Christ, I hate Blackboard

Disclaimer: I&#x27;m involved in a small LMS startup<p>It&#x27;s funny to me because there&#x27;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.<p>The hardest part of convincing businesses that they don&#x27;t need Blackboard or Moodle is reminding them all the features <i>they don&#x27;t use</i>. 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.<p>Despite that the first questions are always going over the &quot;Feature Checkboxes&quot; (Oh, you don&#x27;t have wikis? What about a ticket system?)... it can be a very long sales cycle.<p>That and SCORM, oh man do I loathe SCORM

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.<p>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).<p>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.

Could someone please explain to me -- why do people actually <i>use</i> this software enough to hate it?<p>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. <i>And for nothing else</i>.<p>I can see it has a billion other features but can&#x27;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.<p>Is it that professors don&#x27;t want to learn HTML and maintain simple course webpages? Are faculty trying to do some kind of automatic grading? Do administrations <i>require</i> profs to use the obscure features? Are ... ?

Blackboard is still around because it was early to the game and higher education values tenure.<p>No one who has power really wants to change it. Professors don&#x27;t care. Administrators don&#x27;t care. Students are the only ones who want to change it, but they aren&#x27;t even close to being powerful enough.<p>Using a good online learning software is not on any high school students list of why they want to go to a college.<p>Reputation is #1. If taking an action doesn&#x27;t add to the reputation of the school, then they don&#x27;t take the action.<p>There are 1,000 things Uni. admins care about before the UI of their online learning software.

I used to work in this space. A little background on the primary LMS Companies:<p>Blackboard Desire2Learn Instructure - Canvas Moodle (Open Source) Sakai (Open Source)<p>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).<p>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 &#x27;greater good&#x27; of education. After litigation, Desire2Learn grew substantially and took on 80M of venture funding in 2013, and is on-track for IPO.<p>Instructure (Product called Canvas) is the newcomer and &#x27;next-generation&#x27; platform. It&#x27;s designed well and marketed far better than the incumbents. It&#x27;s growing much faster (for good reason) then the others, and on-track for IPO as well. They&#x27;ve done a good job of UX and getting involved at the professor&#x2F;teacher level to create a following for the platform.<p>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.<p>Moodle by market-share is the largest. There are several companies which offer hosting&#x2F;support for Moodle (A large one in NA being Moodlerooms, which Blackboard also acquired).

The old adage always holds true: if the people buying the product aren&#x27;t the people using it, the product will suck.

Great writing. Who&#x27;s competing with Blackboard in the educational software space? If they&#x27;re really this awful there&#x27;s probably a great opportunity.

Blackboard isn&#x27;t all bad—fixing many of its inadequacies was one of my first big side projects in high school.<p>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.<p>Naturally, I wasn&#x27;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&#x27;d ever built.

Such a rant, I think it comes close to conveying the author&#x27;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.

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

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.

i started writing a serious replacement for what i considered was a completely broken, dis-engaging format for online course delivery.<p>then i discovered Canvas was already a product that was 90% what i was developing&#x2F;imagining and got discouraged from writing more code :(<p>i think the most difficult part isn&#x27;t the software dev, it&#x27;s getting past all the entrenched educational bureaucracy and unfortunately huge existing ecosystems. if you get a foothold as Instructure has, you&#x27;re already waaaaay ahead of the competition.

Idea: GitHub for e-learning. Most lesson content is public and can be taken, forked and pull requested. Lessons can submodule&#x2F;include content from other lessons.<p>Businesses&#x2F;schools can pay for hosting private lessons (that can include public submodules) and for tracking employee&#x2F;student progress.

This article&#x27;s substance is 100% covered by the title. I&#x27;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.

Shameless plug, I&#x27;m a member of FenixEdu, a open source academic and learning management system. I think that people might find it interesting.<p><a href="http://fenixedu.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fenixedu.org</a><p>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.

Honestly, I had the same feelings about BB until the beginning of last semester. What happened?<p>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.<p>There are still things that need to be fixed (the Discussion Thread format is one) but overall the experience is getting better.

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&#x27;ve used Moodle as a student and it seems pretty good.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t difficult -- there&#x27;s no technical incentive to disrupt such a closed market.<p>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&#x27;t have been much better than using bits of paper (their modern descendants aren&#x27;t, so it stands to reason). Thus the only conclusion I&#x27;m able to reach is that it&#x27;s a &quot;I&#x27;ll scratch your back if you scratch mine&quot; situation that has persisted and grown out of control.<p>[1] <a href="http://xoph.co/20130823/on-enterprise-software/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xoph.co&#x2F;20130823&#x2F;on-enterprise-software&#x2F;</a>

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.<p>[1]<a href="https://github.com/JosephRedfern/CM2301-9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;JosephRedfern&#x2F;CM2301-9</a>

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.<p>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.<p>BB is horrible in terms of support and user interface. It has so many functionality but hardly anyone use most of them and that&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t improved.

&quot;If it is a bad piece of software we can build a business by selling a better one&quot; 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.

Our uni has been working with a new startup based in the UK working on a completely new LMS kind of system. It&#x27;s really cool and well designed and takes on features from popular internet services and builds them into education (ala. Facebook, it&#x27;s also really well designed, I think there are some ex-Apple&#x2F;Google people working for them). The company though has also been working with Students &#x2F; Lecturers and Administrators so they&#x27;ve done a good job of integrating with our systems (disclosure: I&#x27;m the LMS Technical Manager). But it&#x27;s also built from a learner and teacher perspective and they guys we&#x27;ve given it do really like it.<p>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)

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.

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.<p>It was awesome! The only grade that counted, as a result, was the final - an A.<p>Also - fantastic writing.

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.

Whenever I read about Blackboard and the universities that use it, I can&#x27;t help but consider that these are the institutions which are supposed to be capable of teaching software engineering.

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&#x27;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&#x27;t.<p>[1] And I have chosen not to, mainly to avoid having anything to do with BB.

My kids&#x27; school district just switched from Blackboard to Schoology. Major improvement.<p>Blackboard is so poorly designed that they couldn&#x27;t force teachers to use it.

Piazza, a class discussion app, seems to have good adoption even at schools that use Blackboard. I&#x27;m hoping to do similar for homework collection with Classhand.<p>I expect a switch to a basic platform with apps like Piazza that offer tailored features&#x2F;user experiences. Not unlike the Salesforce ecosystem. That may be Blackboard&#x27;s future role.<p><a href="http://classhand.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;classhand.com</a> for those interested.

Whats with the title, is this a prayer?<p>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&#x2F;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.

tl;dr: The author passionately hates Blackboard but never once tells us why (just links to a Google search: Blackboard sucks).<p>This piece has zero information content. Very colorful language and prose are used, but there&#x27;s no meat in the essay, just filler. I&#x27;m not familiar with Blackboard or this space in general, and I&#x27;m none the better after reading this. Not sure why it got so upvoted.

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

My school (University of Texas at Austin) is currently in the process of switching to Canvas (<a href="http://www.instructure.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.instructure.com&#x2F;</a>) and plans to completely drop Blackboard by next Fall.

My school dropped Blackboard for their own home-brewed system... FINALLY. <a href="http://lsinfo.byu.edu/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lsinfo.byu.edu&#x2F;</a><p>However, it has its own share of problems.

As someone making a very niche LMS offering, it makes me very happy to read this thread.<p>I&#x27;m so sorry.

If you think black board is bad you haven&#x27;t used podium from whipple hill...

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.)

How clueless is me? I don&#x27;t know what Blackboard is.

You got it backwards again.