Jay Ebben and Alec Johnson, entrepreneurship professors at the University of St. Thomas' Opus College of Business, are putting their business savvy to the test with CourseCal, a cloud-based time and workflow management platform for college educators and students.
Launched last fall, CourseCal allows educators to upload schedules and course materials, which students access online or through mobile devices.
Drag-and-drop functionality enables educators to make changes quickly and easily, they said. Students see those changes in real time because of the platform's integration with the Dropbox file-sharing service.
In contrast, Johnson and Ebben said, changing a course schedule in one of the many systems used by institutions can require dozens of mouse clicks. They believe CourseCal solves such frustrations, and they're positioning it as an alternative to an institution's enterprise platform and the homemade websites and other ad hoc solutions that have been educators' other primary options.
The CourseCal venture also is serving as lesson material for students in starting and building businesses.
"It's a live case study," Ebben said. They're using [CourseCal] themselves and seeing how we ask and answer questions about viability. It's about testing whether this model works."
Said Johnson: "One thing we preach is there's a big difference between a good idea and a sustainable business. That is a drumbeat of our pedagogy, and they can witness it day in and day out."
Eight educators and more than 300 students are using CourseCal this semester in class at St. Thomas, the University of Minnesota and two other institutions, according to Johnson and Ebben. It's free to educators. Students can pay $5.95 a course for a full-featured version of the platform or CourseCal Lite for free.