Trade Names: SoftChalk puts lessons online

Sue Polyson Evans spent hours trying to come up with a name for the eLearning software company that she and Robert Godwin-Jones were forming. She settled on SoftChalk after playing around with the concept of blackboards and chalk.

"It just came into my head," she said. "I had been tumbling names in my head all night."

Evans and Godwin-Jones founded SoftChalk in 2002. The company provides software for educational institutions worldwide. The template-style software helps educators deliver coursework to students in a fun, interactive format.

The two knew they had tapped into a need when, as employees of Virginia Commonwealth University in 1996, they developed Web Course in a Box for the university. The software helped educators create Web sites as a way to provide course work for students.

"We came up with a template system," Evans said.

After it was developed, the software was made available free of charge to other schools, resulting in a need for someone to provide support services to product users.

So Evans and Godwin-Jones started madDuck Technologies in 1997 to provide Web Course in a Box support services. The two sold the company in 2000 to Blackboard Inc., a leader in electronic education, because of rising competition in the support services marketplace.

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Two years later, the pair came up with the idea of developing software that would not only give educators the ability to create professional-looking interactive Web-based content but also be easy to use.

"We formed SoftChalk and began prototyping that tool," Evans said.

After developing the prototype, Evans brought in Peter Huneke to do the final design of the product. Huneke had just completed a post-baccalaureate program in computer science.

"He worked for a year developing the product," she said. "We made him a partner in 2003, the same year we started selling the product."

Evans and Godwin-Jones built their client base from scratch.

"We started with no customers, just a hope and a prayer," Evans said. "We started marketing the product through educational technology conferences. We'd go to the conference and set up a booth."

The two began collecting leads and providing online demonstrations.

Their work paid off. In each of the past five years, the company has increased its sales 70 percent. SoftChalk now works with 500 institutions worldwide with clients in China, Singapore, Belgium and Ireland in addition to the United States and Puerto Rico.

"This is a bootstrap kind of company," Evans said. "We didn't get funding from investors. We wanted to grow the company organically from within."

Most of the management-level employees at SoftChalk have worked in education, many at VCU.

"We know what educators are dealing with," Evans said. "We know the obstacles. We are committed to making sure our products help them."

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The Virginia Community College System uses SoftChalk software.

"It's shared by each one of the 23 community colleges in Virginia," said Inez Farrell, director of instructional technology for the college system. "All of our faculty members have access to it. . . . It helps them engage students."

SoftChalk's principal product, LessonBuilder, features several learning activities such as quiz questions, crossword puzzles, pop-up text annotations and quick-time videos.

"We have 10 different learning activities and six different quizzes and we can create content in multiple languages," Evans said. "Teachers can also pull media in from YouTube and other sites."

The company began marketing its product to higher education because most of the company's owners had worked at the university level.

"In the last couple of years we started focusing some attention on grades K through 12," Evans said. "We've been very successful with that."

The Duke Talent Identification Program began using SoftChalk's LessonBuilder software in 2006. The nonprofit educational organization, founded by a grant from the Duke Endowment, provides innovative programming for academically gifted children in fourth, fifth and seventh grades.

"The LessonBuilder software allows us to integrate an incredible amount of content," said Lyn Hawks, the program's coordinator of independent learning. "What was a student workbook of 120 pages is now a CD with up to four times the amount of content plus links to educational Web sites."

A new product, eCourseBuilder, is scheduled to be released in the spring. It will allow instructors to take a group of lessons and put them together in a larger module.

"It's like putting chapters in a book," Evans said.