Complex Task Assessment Solutions and Information Technology (CTASIT) is company that was founded to address a very specific problem — providing students high quality feedback in a timely and actionable fashion. In particular, we were striving to create a peer-to-peer (P2P) assessment application that augmented the instructor’s input on case study analyses. To see the whole back story about the Mobius Social Learning Information Platform (SLIP) you can checkout the ‘Press and Publications’ tab on the company’s website. Since building our original application, many colleagues have adopted the technology to use in their own classes and conduct research on student learning dynamics. Out of these activities, the commercialization phase of the project was born, which brings us to the purpose of this blog. One aim of this blog is to document the entrepreneurial endeavor as we start to compete in the learning management system (LMS) sector (see list of start-ups in this space here).
The commercial endeavor started innocently enough. Go to LeagalZoom and form a LLC. Open a bank account. Apply for a couple of patents through the university’s Office for Innovation Commercialization (more on this later — it has been good thus far). Lease a computer server. Set-up a credit card processing account. On and on it goes. These activities were easy enough, but they did take a fair amount of time and a couple thousand dollars to make happen. Despite all the work that has taken place, there is still a great deal to be done to even be considered a start-up I suppose. Anyone want to write a business plan?
A bigger set of administrative challenges emerged on the technological side. Suffice it to say, one person’s intuitively simple tool is another person’s impenetrable user interface. As we worked through the issues and added new functions, keeping track of them became more than the Google Docs were designed to managing. One day the link to github shows-up in an email from my partner telling me this is the new functionality tracking system. A new system to learn. Thus far it has worked pretty well too. BTW, the story of rating/ranking sliders is worthy of its own entry. In order to manage the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and build a better user’s guide we also launched a wiki. Yet, another information technology system to learn.
The biggest challenges occur at the intersection of customers, business administration and technology management. The number of faculty interested in adopting the Mobius SLIP has grown so rapidly that my index cards are proving to be a sub-optimal solution. Therefore, this week’s big decision will be to select a customer relationship management (CRM) application. Fortunately, several people have been faced with the same problem and done nice work-ups comparing the CRMs for small businesses, but it is still a new system to learn.
Oh well, enough for now. Back to my day job teaching management. No, really.
