
How passionate are your users? (A comment on Blackboard acquiring Angel) - pierrefar
http://ekstreme.com/thingsofsorts/seosem/how-passionate-are-your-users
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ph0rque
_...the problem is that Blackboard produces (apparently) rubbish software and
has horrible customer support. Angel (apparently), lives up to its name in
that it provided access to source code, super-fast responsiveness and
generally angelic customer support._

We used Angel at Penn State, and that software was broken and cumbersome to
use... I can only imagine the hell that is Blackboard.

~~~
Dilpil
Trust me, it is worse. The interface is so unintuitive that even after 3 years
of using it I make the same mistakes (clicking on news items expecting to go
to the relevant page, trying to view grades for class x on class x's page,
ect.).

Furthermore, the instructor interface is so bad that only about 10% of my
classes even use it, despite the fact that the professors are clearly computer
literate, many electing to create their own website from scratch.

~~~
rcoder
Thankfully, there are better, free alternatives out there to either Angel or
Blackboard. Sakai (<http://sakaiproject.org/>) has the more substantial "big
school" base, and looks like a good platform on which to build if you're okay
with a Java app stack, and willing to put up with some "design by committee"
architectural choices. Moodle (<http://moodle.org/>) on the other hand is much
easier to get up and running quickly (it's just a standard PHP app), and has
an active community of extension, theme, and patch contributors, albeit at the
cost of some of the typical PHP framework's tendency to grow warts.

~~~
ph0rque
We evaluated all of these, as well as some less-known (free) learning
management systems (LMSs), and they are all quite painful and unintuitive to
use, compared to current web apps.

~~~
rcoder
I would honestly say that they're all pretty equally terrible, across both the
paid and free/OSS segments on the market. Making any of them useful for your
environment requires customization, training, and plain old time.

When I was working at a school that had to pick a new LMS, we eventually
settled on Moodle simply because it was the only option that was sufficiently
hackable for us to turn it into something usable.

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paulgb
I wonder how much this is people who passionately like Angel vs. passionately
hate Blackboard.

My school uses Angel. As far as course software goes, it's actually pretty
good. But I can't imagine being a passionate fan of it unless the alternative
was absolutely awful.

