The logo for the new student start-up Devils Connect.
Blackboard, meet Facebook. A new student startup aims to combine social networking with academic support.
Construction engineering junior Yash Lalwani and business finance junior Devesh Tuteja started working on Devils Connect last fall after they were introduced by mutual friends. The two added digital journalism senior Arielle Hurst to the team after meeting her at an entrepreneurial campus event and discovering she had a similar idea for an academic portal that uses social networking features.
Hersh Lalwani, Yash’s brother and an electrical engineer, and supply chain management sophomore Sam Fulton round out the team of five.
Tuteja said Devils Connect aims to keep students at ASU by connecting them to others with similar academic interests. Making these connections will encourage students to apply themselves in class and find a smaller community of like-minded people within the ASU student body, he said.
“Our vision, so to speak, is that no student drops out and that every student’s investment in college is a success,” Tuteja said.
Devils Connect has three main features that students will be able to use when its beta launches this summer.
The first thing students will be able to do after logging into the site is input their course schedules and get matched into small study groups of four or five students.
The students will share a few courses in common and the groups will be partly based on where the students live, though Yash Lalwani and Tuteja said the students will not be able to see each others’ locations for safety reasons.
The other two features are interactive discussion boards for classes and study groups and a calendar that will pull due dates from syllabi for all of a student’s courses.
Lalwani said they will probably input syllabi themselves for the summer session, but in the fall, they want to work with professors and teaching assistants to get the information in the system.
Students will be able to add their own important dates to the calendar, and set text and email reminders, Lalwani said.
After Devils Connect goes live this summer, the team wants to start working on a mobile app and add a place where students can connect to each other for community service and entrepreneurial opportunities. They want to add a course-mapping feature after that.
“It’s going to be a long road,” Lalwani said. “We’re ready for that.”
Tuteja said Devils Connect was born out of student frustrations with Blackboard, but they are not trying to compete with Blackboard for now. They are focused on getting students to use the portal themselves rather than have the University adopt it.
However, the two said they want to subsidize costs by having departments license the software so that they can offer it for free to students.
They said they want to receive part of the technology fee that students pay as part of their tuition, but this would not cause a raise in the fee.
Ruvi Wijesuriya, ASU’s director of academic technology support, said academic divisions that choose to offer software to their students outside of University-wide adoption will usually assess an additional fee on their students.
Additionally, academic software must comply with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and must meet security standards, which sometimes means housing the software's servers on campus, he said.
Despite all this, Wijesuriya said Devils Connect could still be a valuable tool for students because it makes use of social networking. He said the program seems more collaborative than Blackboard, which is a software geared toward assessment.
“I can see them complementing, not competing with each other,” he said.
ASU has used Blackboard for academic support since the late '90s, when it beat out a different program with more functionality but a higher learning curve, Wijesuriya said.
Blackboard has become the industry leader since then, he said.
Wijesuriya said ASU pays less than retail price to use Blackboard, because the University partners with the company.
ASU will add more functionality to its Blackboard system in mid-May, he said. The main new features will be a calendar similar to what Devils Connect is offering, improved navigation that will allow students to jump between the same section of different classes.
Students will also be able to create personal profiles and view who else in the class is online. This will not work as a chat system, but students will be able to email each other if they are online and have questions.
Students and faculty often mistake ASU network outages for Blackboard being down because a network outage takes down ASU’s single sign-in system, he said.
He said there have only been four unplanned network outages since May 2010, and students can usually still access Blackboard by going to myasucourses.asu.edu.
But people still think that Blackboard is at fault, Wijesuriya said.
“The grass is always greener on the other system,” he said.
Anthropology senior Charis Royal said she doesn’t mind Blackboard.
“I feel like it’s easy to use as long as the professors know how to set it up,” she said.
Royal said she would be interested in a program like Devils Connect, because it would help her keep up with coursework, adding that her instructors don’t always post assignments in an effective way.
ASU has its own social networking platform for incoming students called Devil2Devil. David Burge, the executive director of undergraduate admissions, said in an email that admissions wanted to capitalize on the boom in social networking for students.
Devil2Devil allows students to connect with each other before they come to campus, after which they are phased off the network and usually transfer their connections to mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook, Burge said.
“Starting college is a stressful time, and the more connections someone can have when they arrive, the easier that process of acclimation will be,” he said.
Reach the reporter at ammedeir@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @amy_medeiros
