
The Reeducation of Blackboard, Everyone's Classroom Pariah - prostoalex
http://www.wired.com/2015/07/blackboard-reinvention/
======
ak217
Blackboard is also known for harassing and suing its competitors based on
frivolous patents, and for fixing prices. A mobile app and a UX redesign are
nice, but hardly sufficient, when they're funded by those kinds of practices.

~~~
techpeace
I once worked for a startup in the education industry. One day, when
Blackboard released a new product that directly competed with us, we noticed
that their new logo was an obvious, clearly intentional rip-off of our own. It
was actually gratifying, as a group of mostly recent graduates, to so clearly
have threatened a billion dollar company.

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MarcScott
As a teacher and tech-enthusiast, I've used countless pieces of software
designed to "aid" me in my teaching and administration.

I've yet to use a Learning Platform or MIS that wasn't tortuous to use and
ended up generating more work for me than if I had simply used pen and paper.

The trouble always seems to stem from a lack of understanding of what teachers
actually go through in a given day, whether it be setting and assessing work
for students, tracking and monitoring performance, or reporting back to
students and parents.

It's telling that the most effective way I found of having students submit
work to me and for me to provide feedback, targets and grades was using
GitHub. This is a product that is used internally within the organisation that
produces it, and so works (almost) seamlessly.

~~~
jackpirate
For fun (and because ilearn sucks), I taught a computer science class where
the students helped create a learning management system based on git. Each
student's grades are stored in a repo that they own, and the instructors use
signed commits to update the students' grades. I offered an extra credit
bounty to anyone who could write arbitrary grades to their repo without
getting caught, and had a few students discover some clever loopholes.

The documentation is super unpolished, but you can find the repos here:
[https://github.com/mikeizbicki/gitlearn](https://github.com/mikeizbicki/gitlearn)

The "how grades are stored" file in the docs is probably the most interesting:
[https://github.com/mikeizbicki/gitlearn/blob/master/docs/gra...](https://github.com/mikeizbicki/gitlearn/blob/master/docs/grades.md),
but there's also docs on how to start up and run a class using gitlearn.

~~~
lanaius
Out of curiosity, how would the students actually go about making their grades
private. Free github accounts don't actually get any private repo's, so aren't
you effectively requiring a student who wants to maintain some secrecy to pay
extra?

~~~
jackpirate
1\. Github provides free educational accounts to students.

2\. The repos could be maintained on any git server, so bit bucket would work
just fine.

3\. Even if the students had to pay for github private repos, the price would
be far less than even the cheapest textbooks.

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snarfy
The problem with Blackboard is it's almost entirely based on acquisitions.
It's not like they added any of that functionality to their core product.
Instead it becomes just another link on their portal. The only asset shared
across acquisitions is marketing material.

~~~
hippich
While acquisitions are indeed happened and continue to happen, thing released
today is part of bigger effort to get everything under one roof and become
solid system of many microservices, rather than disjointed products with a
"another link in the portal". I work at Blackboard.

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taejo
What happened to Sakai? When I was starting undergrad my university had just
switched to it and it was supposed to be the next big thing.

~~~
edutechnion
Sakai continues to put out releases on a fairly orderly schedule, but it's
lost several of the core, founding institutions as their IT departments move
away from customized FOSS software hosted in local datacenters to SAAS
software hosted by commercial providers.

For example: Indiana University was a core member of the Sakai Foundation that
was rumored to have a $1mm+ budget devoted to heavily customizing Sakai for IU
purposes and for running the software. IU seems to have moved away from the
customized open-source approach to a consortial "buying club" approach to try
to have influence in the commercial, higher-ed market. 10+ higher-ed
institutions (many of them public institutions) have put $1mm each in a pot to
try to better control their software destiny:

[http://mfeldstein.com/unizin-indiana-universitys-secret-
new-...](http://mfeldstein.com/unizin-indiana-universitys-secret-new-learning-
ecosystem-coalition/)

------
jccalhoun
These changes don't really seem to be addressing the real problems with
blackboard which make it frustrating for instructors to do things. Too many
clicks. Too many non-intuitive options.

~~~
hippich
These changes do address these issues. Not all of them in this release, but
this is very first release and Blackboard switching to continuous deployment
model vs one-release-a-year-deploy-at-schools-server-when-admin-have-time.

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minikites
Probably because they saw Canvas eating their lunch. Although I've heard
rumblings that Canvas is turning into Blackboard by tacking on the very same
useless bullshit they said no to in 2012.

~~~
acveilleux
You can only buck the IT dept requests for so long. Eventually you run out of
enlightened and powerful users to sell to and you start having to cross all
the t's and dot all the i's the all-powerful IT dept wants. In so many large
institutions (edu, healthcare, enterprises) it is IT and not the end users
that have final say.

~~~
jerrac
Having had to clean up after "end users" a couple times, I certainly prefer to
have the IT department have the final say.

What kind of "i's" and "t's" are you referring to as a bad thing?

~~~
acveilleux
From personal experience? Access control and integration with authentication
platforms, logging / auditing, various layers of site-wide policies on all
configurable features. Preferred platforms (i.e.: Windows servers and MS SQL
these days, Solaris and/or Oracle 10-15 years ago.) Lots of reporting features
and professional service to support all of that.

Support for antiquated web browsers, often combined with Citrix is a personal
nightmare and a royal PITA to test for. I've had to deal with MSIE 6
compatibility as recently as last year. This, obviously, was on some rinky
dink locked down 6 years old PC used by back-office low-ranking clerical
staff... Who's main job is to use our software.

It really limits what you can do as far as responsive UI if it has to degrade
gracefully in MSIE 6, 7 or even 8. And given how many Win XP clients are still
out there in corporate desktops, MSIE8 support is still going to be a thing
for at least another year or two.

Another real annoyance is very slow deployment cycles. Getting client change
control approval for even bug fix releases, let alone major upgrades is a real
pain, doubly so if any hardware / resource requirements go up and now it's a
capex line item that needs CFO approval. I envy the cloud folks.

~~~
jerrac
> Access control and integration with authentication platforms, logging /
> auditing, various layers of site-wide policies on all configurable features.
> Preferred platforms (i.e.: Windows servers and MS SQL these days, Solaris
> and/or Oracle 10-15 years ago.) Lots of reporting features and professional
> service to support all of that.

From the sounds of it, you're running into how hard it is to balance security
and usability. Personally, I prefer security, but I'm sure I'd say otherwise
if someone was blocking me due to an old, outdated, policy.

As for antiquated web browsers, yeah, that's annoying. And it amazes me that
there are companies out there who don't update their products, even when
they're paid millions of dollars... Then there are the users who don't want to
update....

> Another real annoyance is very slow deployment cycles. Getting client change
> control approval for even bug fix releases, let alone major upgrades is a
> real pain, doubly so if any hardware / resource requirements go up and now
> it's a capex line item that needs CFO approval. I envy the cloud folks.

That's not something I have had experience with. Sounds painful. Makes me glad
to work in a smaller community college where I get to do mostly whatever I
need to.

~~~
acveilleux
> From the sounds of it, you're running into how hard it is to balance
> security and usability. Personally, I prefer security, but I'm sure I'd say
> otherwise if someone was blocking me due to an old, outdated, policy.

What happens is the application will end up requiring dozens of roles juggling
easily a hundred (discrete) privileges.

The LDAP, AD, X.500 enterprise directory you have to integrate with will not
have that granularity so a whole set of interfaces will be needed to map
group(s) from the directory to role(s) and then you need an overlay to allow
super users to customize the imported users.

And you somehow need to handle the case where user disappear from the
directory without breaking auditing. And you need to grow bulk modification
interfaces and import interfaces for those user/roles/privileges.

And then somehow make the UI human usable. And suddenly you'll need special
"users" for anonymous session that are API launched, a whole API
authentication layer and your load balancer now suddenly need to be session
aware, and they want single-sign-on.

And we've not actually implemented any core functionality, just satisfied the
security dude that this will be SoX/HIPPA/ISO-27001 compliant.

------
keithpeter
Mobile is important to students, and I like the time planning focus.

OA managed not to mention that little issue about patents some years ago which
made me smile...

[http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-
invali...](http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-invalidated-
by-uspto/)

UK: many colleges use the open source Moodle as a 'virtual learning
environment'. A tad less clunky than classic Blackboard in my personal
opinion. Universities mostly have _something_ and last time I checked the
split was 50:50 Blackboard and Moodle. The acquisition of WebCT by Blackboard
caused some annoyance in some HE circles I recollect. All ancient history now
and I hope the new people can come up with something easier.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Somewhat confusingly, Blackboard now sell Moodle, via a subsidiary. For those
not familiar with the sector, this is a bit like Microsoft's recent moves
towards open source.

~~~
keithpeter
That would be a support contract they are selling I take it? I can see sense
in that. Otherwise just...

[https://download.moodle.org/](https://download.moodle.org/)

~~~
jerrac
Not just a support contract. MoodleRooms
([http://www.moodlerooms.com/](http://www.moodlerooms.com/)) was acquired by
Blackboard a while back. They provide fully managed Moodle hosting. They
provide a decent enough service. I certainly like not having to manage
Moodle's backend...

~~~
keithpeter
Thanks for link. People are doing hosting in UK as well, it's quite a thing.
One example...

[http://ulcc.ac.uk/](http://ulcc.ac.uk/)

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kennydude
I wonder if they managed to update the forum software so it doesn't take about
40s to load when the rest of the installation my uni have is lightning fast.

They have a long way to go, but it's better than the internal system we have
as well.

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Yhippa
If only they gave this much attention to their back-end APIs to Bb.

------
jbob2000
I used blackboard throughout high school and university. It was never the
software that was the problem, it was always teachers and professors who
didn't know how or didn't want to use it. For the most part, it was a
glorified dropbox; a way for the professor to share slides and notes in a time
when dropbox and google docs didn't exist.

A fancy UI and increased analytics isn't going to change user apathy.

