

Ugly Software (like Blackboard) Gives Education a Bad Name - ashamedlion
http://www.smartlyedu.com/blog/posts/19-ugly-software-gives-education-a-bad-name

======
netcan
If something is repeatedly happening (restaurants have bad sites, enterprise
software is crap, education software is ugly..), it might be worth digging a
little deeper and understanding why. If something is perplexingly broken,
there is slightly harder to find reason why. That's why it's perplexing.

Very often people seem at grasp at a hand wavy, superficial explanation. For
example, a few days ago there was a thread on restaurant sites. A lot of
comenters seemed to conclude that this is because service providers to this
market suck. While that's almost axiomatically true, it should just trigger
another why.

If you are off to fix the restaurant site problem, you need to answer the
second why. Conclude that service providers suck stopping there will lead you
try fix the problem be starting a web site design business for restaurants
that doesn't suck. But restaurants didn't just magically all end up with bad
service providers. Surely some good ones tried and either failed or started to
suck. There was a reason.

Same here. The "horrible mentality" of schools is s symptom, not a root cause.

~~~
cubicle67
From what I've seen, Blackboard (the company) spends a lot of effort suing
competitors to kept them out of the market. They have a bucket load of patents
they're quite happy to wield in order to protect their turf

~~~
mahmud
More than patents, what keeps potential competition from attacking the problem
is people telling them blackboard will sue them.

This is a horrible meme. No other company that I know of has its potential
competitors talked out of the business by this gossip of fear.

Hint: not everyone is operating in the U.S.

~~~
DeusExMachina
Can they still sue a company that is based outside of the USA? I always
wondered this, but never found an answer. Europe, for example, does not have
software patents, but I think that is more complicated than this.

~~~
mahmud
Groupon, can't get groupon.com.au because an Australian guy registered the
domain and trademark. Not only can you compete with Blackboard, but if you
registered blackboard.com.foo and sold competing software, they would have no
recourse in certain jurisdictions.

------
bhickey
Sungard is another offender in this sphere. Huge company, crappy software (the
Sony Root-kit) and incompetent, litigious management.

When I was an undergrad I found a CSRF vulnerability in their product Banner.
I tried contacting SungardHE on my own, but couldn't contact a human being, so
I brought it to the attention of the IT dept at my university. They asked me
to prepare a demo against their dev server. After seeing the demo, IT brought
this to the attention of Sungard.

A day or two later, someone at Sungard called the school's general counsel and
demanded that they bring charges against me for some ambiguously defined
computer crime. A professor I was working for went to bat for me and smoothed
things over.

We reached an agreement where I wouldn't disclose until they had distributed a
patch and they would acknowledge me for the fix. They reneged on their end of
the deal, so I released to Bugtraq.

I'm all for someone eating their lunch.

------
cubicle67
Ugly[0] companies (like Blackboard) give software a bad name

[0] I'm referring not just to the software they produce, but the arrogant
mentality and litigious nature of the company as a whole

------
seabee
Not sure how true that really is in Blackboard's market, given their use of
software patents to attack competition.

As far as getting good software into education, you're fighting both your
competition and the establishment. Not an enviable position. Most of my
experiences with how UK schools procure their IT equipment and software have
reminded me of 'enterprisey' corporations and the disconnect between
purchasers and buyers. (At least their excuse is they have neither enough time
or money to do a good job.)

~~~
kolektiv
I feel a similar way. My other half is a teacher, and every time I've looked
at the software systems she uses (in the UK) I'm appalled. I've identified a
few software tools which would make teachers lives much better and easier,
based on problems she actually has. Are they hard to build? Not that hard.
Could I get them in to schools? Not a chance.

Approved bidders, closed lists, hugely expensive bidding processes, it's
calculated to keep the market sewn up by the education IT vendors (usual
suspects, Capita, Fujitsu, etc.)

At a time when the UK is looking to save money, the state of school software
provisioning is shameful on multiple levels.

~~~
chesspro
Also we have to keep in mind sometimes incompetent IT people are in charge. We
had a grad who came back and designed a software for the entire school
(potentially district) to use.

Although it's in place, it's been severely restricted due to irrational
concerns over security and other illogical arguments. In order for the buying
to even occur (keep in mind this was free for the school), there must be
knowledgeable IT people in charge.

This is a much smaller scale here since it was for a high school instead of a
college, but you'd be surprised at how incompetent people can be.

Right now in the IT people I work under at the university are smart, but
lightyears behind when it comes to good user interfaces and the latest
technologies.

~~~
sskates
This seems to be why people don't go into educational software. Educational
software doesn't win because it's the best, it wins because a bureaucrat
mandates it for use.

~~~
bphogan
I am in education during the day and we write software for our campus using
cutting edge tools and technology, but only for "non administrative" things.

It was decided well above my pay grade that grade checking, admissions,
financial aid, registration, and online courses would use Oracle, PeopleSoft
and Desire2Learn.

Your assessment is 100% accurate.

------
patricklynch
I recently graduated from undergrad. While I was there, my alma mater switched
from Blackboard to Moodle. A few of the 'bleeding edge' professors started
experimenting with Moodle's features, but most used it exactly the same as
Blackboard (post the syllabus, post weekly assignments if they weren't already
on the syllabus).

Moodle was prettier. That's all most of the student's noticed. I'm reminded of
the chapter in ReWork 'Tools Don't Matter'.

With either system, the great teachers were still insightful, engaging, and
likable. Two years of Moodle didn't change that.

------
jbellis
There's a strong team behind a new competitor to Blackbord,
<http://www.instructure.com/>.

Decent article about them: <http://mfeldstein.com/instructure-canvas-a-new-
lms-entrant/>

~~~
littleidea
Like Jonathan said, Instructure is making a run at solving this.

The CEO founded Mozy. Team is solid. Free for teachers.

------
protomyth
Moodle seems to do the basic job if you don't want to deal with Blackboard.

~~~
veb
Moodle is horrid! I can _never_ find _anything_ on it. Blackboard works at
least!

------
ggordan
There was a question recently posted (by me - hope it's not a problem I'm
bringing it up again): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2011805>

which gives a lot of insight into the issue.

I'm currently a student and my university uses BlackBoard. The software is
simply awful. Every professor chooses a different ugly template for their own
course, so there is no consistency. In my university, the more able professors
have started making their own websites to put up lecture notes, tutorials and
grades.

Even the new updates are just a skin of their poorly designed product. No new
functionality is added(or even improved), but instead it's just a 'prettier
version' of the older system. And the amounts they charge universities for
such tools is crazy.

But as someone already mentioned, they have a monopoly in the education
sector, and they make it really difficult for universities to switch to an
alternative tool [1].

[1] <http://www.dowling.edu/mydowling/tech/bbdocs/bb-exp.html>

------
thesethings
An HNer, kylemathews, has a nice Drupal-based package, eduglu
(<http://eduglu.com/>). It's both an opensource project and start-up. Having
followed him on Twitter for a while now, I know his interest and passion for
improving/hacking education long precedes his financial interest in it. Really
rooting for his project and anything else that moves the edu situation
forward.

------
wedesoft
Universities should stop using Blackboard. They tried to use a software patent
to prevent competitors from implementing "roles" (otherwise known as user
groups).

Eben Moglen even gave a keynote on this:
[https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Keynote+-...](https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Keynote+--+Eben+Moglen)

The keynote was followed by an open discussion with Blackboard's lawyer:
[https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Lunchtime...](https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Lunchtime+Discussion+with+Eben+Moglen+and+Matthew+Small)

As Eben Moglen put it: "Preventing people from learning how things work is the
opposite of education."

------
forkrulassail
Having only Blackboard as a delivery mechanism in South Africa (TUT) was
really detrimental. Everything is a service call or a call out. I eventually
(after 2 semesters) just used my own Moodle setups.

------
mbregman
Most faculty just want a simple place to put course documents and
announcements and Blackboard (and Moodle for that matter) are just overkill
for most of them. The main reason it seems is that they're purchased by
committees who make decisions by checking off boxes on a large feature list,
where it doesn't seem to matter if anyone actually uses those features. You
can tell how bad it's gotten since many faculty are already doing their own
thing, i.e. using Google groups, pbwiki or making their own simple websites.

Due to my frustration using WebCT for classes I TA'd as a graduate student, I
recently partnered with another student to build a simple alternative in
Django. Check it out at <http://thiscourse.com> It's designed to provide
access to the crucial features as quickly as possible. We're always interested
in getting feedback and have had a few classes use it successfully so far.

------
tzs
I have just visited the Blackboard web site. After following many links and
viewing about 20 pages there, I have no idea what it actually does, what is
required to run it, and what it costs.

I don't understand why companies make such useless web sites.

~~~
freiheit
Because their products are in the dark ages. And semi-monopolistic. The
requirements are incomprehensible, the pricing is highly variable. The
combination of needless complexity and high cost means the easiest way to find
this stuff out is having a team of sales reps fly out to confuse you further.

One of the Bb products we use (transact/envision/cash registers), they
basically ship you the server with the software, and updates are handled by
their techs. We actually resorted to disk-to-disk type cloning of that server
to give ourselves a backout plan for when their engineers break stuff.

------
stopbits
The more cognitive energy students spend on figuring out how to use systems
stops them from focusing the course content. The bigger barrier to
participation the less participation there will be. Course management systems
like blackboard, desire2learn, etc are rarely if evaluated on user-centered
principals of design and usability. Decisions are made based on business
factors like cost, licensing, etc. Features are only evaluated in an abstract
sense. I guess it is this way with many large organizations.

------
mcarrano
As a student still in college, I cannot stand blackboard. I cringe every time
I need to use it because it is ugly, slow, confusing and often does not work
correctly.

Most professors prefer not to use it but are forced to by the College since
they are paying for BB services.

I personally feel the education sector is a wide open game, create something
that will increase learning potential and bring more value to a students
degree and you will have success.

------
choikwa
Horrible software, us UofToronto students have to use this despite having had
our own univ server CCNet in the past that worked flawlessly and blazingly
fast.

~~~
omaranto
I agree partially: Blackboard is much much worse than CCNet, but CCNet wasn't
all that great either.

------
michaelty
Anybody remember Peoplesoft?

Ugh...

~~~
natep
I thought I was done with Peoplesoft after I graduated (it was many times
worse than the downloadable software that came before it, and that looked over
a decade old), but now my work uses it for some things :(

<blink>Processing...</blink>

~~~
meatmanek
I'm pretty sure it's not <blink>, as Chrome doesn't respond to <blink>
anymore. That means they _re-implemented it in Javascript_

~~~
dzuc
<http://plugins.jquery.com/project/blink>

you know... just in case ;)

------
X-Istence
My school used eCollege a Blackboard competitor. Let me tell you, it is just
as bad.

------
Apocryphon
Are we talking about Blackboard, the company founded by Cal students?

~~~
natep
Don't think so. None of the founders of the two original companies that merged
to form blackboard.com list Cal in their background. 2 from Cornell and 2 from
American University

Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc>.

Founders:

* Cornell 1. <http://www.linkedin.com/in/dcane>

* Cornell 2: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Gilfus>

* American 1: <http://www.linkedin.com/in/chasen>

* American 2: [http://investor.blackboard.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=177018&dc...](http://investor.blackboard.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=177018&dc=177018&p=irol-govBio&ID=117636)

------
paxswill
Blackboard (the webapp) itself isn't that bad, and the iPad app is really
nice. It's just any site that tells you that you just failed a quiz is bad by
association.

~~~
meatmanek
_Blackboard (the webapp) itself isn't that bad_

I can name a few problems with Blackboard (the webapp). I've seen both sides
of it; I've suffered through 7 semesters with BB as a student, and 2 as a
teaching assistant.

It uses frames. When you open a link in a new tab, you get the bare page
without the top/left nav bars. Really? They couldn't even use a little 1998
Javascript to get the page to reload inside the frameset?

Too many modules are enabled by default, which causes confusion when profs use
things differently. Does the syllabus go in "Course Information" or "Course
Documents"? Or, since it contains the prof's email, "Staff Information"? Do
homework assignments go under "Assignments" or "Course Documents"?

There are two ways to upload files. One is convenient for both students and
teachers, one is not. Guess which one is more obvious? The nonintuitive one,
Digital Dropbox, is buried two pages deep. It has two choices: "Add File" and
"Send File". If you add a file, but don't send it, the teacher never sees it.
From the teacher's end, Digital Dropbox renames files, for your convenience.
Yes, BB, thanks so much for renaming my students' Java files so that I can't
compile them. Also, for your convenience, any .html files that are uploaded
get their extension changed to _.rtf_ , prompting more shell scripts just to
de-BlackBoard your students' files.

The better upload option is for teachers to allow submissions in the
Assignments tab. This makes _way_ more sense, since you can view and complete
the assignment all on one page. To enable this, the teacher has to select an
assignment type of "Assignment", instead of the default "Content Unit". As a
TA, I only knew this existed because one semester, one of my profs used this.
(Once, out of all the classes I took that had digital submission.)

The grading page is _horrible_. It has a table for the grades, like you would
expect, with one column per assignment, and one row per student. If you have
more than 5ish assignments or 15 students, it overflows the page. This would
be fine, except the table doesn't respond to the scroll wheel. It has a
scrollbar on the right, and a scrollbar on the bottom, and watches their
position with Javascript. When you scroll one of these, the table contents are
updated to reflect that position of the table. This makes scrolling awkward
every time - the screen flashes a bit, and you have no idea how many columns
Blackboard decided you wanted to scroll until you look at the header row. Oh,
and every time you resize the page, the table is reset to the top-left.

TL;DR These people need some serious UX help, fast.

~~~
kd0amg
_The better upload option is for teachers to allow submissions in the
Assignments tab._

Is there a way to quickly download all submissions for an assignment at once?
So far, I've been stuck with going into each submission's sub-page and
clicking the download link.

 _The grading page is horrible. …_

Also, columns you tell it not to use in grade calculation may simply not
appear anywhere.

------
solipsist
In my school district, we have been using Blackboard Learn for as long as I
can remember. According to Wikpedia, it's the " _next generation learning
management system_ ". In essence, it provides a way for teachers to interact
with students, as well as for students to interact among themselves. Posting
grades, class announcements, and homework assignments are only a few of the
things teachers can do through the site. Students can view all of this
information, as well as form groups, run blogs, use calendars, and create
discussion boards.

My point is that Blackboard is not a piece of ugly software. It is fully
functional and has a nice and intuitive design to it. The article says that:

    
    
       Badly designed software with poor usability goes hand in hand with general appeal
    

However, this software is not badly designed as it does what it is supposed to
do (and more), and the usability is perfectly fine. Ironically, our district
has switched to another piece of software to replace Blackboard's, but only
because of the teacher's belief that it offered too many features.

I think that the author of this post should rethink Blackboard.

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
My experiences with Blackboard paint a far less flattering picture. An
"intuitive" interface is entirely subjective, but I've hardly ever tried to do
something new without wandering through confusing, cryptic and downright
_hidden_ menus for half an hour. Computed columns in the gradebook are
crippled for no reason (formulas cannot be nested) and use an obscene[1]
"keyboardless" entry form with pointless user-side validation. If you ever
want to give yourself a migraine, crack open the source to any nontrivial page
and try to tease apart the miles of needlessly complicated and frequently
broken Javascript.

Granted, my university does not use the latest-and-greatest version (yet) of
Blackboard Learn, but for someone with your history of using the application
these should not be totally alien points.

[1]<http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/9500/whygodwhyl.png>

