OK, despite having read the article, the thread, and working for a major US university, I still have no clue what this Blackboard thing does, or what LMS stands for (though I have learned that everybody hates Blackboard). Can someone explain what class of product we're discussing?
Blackboard is an LMS that many major universities use to provide online support for classes. At my university (University of Richmond), I can sign on to blackboard.richmond.edu and for each of my classes that semester, can download assignments/lecture/slides that my teacher has uploaded, upload assignments for my teacher to grade, view a roster of the other kids in my class, participate on a bulletin-board for "class discussions", view my grades, and my teacher can send out emails to the entire class fairly easily (enter text in a box, select which students of that class to send to, hit submit).
It's okay, but there are definitely some issues. Like, not being very user-friendly (I constantly help out my instructors with how to use it). Also it doesn't work very well in Chrome =/
Blackboard hurts Universities because it's overly expensive and unintuitive for the price.
This new site looks great. I worked on http://moodle.org/ back in the day which is a great opensource alternative. It's now deployed in most if not all California State Universities. This is a great space to work in.
