"Speaking of textbooks, you may be wondering what the business model is for giving away a comprehensive learning management system for free. Coursekit is pursuing the "build a userbase and then work out how to monetize that" route. The obvious option might seem to be ads, but Cohen sees a better way. Beyond the broken business model for learning management systems, Cohen sees a big shift coming in the way that textbooks are made, sold, and distributed. The days of dead tree editions that are slightly updated every few years are numbered. You can catch a glimpse of what might be coming in the Kindle, the App Store and products like Inkling.
"The textbooks of the future will not be textbooks," he says. But there will be a need for educational content and much of that will be bought (remember, direct-to-instructor is already at the heart of that businesses). If all goes well, Coursekit is the seed of the storefront of the future for educational products, with a ready-made group of customers who are already logging in.
"There are personal social networks (Facebook and Twitter) and there are business networks (LinkedIn) but there's no learning network yet," says Cohen. "We want to be that.""
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