a course grade) through a formula that is fair to all the students in the class. Good Semester starts from that goal and achieves it through a completely novel set of visualization tools.

Mar28 update: Audrey Watters frames it as BaseCamp for Open Education.