
Christ, I hate Blackboard - mtviewdave
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/01/christ-i-hate-blackboard
======
columbo
Disclaimer: I'm involved in a small LMS startup

It's funny to me because there's so much low hanging fruit in the business
training industry but the clients tend to be absolutely fearful to make
decisions beyond the norm.

The hardest part of convincing businesses that they don't need Blackboard or
Moodle is reminding them all the features _they don 't use_. Last year I
featured our application to a client. I have a pretty scripted event that
starts with creating a course with content in a few minutes and had people
clapping because of the simplicity.

Despite that the first questions are always going over the "Feature
Checkboxes" (Oh, you don't have wikis? What about a ticket system?)... it can
be a very long sales cycle.

That and SCORM, oh man do I loathe SCORM

~~~
vineet
In the context of the above: Here's a question to the experienced
entrepreneurs. If a startup wants to take on Blackboard. What would be a good
way to go about doing it?

~~~
shimms
We tried the typical SaaS startup freemium model for what we thought would be
our Blackboard killer (hint: it wasn't).

We offered it for free to individual teachers with the strategy of enlisting
an evangelist group of dedicated and passionate teachers at institutions. The
plan went that once a critical mass of teachers from a given institution where
onboard and using it, we would trigger the enterprise sales approach and sell
the product to the institution.

We had some uptake from teachers, who universally loved the product. They
raved about it in fact. We were super excited. We thought we were onto a
winner.

They told their friends and colleagues who in turn signed up, and they too
loved it. And raved about it. And told their friends about it.

Unfortunately the vast majority of them never actually delivered a course on
it with live students. We were stunned.

After prodding and asking, and eventually getting to the bottom of it, we
found that whilst the vast majority of teachers loved the product, and loved
the idea of using it for their courses, they wouldn't use a product that
wasn't centrally supported by the institution (or even in quite a few cases,
couldn't use a product that was specifically prohibited by their institution -
they were only allowed to use the prescribed LMS, which in most cases was
Blackboard or Moodle).

So my tip for entrepreneurs trying to break into the enterprise LMS space is
appreciate your an enterprise sales company. Your users are not your buyers,
and even if they _love_ your product, if you aren't selling it to the buyer
you'll die.

I don't believe this is a market in which you can offer a freemium product to
the individual with the intent of penetration reaching the masses through
viral or other growth strategies. It might be worthwhile to do this to help
get exposure, but don't expect to get actual sales, or actual usage, off the
back of it. This isn't an industry in which a Yammer approach works (IMHO).

~~~
prawn
I wonder if a risky marketing tactic of "Everyone hates Blackboard but no one
has the balls to use a better product [like ours]" might work to bait buyers
in these situations? Liken it to the majority buying PC when kids might prefer
Mac. Imply "Do you have the guts?" "A lot of prospects we speak with haven't
had the authority to step away from the herd." i.e., do they want to think of
themselves as having the authority, being at the forefront, having the balls,
etc.

~~~
User8712
Not sure if that's a good approach. Why do they need balls or guts to use your
software? It's that risky? If your software is at the forefront, why is no one
else using it?

I think most schools want to see something that's proven, low risk, and
beneficial. If you can show them some of the top schools are using your
software, and their faculty and students are raving about it, and how it's
making their lives easier, reducing costs, and how the transition from BB was
seamless.

The problem is obviously getting the first few schools. You need to eliminate
as much risk as possible. You need a lot of credible sources backing you in
this situation to make buyers more comfortable.

~~~
prawn
I acknowledged that it was a risky strategy, but the alternative is to not get
noticed at all because the buyers get stuck comparing checkboxes rather than
realising that feature creep can make for an unwieldy behemoth.

------
616c
As someone who deals with a lot, it is garbage garbage garbage, and as some
have guessed, little competition and enterprisey licenses and lock-ins
guarantee they thrive.

Recently, I discovered their mobile app requires an in-app purchase to even
use in iOS, provided that your university has the proper server-side set up
(good for them they let you check with their database on the BB site without
purchase).

I was under the impression such dirt-bag nonsense was even permitted by the
App Store (there is zero functionality with this app, at all, until you do the
in-app purchase (which is per year). I hated them before, but this put them in
the scum list in my mind permanently.

------
impendia
Could someone please explain to me -- why do people actually _use_ this
software enough to hate it?

I am a math professor at a university which uses it, and so I use it to mass
e-mail my students and to record grades. _And for nothing else_.

I can see it has a billion other features but can't fathom wanting to use
them. It looks like it is designed to make simple tasks tedious and clunky,
and the article confirms this impression.

Is it that professors don't want to learn HTML and maintain simple course
webpages? Are faculty trying to do some kind of automatic grading? Do
administrations _require_ profs to use the obscure features? Are ... ?

~~~
freehunter
From a student's point of view: I hated professors who made their own webpage
just about as much as I hated Blackboard. A big downside to Blackboard was
that every professor had their own way of using the tool, but it was worse
with professors who made their own sites. At least on Blackboard _some things_
were standard, and everything _could be_ standard if the professor wasn't an
ass. On their own websites, _nothing_ was the same across classes. I'd have to
learn how to use the site again every time I took a new class. Doubly true on
both accounts for online classes.

Blackboard sucks, but at least it takes some work out of being a professor.
Making your own site takes extra work, and extra work on top of that to make
it friendly for students. They both still win out over the atrocity that is
the Respondus LockDown browser, which my school required for some tests.
Google it. It's bad.

~~~
impendia
An interesting point. I don't really understand it, so please allow me a
question.

Is there anything you would find disagreeable or unfriendly about, e.g., the
following?

[http://www.math.sc.edu/~thornef/math142/](http://www.math.sc.edu/~thornef/math142/)

To my way of thinking, this is obviously _the_ way to present my course
materials. Any friction points I'm not thinking of?

~~~
jkimmel
Another student here with my two cents.

Your course website looks very clear, easy to use, etc. (also, I like the
approach you seem to be taking with the material, I learned from the same book
and always thought the convergence test guesswork was silly)

Part of my personal frustration with custom Professor sites, and that of other
students I know, is simply that it's yet _another_ site to keep track of. For
all the failings of large LMS's, they are effective at centralizing coursework
into a location a student can check daily. When a few professors have custom
sites, it's easy to forget to check one Prof's site for updates,
announcements, etc. Even just for syllabus info, I have more than once gone to
my LMS and groaned when I realized that I had to look up the address for a
custom site or dig through bookmarks. I once had a semester where every Prof
used their own site, and I had to cycle through 5 bookmarks daily to keep
track of everything.

TL,DR: it's simply one more thing to keep track of, increasing the friction of
information acquisition from a student's perspective.

~~~
saraid216
> Part of my personal frustration with custom Professor sites, and that of
> other students I know, is simply that it's yet another site to keep track
> of.

It's worth noticing that this is a symptom of a much larger trend in academia:
professors tend to be naturally siloed and need to put in effort for
presenting themselves and discovering others' work. Journals seem to have some
positive effect, but Elsevier seems to negate a lot of that effect.

Contrast this with something like the open source community, with its
registries of projects and package managers and the current (long-lasting)
trend towards platforms and APIs.

I think what I'm describing is what SCORM is supposed to be, but I've never
actually used it, and I suspect SCORM is the XML of it. The "Yes, it does the
job, but ohgodclunkymassivehugepain, save us Douglas Crockford, you're our
only hope."

------
socrates1998
Blackboard is still around because it was early to the game and higher
education values tenure.

No one who has power really wants to change it. Professors don't care.
Administrators don't care. Students are the only ones who want to change it,
but they aren't even close to being powerful enough.

Using a good online learning software is not on any high school students list
of why they want to go to a college.

Reputation is #1. If taking an action doesn't add to the reputation of the
school, then they don't take the action.

There are 1,000 things Uni. admins care about before the UI of their online
learning software.

~~~
27182818284
I used to work at a large university. (Actually a couple universities.) That
was _sorta_ the case. IT people hated with a passion Blackboard and Talisma.
Administrators hated it sometimes, but that isn't their job, because they
aren't developers / IT people. Professors often jail break out of it if they
can by running their own webpages with HTML table layouts because even that is
preferable.

The bottom line I saw is that nobody _once_ admitted to liking either of those
systems, but the total amount of work and politics involved to change from
those systems meant it was a conversation that never really even occurred.

Some observations I had with respect to migrating away from hulks like
Blackboard and Talisma:

1\. There were pretty talented people supporting Blackboard and Talisma
working for the universities full-time with salary. Both systems were
frustrating for them, but the huge amount of work to migrate away from those
systems generally stops any hopes of beginning a conversation. Can it be done
over summer break? If not, will you do it in parallel? Won't that require more
salaries to be hired? can you get the buy in of the other departments who
you'll put extra work on because their system already has been coded to chug
along and work with those?

2\. Politics. I once saw a different university choose an awful CRM because
they did a better job courting the top IT advisors at the school. I've seen a
university choose Microsoft over Google even though students voted
overwhelmingly for Google (emails announcing the Microsoft win were sent out
before the students could even have voted)

3\. Politics, but this time personal ones. There are people whose role has
been to support Blackboard or Talisma _for a decade_. Their kids are now in
high school and all that time the household was supported because their role
was Director of Something but really it meant, "make sure your team keeps
Blackboard or Talisma going". They'll obviously be hesitant to switch.

(In case you haven't heard of it this is another hulk in higher ed that people
don't like, but it persists: [http://www.talisma.com/en-
us/solutions/highereducation/pages...](http://www.talisma.com/en-
us/solutions/highereducation/pages/higher_education.aspx))

~~~
14113
As for 2, I'm currently studying at a university that this occurred in, I'm
not sure if it was the same one, however mine was in the north east of
England.

One of the reasons that was given (and which I felt was totally reasonable in
this case) was that Microsoft provided assurances that the university could
manage their own data, and none of it would ever leave the UK - something
which Google couldn't do.

This was pre-Snowden, however I suspect that this was a big reason why
Microsoft was chosen over Google.

------
soundscape
I used to work in this space. A little background on the primary LMS
Companies:

Blackboard Desire2Learn Instructure - Canvas Moodle (Open Source) Sakai (Open
Source)

Blackboard was first to market, went public and gained tremendous market share
across Higher-Ed. They acquired much of the competition along the way (WebCT
and Angel).

Desire2Learn was boot-strapped, slower to grow but had traction with state-
wide systems. Blackboard sued them over patents, went into a whole legal mess
and ended with a cross-liscence agreement for the 'greater good' of education.
After litigation, Desire2Learn grew substantially and took on 80M of venture
funding in 2013, and is on-track for IPO.

Instructure (Product called Canvas) is the newcomer and 'next-generation'
platform. It's designed well and marketed far better than the incumbents. It's
growing much faster (for good reason) then the others, and on-track for IPO as
well. They've done a good job of UX and getting involved at the
professor/teacher level to create a following for the platform.

Open source: Sakai is a collaboration of several Higher-Ed institutions to
develop their own platform. It was never great and last I heard support is
dropping.

Moodle by market-share is the largest. There are several companies which offer
hosting/support for Moodle (A large one in NA being Moodlerooms, which
Blackboard also acquired).

------
webwielder
The old adage always holds true: if the people buying the product aren't the
people using it, the product will suck.

------
peter_l_downs
Great writing. Who's competing with Blackboard in the educational software
space? If they're really this awful there's probably a great opportunity.

~~~
skywhopper
Blackboard bought out most of their commercial competition (WebCT, Angel) and
tried to patent-troll the rest out of business (Desire2Learn for one).

Open-source wise there's Moodle (PHP based) and Sakai (Java based).

But from my POV within higher ed IT, my impression is that many of the big
guys (Michigan, Indiana, Cal, NYU, Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford) are
desperately searching for what's next. edX (Harvard+MIT along with
contributions from Stanford) has open-sourced their software, I have no idea
if it comes close.

The problem with starting up is that to make anyone happy, a new Learning
Management System needs to have two things working spectacularly well:

1\. An online testing engine supporting both automated grading and human
grading with a wide variety of question types and an easy to use test builder.

2\. A gradebook tool that's easy to set up, can import and export
spreadsheets, and can support any wild scoring system a faculty member can
devise (and they can come up with some doozies). It also needs to integrate
with any and every other tool in the system, as some faculty somewhere will
want to grade every single type of activity students can perform in the
system.

In addition to those two baseline elements it needs a world-class
collaboration system for file-sharing, plus messaging and forum tools and
online chat. It needs to support multiple class sections with unified
resources, ad-hoc class groups, and student-initiated study groups. It needs
to support fine-grained permission schemes based on classes, instructors, grad
assistants, sections, individual students, and groups.

Every file, test, assignment, forum, and chat room all need to be able to be
gated access based on student activity so that, for example, a quiz must be
passed before getting access to a document which leads into an assignment
followed by a forum-based discussion.

Research is also critical to support, and your system will need to be
accessible in a secure way to collaborators, guest instructors, and remotely-
enrolled students around the globe, in a way that doesn't make the faculty
wait more than a few minutes to grant those people access.

All of this will need to be provided in a fully responsive user interface that
scales well from 4k screens down to tablets and smartphones, including the
testing and gradebook engines. You'll also need a free mobile app that
provides all the same funcionality in a reliable native interface on iOS,
Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry OS, and more.

You also need to integrate with the University's student information system,
and update enrollments in courses and sections on the fly as students add/drop
and courses change, and send grades to the SIS in return. You need to
integrate with external tools at the university such as wikis, message boards,
and eTextbooks; and outside including cloud-based calendars and document
sharing tools including Google Apps for Education and Office365.

You'll also want a instructor evaluation system, electronic portfolio
functionality, program-level assurance of learning awareness, institutional
assessment reporting, user activity monitoring.

Oh and all of this needs to be customizable to match the traditional way of
doing business at each of thousands of different universities. Business
processes are not up for compromise.

Notice I've left out concerns of usability, security, performance, stability,
ease of deployment and upgrading, etc. That's because those are at the bottom
of the list of priorities for the people with the money.

So... good luck.

~~~
krapp
I've never used Blackboard but I wouldn't ever recommend Moodle as an
alternative for anything (and neither would my Java professor to judge by his
rants about it...)

~~~
Steuard
I've used Sakai in the past, and Moodle for years now. (I think I used
Blackboard once, years ago.) They're all a pain, but it would be hard to hand-
code something that has even just the features that I use regularly myself.

That being said, Moodle has some serious issues with dataloss if a user's
session times out (and for a long time, the default timeout delay was just 24
minutes). If someone hasn't specifically clicked "Save" or "Submit" before
time runs out (even if they were typing constantly the whole time), then those
buttons invisibly turn into "Throw away all my work and make me log back in
and start from scratch". It's _horrific_.
[https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-11972](https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-11972)

------
zenazn
Blackboard isn't all bad—fixing many of its inadequacies was one of my first
big side projects in high school.

There was one Blackboard dashboard unit that allowed you to embed arbitrary
HTML, and I injected some JS onto the page that allowed you to set a
background image, made clicking on links pop open new tabs (instead of
whatever abomination of javascript they had), and all kinds of other little
tweaks. I even got most of the way through writing a drag-and-drop module
rearranger before I graduated. Maybe 60% of what I knew about JS and CSS at
the time I learned through trying to add features to Blackboard through script
injection.

Naturally, I wasn't the only one frustrated at Blackboard, and the script
travelled by word-of-mouth to a pretty sizable chunk of the school. At that
point, it was probably the most widely-used thing I'd ever built.

~~~
krapp
I'm both impressed and horrified.

~~~
pjscott
Any JS-injection-based software that's actually good enough for people to use
is probably going to be impressive -- and horrifying. If you try writing some,
you will know my words to be true.

------
ChuckMcM
Such a rant, I think it comes close to conveying the author's distaste for the
product. The Google link is pretty informative as well. I wonder how some
product that is so loathed by clearly a number of people, manages to stay in
the market. Understanding that question might actually shed some insight on
what it would take to create a successful education targeted company.

~~~
pcwalton
From what I've read the problem is patents: Blackboard owns a huge number of
them and threatens to sue any potential competitor out of existence.

~~~
rch
I would love to know what the more important patents are, if anyone has been
looking around and happens to have a list.

~~~
nate_meurer
As far as I know there was one main patent -- 6,988,138 -- which was utter
garbage and was invalidated in 2009.

It was this patent which BlackBoard used to try to shut down a competitor
named Desire2Learn in 2006. The invalidation forced Blackboard to retreat, and
they've since been much quieter on the legal front.

~~~
rch
Interesting - Thanks. It's downright annoying to read a patent like that, and
I'm happy to hear it was invalidated.

------
betterunix
Academic software is notoriously hard to get right. Every school does things
slightly differently and has a slightly different culture from other schools.
Sadly, the people who are in the best position to design good course
management software -- the students themselves -- are also the least trusted
for the task (and also tend to be less reliable as workers, given the
realities of being a student).

What really saddens me is when a school does design its software in house,
then throws that away and buys Blackboard or whatever else.

------
mbloom1915
As a current student user of Blackboard, the main problem lies within the
professors. The professors either struggle to grasp the Blackboard system, or
are technically sound to hate it enough to want it to change. The learning
curve is unfortunately very high for most professors, which happen to be of an
age greater than 40. I think the system could be more user friendly to the
professors and students, but convincing a university to make a large scale
upgrade will not be easy.

~~~
ronaldx
This is not a problem with the professors. It's not about their age either.
It's a problem with Blackboard.

Blackboard creates a lot of potential work for professors which often has
unclear educational value (or is expected in addition to their regular work).
It's not evident that it's a good investment of their time.

------
leeoniya
i started writing a serious replacement for what i considered was a completely
broken, dis-engaging format for online course delivery.

then i discovered Canvas was already a product that was 90% what i was
developing/imagining and got discouraged from writing more code :(

i think the most difficult part isn't the software dev, it's getting past all
the entrenched educational bureaucracy and unfortunately huge existing
ecosystems. if you get a foothold as Instructure has, you're already waaaaay
ahead of the competition.

~~~
keithpeter
UK: Split between Blackboard (which swallowed WebCT) and Moodle.

Moodle is GPLed of course and free to download, but you administer it
yourself. The Open University decided to hack on Moodle rather than invent
their own system some years ago and the code was released back into Moodle[1]
(I recollect the 'roles' system and an add on e-portfolio).

 _" it's getting past all the entrenched educational bureaucracy and
unfortunately huge existing ecosystems"_

Teachers often _work around_ the structures. Use email/FB/Whatsap/BBM/Other
free things to reach students on an ad hoc basis. Who actually _needs_ course
management other than the bureaucrats? Its a dialogue![2]

[1]
[http://docs.moodle.org/26/en/About_Moodle](http://docs.moodle.org/26/en/About_Moodle)

[2]
[http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~rjr/dolweb/docs/laurillardmoddoc.h...](http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~rjr/dolweb/docs/laurillardmoddoc.htm)

------
pixelcort
Idea: GitHub for e-learning. Most lesson content is public and can be taken,
forked and pull requested. Lessons can submodule/include content from other
lessons.

Businesses/schools can pay for hosting private lessons (that can include
public submodules) and for tracking employee/student progress.

~~~
scriby
[http://www.blackboard.com/sites/xplor/index.html](http://www.blackboard.com/sites/xplor/index.html)

------
dbbolton
This article's substance is 100% covered by the title. I'd be much more
inclined to upvote an article that actually discussed the technical reasons
why BlackBoard is bad, as opposed to a long-winded and flowery hyperbole that
can be summarized in a single phrase.

------
arturventura
Shameless plug, I'm a member of FenixEdu, a open source academic and learning
management system. I think that people might find it interesting.

[http://fenixedu.org](http://fenixedu.org)

FenixEdu was designed for a single school for the past 10 years and now we are
trying to refactor it to be installed anywhere. We want to create that can
tackle the needs for the next decade of teaching. If people are interested in
this kind of thing please talk with us, we are most welcome to receive any
kind of suggestion or feedback.

------
vxNsr
Honestly, I had the same feelings about BB until the beginning of last
semester. What happened?

My university switch from doing all blackboard support (updates, helping
teachers, etc) to contracting it out to blackboard, suddenly, the entire
interface was modernized, and continues to get better every couple weeks,
teachers got better at doing what they wanted, and it just felt like a huge
breath of fresh air.

There are still things that need to be fixed (the Discussion Thread format is
one) but overall the experience is getting better.

------
Xophmeister
I have fortunately not had to deal with Blackboard in my role as a software
developer at a university, who -- despite their otherwise questionable choices
-- have fortunately migrated to Moodle. I've used Moodle as a student and it
seems pretty good.

Anyway, my hands are still dirtied by plenty of other similar systems. They
are almost all terrible: expensive, badly designed and even more poorly
implemented. It's endemic in the sector to be sold snake oil. I had a thought
why this might be the case, which I wrote about [1] In summary, despite the
seemingly low-hanging fruit -- i.e. the problems these packages solve aren't
difficult -- there's no technical incentive to disrupt such a closed market.

However, I cannot fathom how this happened in the first place. Presumably,
20-years-ago, when these types of packages were first on the market, they
wouldn't have been much better than using bits of paper (their modern
descendants aren't, so it stands to reason). Thus the only conclusion I'm able
to reach is that it's a "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" situation
that has persisted and grown out of control.

[1] [http://xoph.co/20130823/on-enterprise-
software/](http://xoph.co/20130823/on-enterprise-software/)

------
JosephRedfern
We started work on a Blackboard Alternative last year[1] (using Django), for a
2nd year Group Project module at University. Not mature enough to replace
Blackboard yet, but we tried to address some of the issues that lecturers and
students had with it, and received some good feedback. We open-sourced it at
the end of the module.

[1][https://github.com/JosephRedfern/CM2301-9](https://github.com/JosephRedfern/CM2301-9)

~~~
vikp
I made something similar a few months ago, also using Django:
[https://github.com/equirio/movide](https://github.com/equirio/movide) . It's
really hard to get teachers on board in a bottom-up way. There are a couple of
classes using it, but it took a lot of work to get there. I am interested in
talking more if you are still working on your project.

~~~
keithpeter
_" It's really hard to get teachers on board in a bottom-up way."_

Try getting them to 'score' their idea of what online course elements might
provide using the scheme in [1]

Do they want a filing cabinet, an online classroom, or some kind of student
led Reddit/HN thing around their course materials? Gets a discussion going.

[1] [http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/legacy/blog/ilt-ideas/alan-
stale...](http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/legacy/blog/ilt-ideas/alan-
staley/index.html)

------
yeukhon
I make plugins that works with Blackboard as part of my undergraduate
research, specifically making SCORM modules. The only thing that Blackboard is
useful is that it does the authentication and authorization bit for us. We
could easily roll out our own Django service and have students run code instad
of having to log in BB and click on assignment to start coding.

The other thing is BB does have tincan API but only newer version does. I
think the BB we use now has been upgraded and does have TINCAN API so I am
going play with it.

BB is horrible in terms of support and user interface. It has so many
functionality but hardly anyone use most of them and that's where I think BB
engineers need to re think. They should slim BB. And there is a BB mobile app?
Fuck that shit (excuse my Chinese). Useless piece of shit.

There is an open source version called Moodle but the interface is even worse.
It tries to solve all the problems BB is solving... I have played with it for
a few years and the interface just hasn't improved.

------
WWKong
"If it is a bad piece of software we can build a business by selling a better
one" does not apply here. Many have tried and failed. The reason being the
users are not the buyer here. And the buyers will always lean towards the
decision that will preserve their job. After all no one got fired for picking
IBM.

------
tmwh91
Our uni has been working with a new startup based in the UK working on a
completely new LMS kind of system. It's really cool and well designed and
takes on features from popular internet services and builds them into
education (ala. Facebook, it's also really well designed, I think there are
some ex-Apple/Google people working for them). The company though has also
been working with Students / Lecturers and Administrators so they've done a
good job of integrating with our systems (disclosure: I'm the LMS Technical
Manager). But it's also built from a learner and teacher perspective and they
guys we've given it do really like it.

If anyone wants to talk about it you can email me at rusdyas {at} gmail.com
(kind of non-disclosure, over at least the details anyway)

------
mjackson
Please, you can make your point without profaning the name of Jesus Christ, a
man whom many of us worship and who is dear to our hearts. To use the name of
any sacred personage in this manner, as an expletive, conveys a lack of
understanding and respect for other people.

~~~
fleshweasel
you created your profile 666 days ago you demon

------
rekoros
Yes and no. When I was in college, Blackboard once lost all my previous grades
in a calculus class, when we were close to the end. I was averaging maybe a B.
No other records existed.

It was awesome! The only grade that counted, as a result, was the final - an
A.

Also - fantastic writing.

------
rch
I hear Bb has been adding some talented people and taking a hard look at their
product. Turnarounds can be difficult, but at least they are cognizant of
needing to take serious stab at the problem.

~~~
616c
Well I know they fired their CEO or he "found something better and pivoted"
not so long ago. I find this ironic because he started the product after
graduating from our alma mater, who is terribly locked into this garbage.

------
politician
Whenever I read about Blackboard and the universities that use it, I can't
help but consider that these are the institutions which are supposed to be
capable of teaching software engineering.

------
fnordfnordfnord
College instructor here, yup that sounds like a Blackboard user. Fortunately I
have the ability to choose not to have any online classes[1] but I have heard
similar tales from my colleagues. Our aging IT decision makers aren't spared
the vitriol, but their leather ears are deaf to the pleas of the faculty and
of the students. This torture shall continue until morale improves, or until
the gutless boomers in charge, aren't.

[1] And I have chosen not to, mainly to avoid having anything to do with BB.

------
patrickmay
My kids' school district just switched from Blackboard to Schoology. Major
improvement.

Blackboard is so poorly designed that they couldn't force teachers to use it.

------
mattrepl
Piazza, a class discussion app, seems to have good adoption even at schools
that use Blackboard. I'm hoping to do similar for homework collection with
Classhand.

I expect a switch to a basic platform with apps like Piazza that offer
tailored features/user experiences. Not unlike the Salesforce ecosystem. That
may be Blackboard's future role.

[http://classhand.com](http://classhand.com) for those interested.

------
spydum
Whats with the title, is this a prayer?

In any case, I cant help notice a ton of the features people desperately want
from a LMS system seem better developed and added onto something like (brace
yourselves): sharepoint. It has all the group/collab stuff you could want. Am
I crazy? Plus given how pervasive it is in the enterprise space, seems like
plenty of development talent to extend and customize per school as needed.

~~~
wpietri
At least in American and British English, "Christ", "Jesus", and "Jesus
Christ" are used as exclamations:

[http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/british/jesus-...](http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/british/jesus-
christ_2)

------
United857
tl;dr: The author passionately hates Blackboard but never once tells us why
(just links to a Google search: Blackboard sucks).

This piece has zero information content. Very colorful language and prose are
used, but there's no meat in the essay, just filler. I'm not familiar with
Blackboard or this space in general, and I'm none the better after reading
this. Not sure why it got so upvoted.

~~~
gtaylor
Given that this is a link to a personal blog, you've got to get your
expectations set correctly leading up to reading a post titled "Christ, I hate
Blackboard". You have to go into it knowing that you are about to read a rant,
and that it's going to be pretty colorful.

It's possible that the rant was more meant for his cohorts or his social
circle, which may already know why Blackboard sucks. I doubt he wrote it
specifically for the HN audience.

If you don't care to do the research as to why Blackboard sucks, just enjoy
the amusing rant and move on. Don't worry about why it sucks, you wouldn't
appreciate how bad it sucks unless you've had to use it.

------
sidcool
Pardon my ignorance, but what is this about? The language is too tough for me
to understand, I being a non-native English speaker.

~~~
verandaguy
Blackboard is a piece of software - although calling it that discredits all
real software - used by universities and colleges to manage student marks and
assignments in a way that's supposed to be easily accessible to students.
Speaking as a first year who's had to endure it for only a semester so far -
it's a complete mess. In addition to the above two features, it _attempts_ to
do lab group management and acts as a dropbox-like file sharing platform
between profs and students.

It is good at neither of these. File sharing is inconsistent. Rather than
having a single, designated file area for each class and each prof, every prof
can customize where it's located in what can loosely be called a directory
hierarchy within the webapp. Additionally, they can even link to their own
sites (and the linking is a calamity too - but that's another story).

Group management is tolerable when it works. More than once has there been a
missing asset issue, or a permissions issue, or a straight up JSP error that
prevented my peers and myself from joining appropriate lab groups and
uploading assignments on time.

All of this is worsened by the scores of profs who haven't a clue how to use
this.

Lightly put, this is one of the worst user experiences one can have, and
rivals Windows 8 on desktops in terms of user unfriendliness (read: user
hostility).

~~~
sidcool
That indeed looks like a mess. Thanks for your response.

------
mebeweber
My school (University of Texas at Austin) is currently in the process of
switching to Canvas
([http://www.instructure.com/](http://www.instructure.com/)) and plans to
completely drop Blackboard by next Fall.

------
mholt
My school dropped Blackboard for their own home-brewed system... FINALLY.
[http://lsinfo.byu.edu/](http://lsinfo.byu.edu/)

However, it has its own share of problems.

------
MWil
As someone making a very niche LMS offering, it makes me very happy to read
this thread.

I'm so sorry.

------
amjaeger
If you think black board is bad you haven't used podium from whipple hill...

------
mtllmn
digedu (www.digedu.com) provides an alternative for K-12. Much more
comprehensive -- not just software, for instance-- but our Learning Engine is
a sort-of next generation LMS. (disclosure - I work for digedu.)

~~~
mtllmn
www.digedu.com

------
njharman
How clueless is me? I don't know what Blackboard is.

~~~
chuable
This might help:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_learning_environment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_learning_environment)

------
again_really
You got it backwards again.

