Comments on: Six reasons I don’t like Blackboard

By: Sarah

Sarah — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 13:46:53 +0000

the version we use at Medaille is very different than what we had at UB and incredibly frustrating. I can’t edit content the way that I want to, It’s not user friendly, and there isn’t an easy way for students to access it, so I am still getting “what is this blackboard thing?” uploaded content doesn’t show up as a link, it just asks to be opened/saved as you click on the page “assignments” or “syllabus” I could go on and on. But we’re in a technology ignorant school so faculty doesn’t seem to know there’s better ways to do thing.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 14:45:23 +0000

I'm taking a stats class this semester through SUNY Albany (online). They usually use the SUNY Learning Network Lotus Notes system, but the instructor of our class has gotten permission to use Moodle. I'll be interested to see how that works, as I have taken classes that use the Lotus Notes system as well as Blackboard. In both cases I was disappointed with the functionality that the two products provide. The interfaces from a student perspective are unintuitive and what functionality there is is extremely limited. For strictly online classes, I don't find the standard hierarchical structure of discussions conducive to particularly in-depth exploration. On the other hand, I found the blogging-only technique you employed in the Intro to Information Science and Services class you taught at UB to be a surprisingly effective means to carry on discussions. Anyway, I'm looking forward to trying out a new system to see if it does a better job.

By: links for 2007-08-29 : Tama Leaver dot Net

links for 2007-08-29 : Tama Leaver dot Net — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:38:38 +0000

[...] Six reasons I don’t like Blackboard [a thaumaturgical compendium] A case against Blackboard: It’s slow; has a clunky instructor interface; isn’t easily extendable; leads to a homogeneous student online experience; doesn’t talk to the world outside the university well; and costs too much. (tags: blackboard elearning lms webct) [...]

By: M-H

M-H — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 09:45:36 +0000

I am conflicted about this also, for similar reasons. I work in the support team for WebCT/Blackboard on my campus, and I am under no illusions as to why the university likes it. However, I have to say that the majority of users like it too. As you say, students are comfortable with it and academics don’t want to have to set something up for themselves. That’s not where they want to put their teaching energy. I’m not sure that turning to open source software would really work on our campus – we would have to employ so many people to support and customise it. We check every Bb site before it goes ‘live’ as well as running a help desk, and believe me many of our academics are struggling to use it in the most basic way.

However, some people use the discussions in very interesting ways to support team-based or Socratic learning. The more positivist disciplines use it for quizzes – sometimes really creatively and with sound pedagogic development ( sorry, scaffolding!), I am happy to say. There are advantages to its use as an ‘enterprise solution’. It means that our university can offer extensive support, including offering quite a lot of one-on-one educational design time to be really creative if academics can articulate what they want (and that isn’t always easy for them). Yes, you can use CSS on your pages, and we do. We set up quite complex ‘learning modules’, so academics can create functioning case studies, with either carefully mapped paths or quite free ways to deal with the material. We create flash modules and java scripting to do various things, and put them into Blackboard sites. I don’t know what support is offered at your university, but it might be worth checking.

On the other hand, when you’ve used Web2.0 apps, Bb is very pedestrian. It is a challenge to be creative with it. The so-called blogging tool is sh*t and the wiki isn’t much better. The whole package is so… uninteresting. The good news is that we are presently choosing an eportfolio tool, and it looks like it won’t be the Bb one, but rather a much more exciting app which is compatible with it. But I’m not allowed to talk about that yet. :) And yes, the wall around knowledge with all the ‘security’ (and the complex backend that supports that) goes against the grain for me too.

Oh, yes, it does have an Oracle db at the back, but we have had a lot of problems with the integration (and I won’t even discuss the problems we’ve had with user’s Java setups since we performed an upgrade a year ago). The slowness may be a local issue – we have doubled our server capacity twice since the upgrade, and that seems to have made it work reasonably well. Mind you, ours is huge installation in Bb’s terms – Our administrator logged 5 million server hits on one day last semester. (We’re not sure what a ‘hit’ is – we think it’s a mouse click!)

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 23:14:21 +0000

I have to say I agree with you. Over the past few years I have tried to use Blackboard to teach classes at Liverpool University here in England and have found that it is fine as a repository for handouts and course documentation, but hopeless for blogging or other more interactive approaches. The lack of Web-facing content, including RSS, holds it back and is I think a subject of some scorn in the student body, many of whom use Blogger, Facebook and so on to run their lives. I find that the tools provided for me at great expense by the university are not as good as the ones available for free. I am planning on setting up some online Continuing Education courses in the next year or so and I dread having to use Blackboard to the point where I may even resort to installing Moodle on my own server.