

I develop free software because of CUNY and Blackboard - _delirium
http://teleogistic.net/2011/09/i-develop-free-software-because-of-cuny-and-blackboard/

======
danteembermage
I use Blackboard as professor a lot, and while pedagogically it can do amazing
things technically it's poorly done and annoying. I think the author wrongly
poo-poos the one-stop-shop feature of Blackboard. The fact that the annoying
quiz making facility grades automatically and posts grades to the annoying
grade center that can't even do weighted grades right is still pretty great
compared to the alternative (which is what? Getting my students to get their
own logins to some other site, take a quiz, scrape that data automatically
somehow to some kind of password protected database and get them to sign in to
_that_ and then check there)

Everyone gushes over the Kahn Academy approach of expecting perfection and
permitting failure; they're right and I can run with it in Blackboard.

What I do: Write random question pools using Blackboards obnoxious question
writing web interface.

Randomly generate quizzes from a series of different pools by subject.

Let my students take the quiz as many times as they want; offer _zero_ partial
credit

Blackboard automatically puts the latest grade into grade center (which is
almost always the highest since they stop taking it when they're satisfied
with their grade) which they can then access with their university login at
any time without revealing confidential information about other students

There is a terrible, ridiculous, hackery way to dump to question log files
into excel, clean up the data (takes about an hour) and get feedback on how
often each question in each pool is answered correctly, so I know which
subjects the students are struggling with. We go over those topics in later
lectures.

This has had a huge effect in my sections because it feels like the students
work twice as hard but are half as stressed about it. They can fix just about
any result for the better by _learning the material_.

So tl;dr I love learning content management systems and by implication
Blackboard despite its many egregious flaws.

In terms of startup ideas, I think there's plenty of space to work with
Blackboard rather than try to replace it i.e. I don't think their proprietary
quiz formats would be difficult to decipher at all, which means a clever
startup could make a "We make making Blackboard quizzes easy!" product and do
big enterprise sales with it. Universities love to feel they are on the
cutting edge of "technology" and clearly have deep pockets for this stuff (if
you didn't click on the expensive link in the article you should)

~~~
niels_olson
> I love learning content management systems and by implication Blackboard
> despite its many egregious flaws.

Your obliviousness is obvious in your writing. So let me offer what you can
hopefully take as a Penn-and-Teller-esque response.

Student and former independent LMS developer here. No offense, sir, but profs
like you are a major part of the problem. Any interest you have in LMSes is
unnatural. You're a professor. Your students did not sign up to be your test
subjects. Do you have any idea how much time is wasted by your students in the
byzantine hell of your personal online frolicking? 3 sections x 20 x 1 - 2
hours a day makes ... we might be better off skipping your class and deriving
Black-Scholes from first principles.

Your university quite possibly has rewarded you for your LMS geekery by making
you some sort of educational tech committee member, maybe even the chairman.
Your students blow sunshine up your ass because you hold their futures in your
hands, but I'm sure you ignore all that. Blackboard will blow what ever you
want up your derriere, so long as you or your committee keeps telling the
deans that Blackboard is making progress, or has new feature "x". In fact,
Blackboard will blow harder if you question their utility.

> Universities love to feel they are on the cutting edge of "technology" and
> clearly have deep pockets for this stuff

Sir, _you_ are one of _them_ \-- the people at the university -- that the
author wouldn't mind actually taking what he has to say to heart.

~~~
danteembermage
So sell me! Blackboard does a million things but I really only care about 1.
posting syllabuses, links, and documents 2. making randomly generated auto-
grading quizzes 3. auto-updating a gradebook.

Does your software do these things better? Does it do things I didn't even
know I wanted? What are the big ways you hope to make the world of LMS better?
Non-techies experience great pain learning complex new software, what awesome
improvements justify a switch? I'd love to have some alternatives and some
ammo to back them with.

~~~
aufreak3
I think what niels_olson is asking for is to weigh your time saved versus the
collective spent time of the students in some measure when considering the use
of an LMS tool.

(Disclaimer: I don't use Blackboard, but am curious about the state of LMS
art.)

~~~
_delirium
I know I always found these a huge imposition for no gain as a student. Email
to a designated address: easy. Run a Unix command on the CS department server
to submit: also easy. Deal with some bullshit LMS to figure out what it wants:
hours of my time.

Even as a prof, they're a pretty mixed bag. For a lot of simple things, it's
infinitely easier to ask students to just email me something as an attachment,
with a particular subject line, and then set up a quick procmail filter to
grab and process the attachments. Then you can actually run scripts on the
result, which it turns out in computer science is something you sometimes want
to do (you might even want to run _tests_ on code!). The role of these LMSs
appears to be to make it as hard as possible to just get a damn zip file with
all the data so I can run my scripts, and then also difficult to upload my
grading results back into the system. Maybe that would be okay if they
included internally all the functionality I might need, but: 1) it's hard to
use any functionality they _do_ include; and 2) as far as I can tell, they
don't include anything like compiling code with gcc and running instructor-
submitted tests on it.

------
ggchappell
I am a university professor who occasionally uses Blackboard. Some thoughts:

I certainly agree that Blackboard is overpriced and somewhat painful to use. I
don't use it much. I mainly create my own web pages from scratch, which I find
to be about as easy as using BB, and rather more conducive to my aims (which
include making most course materials available to the public).

But then there's this:

> It forces, and reinforces, an entirely teacher-centric pedagogical model.

Um ... that assumes that the BB area _is_ the class, which I find rather
silly. I use my websites (and BB now & then) to get information to students,
including handouts, announcements, solutions, links, and source code. I could
do all this on a physical bulletin board, but the paper cost would be
excessive, and it would require students to type in source code, instead of
simply downloading it.

But my website is not intended to be some collaborative space where students
learn together. On the contrary, the model I follow is to provide my students
with resources, and allow them to learn as they see fit (together, if they
wish; sometimes I require it). After all, high school is over. My students are
adults. They run their own lives. And there are plenty of collaborative
learning spaces around here. They are called "tables", and they are used a
lot.

This is not to say I'm against the online-collaborative idea. Certainly, if
someone figures out how to enhance the educational experience with some kind
of computerized thingy, then I say more power to them. Let's get lots of
start-ups in this area to come up with lots of interesting things. But in the
mean time, I don't feel obligated to somehow "manage" my students' total
educational experience.

> The very concept of a “learning management system” may itself be
> wrongheaded.

Oh, certainly. But after all, "learning management system" is just a term
invented by marketing people. We don't have to take it to heart.

------
edtechdev
In my humble opinion, blackboard and the like (moodle, sakai...) are mainly
useful for core classes that have a lot of students taking quizzes or writing
papers or doing readings.

Faculty and instructors, I think, sometimes forget when they have academic
freedom to teach their course whatever way they see best (sometimes they
really don't have this choice though, like for much
government/military/corporate training). They can use stuff outside of
blackboard if they wish. Also though, they may not have the time or skill to
set up their own online course tools.

There are alternatives that many faculty are embracing such as wikis
(wikispaces, etc.), blogs (wordpress), and even some universities are
exploring more decentralized or cloud-based alternatives that don't box you
into a walled garden, like wordpress hosting, drupal tools (harvard's
openscholar), google apps, and see what BYU is creating (although I'm not
sensing that it will be open sourced): <http://learningsuite.byu.edu/>
(described in the educause article below)

The newest LMS tools like Instructure (and the newest version of Blackboard)
are basically trying to emulate Facebook, for better and for worse, with
dynamic streams of information and connections to social networking tools.
Some believe Blackboard will not dominate the market for much longer:
<http://mfeldstein.com/emerging-trends-in-lms-ed-tech-market/>

Anyway, there are plenty of articles exploring the effects (negative and
otherwise) of learning management systems like Blackboard:
[http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterly...](http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/EnvisioningthePostLMSEraTheOpe/199389)
[http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ar...](http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2530/2303)
[http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ar...](http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2434/2202)

Unfortunately many academic IT departments are primarily just consumers of
vendor technologies, they aren't big enough nor do they have enough money to
develop custom software tools. Purdue and others are some exceptions:
<http://campustechnology.com/innovators>

An even bigger problem is probably that most faculty have no training in
instruction and pedagogy and learning theory and design. As one person put it,
"College teaching may be the only skilled profession for which systematic
training is neither required nor provided–pizza delivery jobs come with more
instruction." See [http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/50-examples-of-
the...](http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/50-examples-of-the-need-to-
improve-college-teaching/)

------
Duff
The whole Blackboard thing is interesting. But what I found most refreshing is
that the author actually presents himself as a bona-fide public servant, and
seems to give a hoot about what that is supposed to mean.

These days as a society we have collectively accepted certain economic ideas
as gospel. Public activity == parasitic. Private interests == the american
way. It's refreshing to hear a different story.

------
calloc
My school used eCollege, a Blackboard competitor. From what I have heard from
professors that have used both they are both on par with each other in terms
of being absolute shit.

When I was still in school the students attempted to push the administration
to go for an open source alternative called Moodle which is miles ahead of
anything else.

Speaking of Blackboard, apparently some security vulnerabilities were found:
[http://www.scmagazineus.com/zero-day-holes-found-in-
blackboa...](http://www.scmagazineus.com/zero-day-holes-found-in-blackboard-
platform/article/212156/)

~~~
dagw
I haven't used eCollege or Blackboard, but I have used Moodle (as a student)
in a couple of courses, and to be honest I found it to be a stunningly
mediocre. If it really is miles ahead of everything else then the whole
concept of that type of software probably needs to be radically rethought.

PS: I should add that this was a good 3 years ago, so great things may have
happened in the meantime.

~~~
sorbus
> If it really is miles ahead of everything else then the whole concept of
> that type of software probably needs to be radically rethought.

That's pretty much what I thought, reading that. The college I'm at right now
uses Moodle, and while it gets the job done it doesn't do so particularly
well. Might just be because of how the professors use it (there's a lot of
variability in how useful it is between classes), but even in the best cases
it's nothing special.

------
eLinda
I am pleased and interested by the somewhat heated exchanges going on and
especially because of the focus on online education and which technologies do
or might support online teaching and learning.

Online education is of great interest and importance to me. I started working
in this field in 1983, and have had the opportunity to help shape it, study
it, and I continue to contribute to the field. I come from the education side,
and have written some books on this topic. I have had a company that developed
online environments to support learning, and the result was a pretty excellent
collaborative learning environment software that 16 years later I still use
and which students are pretty positive about. However, my company put our
dollars into development rather than marketing, and eventually found that the
competition had a crappy product but alot of marketing dollars. So, I wound
down the company in 2002. The market was primarily educational institutions,
schoolboards, etc and they were buying into the 'lms' solution, where learning
is viewed as something to be managed and packaged.

Primarily, I am a prof. and I have been teaching online since 1985: I taught
one of the very first totally online courses, and it was based on
collaborative learning. In fact, online education in the 1980s was almost all
about group learning, team project, knowledge building---whether in secondary
or tertiary or training education.

Phew...long lead it. But I provide it as a framework to my message which is
that: online education can and has served as a major game changer in
education, and is likely the key to the 21st century Knowledge Age.

I don't see much reference to that in this discussion. Most of the comments so
far seem to be referencing old paradigm ways of teaching and learning...i.e.,
lms stuff. None of the software mentioned has achieved great or even mildly
interesting or important learning gains. Mainstream elearning software are
mostly associated with groans and frustration and anxiety, not excitement at
new ways to teach and learn. Moodle is really a muddle, let's be clear. Like
BB, Moodle was not designed nor developed for learning or teaching. Education
was an add-on to this 1990's moo (aka mud). Educationally, Moodle is just a
bunch of things added on without rhyme or reason--anything goes, sort of. BB
was initially and largely remains an administrative software. This was not
about technologies designed to address learning activities but a slap dash
kind of commercial "solution" (the fact that Moodle is open source does not,
imho grant it dispensation or holiness). It is making a mess of online
education and undermining and distracting the field.

Let's focus on learning, which should and could be really exciting and
relevant adventures. About inventing! Innovating! Solving problems! ENgaging
in Knowledge communities. Addressing realworld conundra! Let's talk about
learning theory. WHat learning methods work best? How can we, educators and
technology developers) support 21st century pedagogies and discoveries with
new technologies?

The 21st century is a new paradigm and it is about Knowledge building. Our
learning approaches and technologies need to support collaboration and
knowledge building. That vision can help orient us to new ways of learning, to
supporting new paradigm learning pedagogies and strategies.

Let's stop kicking around the 20th century can of learning strategies
primarily based on 19th century factory-needs and models (lecture halls, rows
of student desks bolted to the floor, obedience, memorization, repetition,
etc.). BB and Mooooooodle take us backward. They waste time, money and talent.

Its time to innovate and make a difference, and the world of teachers and
learners will thank you for investing your time and energy in designing real
solutions.

Cheers, Linda

~~~
Turing_Machine
"Like BB, Moodle was not designed nor developed for learning or teaching.
Education was an add-on to this 1990's moo (aka mud)".

Moodle has absolutely nothing to do with MOOs or MUDs, and was, in fact,
designed from the ground up as a learning management system.

------
rglover
Absolutely stunned by the cost of Blackboard referenced here:
<http://bit.ly/pjCNow>. No software that is as poorly made as Blackboard
should ever cost _that_ much. Glad to know my now former university is
ditching BB for a different service.

~~~
reemrevnivek
After seeing that figure, I'll be writing a letter to my current university
asking them to ditch BB for a different service. What options should I
suggest?

For those who don't want to click the bit.ly link, The 5-year contract is for
$4,228,812.50 and can be seen at
[http://wwe1.osc.state.ny.us/transparency/contracts/contractt...](http://wwe1.osc.state.ny.us/transparency/contracts/contracttransactions.cfm?Contract=NMP0141&Agency=70000&entitytype=Agency)

~~~
_delirium
That's not too unusual, unfortunately, and not _entirely_ the fault of one
side. Selling to a system like CUNY, and the kinds of reporting, maintenance,
and support requirements they have of these kinds of contracts, is hardly
worth it unless you get big money. Maybe $1m/yr isn't the minimum for it to be
worth it, but if you sell one of these big systems as a hosted enterprise
solution and you're only getting $100k/yr, you'll have trouble breaking even.
Just the trips out to meet with the various IT Strategy Boards and Educational
Technology Review Panels and whatever will cost you $10k in travel, as one
cost among many, and then there's some liability insurance to protect against
things like security holes leaking grades, etc.

------
sirlancer
I'm working out of PSU on a humanitarian engineering and social
entrepreneurship venture based in India. I have to say that Moodle is light
years ahead of the competition. I'm speaking not just from a users
perspective, but as a system administrator, it's an absolute dream to work
with. Which operating system would you like to run your LAMP server from? OSX?
Not my first choice, but it works fantastically all the same.

------
josephcohen
For professors and instructors looking to try something new, see
<http://coursekit.com>. We're in a private beta this semester and are still
accepting classes.

Press: <http://cl.ly/AGRE>

For developers interested in the space, we're hiring:
<http://coursekit.com/jobs/engineer>

------
misterbwong
What is the reason for Blackboard and eCollege's dominance? Is it truly
because the school "IT departments are dominated by Microsoft-trained
technicians and corporate-owned CIOs" or is there another reason?

I understand that Bb is very litigious and has a pretty broad patent on
"eLearning" but that doesn't seem like it's stopping its competitors.

~~~
Homunculiheaded
I worked in Higher Ed for a while, and when I left I thought "oh it should be
really easy to create a company that makes better software than much of the
academic software out there, probably for way less money as well". But then it
hit me. Almost everything, even pretty inexpensive stuff is purchased by large
and mostly unqualified committees (with a requirement that at least one member
be insane). The process is usually drawn out over many months, even years (not
just for blackboard scale sized products). The result is that to survive the
key is not a great product, but to have patience and lots of salespeople in
suits to send to listen to these committees and make them feel like you care.
(In my experience even if you know what product you want, you still have to go
through the ritual, the fastest I ever saw software purchased was 4 months,
and that still required bringing in sales people even when we knew what
product we wanted)

A team of 1-3 smart developers could create a product that is significantly
better than blackboard and orders of magnitude cheaper in less than a year.
But the process of selling the product would take more energy and resources
than they could commit. A team of smart developers would quickly realize there
are much better ways to make money and sell software. I believe this is the
core of why most academic software (institutional level) is terrible, the only
companies that would put up with this are ones that are more interested
exploitation than creating great software.

------
solipsist
Whenever Blackboard is mentioned here on HN, the message is very clear. Almost
everybody agree that it is a piece of shit.

Doesn't anyone think that this is the perfect market to be entering these
days? The market has a ton of potential (as evident by all the money that is
being spent on it) and the satisfaction with the current leaders is seriously
lacking.

Are there any YC companies that are tackling this area?

------
TheEzEzz
I just started a postdoc at NYU and have been forced into using Blackboard to
teach my class. Inspiring alternatives can't come fast enough.

~~~
brainid
I am not sure how inspired it is, but Sakai is a very good open source
alternative to Blackboard used at many Universities.

<http://sakaiproject.org/>

~~~
tikhonj
We use a system built on sakai at my university. While it isn't horrible, it
isn't brilliant either.

In the CS department we have a command-line utility for submitting homework
and grades, and the classes just have a simple website. Everybody likes that
system more than the one based on sakai, which should give you a good idea of
how much functionality sakai brings.

Additionally, everybody is now using a system called piazza[1] as an online
forum for the class instead of using the one provided by sakai. I rather like
it and it has met considerable success in most of the classes that deployed
it. Of course, some of my professors are _very_ enthusiastic about this
system; one of them even has a testimonial on piazza's main page.

[1]: <http://www.piazza.com>

------
oddthink
After hearing endless complaints about Blackboard at Hofstra, I was just left
wondering what the computer science students at all these schools were doing.
This stuff doesn't seem that hard. One undergrad or Master's thesis, maybe a
seminar on web development, and you've got it.

~~~
_delirium
Harvey Mudd's taken that approach for a few courses, having student projects
develop fairly course-specific management/grading/feedback tools. They're less
general, but tend to be less crufty and a good fit for the course as a result.
The tools for the intro C++ & data-structures course, for example, integrated
with revision control, a submission system, gcc compiler, tests, and various
lint-type tools, and an automated early-submission system that would give
students basic feedback on whether their submission was compiling and passing
sanity checks. Also, there was a grading interface for entering comments (with
some things pre-selected, like failed tests, and easy cross-reference to the
source code), which would then record the results, and produce & email nicely
formatted results emails when done.

It was an amazingly bad awakening when, after _that_ was my first-ever TA
experience, I TA'd a course in grad school using Normal Course Management
Tools, which by comparison didn't really automate much of my job at all, nor
particularly seemed designed to fit with what the course was doing.

------
mikeocool
"The project is not pitched as a Blackboard alternative, for a number of
reasons (primary among which is that the Commons’s Terms of Service prohibit
undergraduate courses from being held on the site)."

Is there any particular reason undergraduate courses prohibited?

~~~
boonebgorges
Money. The site was started on a shoestring budget, and we don't have the
resources (servers, support, etc) to serve the 300,000 undergrads at CUNY.

------
LeafStorm
Incidentally, "a sort of Hotel California" is actually a pretty good analogy
for data lockin.

------
jeremy82
CUNY or CUNI means asshole in farsi.

------
herdrick
What is Blackboard?

~~~
younata
It's a company that pretty much owns the education market, despite their
products being nearly universally considered to be
harmful^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhorrible.

For more information, see wikipedia:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc>

Edit: I should point out that my knowledge of blackboard is near non-existant,
I haven't had to use it in any of my schooling (university in central florida,
public education in silicon valley), so I don't have a useful opinion of it.

~~~
jeffreymcmanus
Blackboard doesn't own the market. There are tons of campuses that are using
alternatives, and more than a few that are migrating off of Blackboard onto
other alternatives.

~~~
Kliment
They don't own the market, but they hold a good deal of patents in the field,
and are very aggressive when it comes to using them against competitors.

