You make a lot of valid points. As guptaneil alluded to, the ideal case would be if we could get teachers to post their assignments on Tabule. Teachers for the most part already post assignments online, but the education market lacks a good central homework management system that aggregates assignments between classes.
What we're trying to achieve is to bridge to that ideal case with student-submitted assignments. There's an interesting dynamic at play here, because inputting all of one's assignments is trivially better (perhaps even worse if we consider switching cost) than using Google Calendar. For the second person to join the course though, the experience is already better, because all of their assignments are already available to them. It's an interesting chicken-and-egg problem. If my assignments aren't already in the system, then there's no immediate value for me, but there will be for everyone that comes after me.
No idea how your actual finance side works, but the obvious way to solve this seems to be to offer a reward to the first student to enter assignment data for each class. A couple of checks would be necessary, i.e, reward is only valid after two other students confirm the data, to prevent students just adding junk. Have you considered something like this? Market it like 'all your assignment dates ready for you, or get a red bull on us!'
Guptaneil and etrinh, I appreciate the thoughtful feedback.
Regarding a reward-based or gamification system, this is an excellent idea. Of course, it would not necessarily be monetary. To give a specific example, Dropbox has become very good at gamifying their recruitment by posing their challenges for expanding storage space. A similar adoption here could be interesting. I plan to follow Tabule's development and adoption curiously.
You make a lot of valid points. As guptaneil alluded to, the ideal case would be if we could get teachers to post their assignments on Tabule. Teachers for the most part already post assignments online, but the education market lacks a good central homework management system that aggregates assignments between classes.
What we're trying to achieve is to bridge to that ideal case with student-submitted assignments. There's an interesting dynamic at play here, because inputting all of one's assignments is trivially better (perhaps even worse if we consider switching cost) than using Google Calendar. For the second person to join the course though, the experience is already better, because all of their assignments are already available to them. It's an interesting chicken-and-egg problem. If my assignments aren't already in the system, then there's no immediate value for me, but there will be for everyone that comes after me.