An open letter to Blackboard

Posted on May 12, 2009 by James

Dearest Blackboard,

For active course sites, Blackboard does a horrible job keeping the student up to date on what they need to be working on. Even if (and especially if) the instructor has entered all the course data and assignments at the start of the semester, the student still has to dig through at least three links to get to their assignment. This is what is known as a bad user experience.

Oh, sure; you allow instructors to post announcements. They never do that unless there’s something very important and abnormal, like the due date for an assignment being moved, or system maintenance on Tuesday, or something like that. Oh, and these posts typically stay there for weeks after they are relevant. Hey, guess what? If Blackboard was designed well, most of the announcements I see would be completely unnecessary!

Have you looked at Facebook recently? It does a great job letting users know about upcoming events. The feed model would be extremely apt for your product. Not only would it show users incoming events without them having to dig for them, but almost all your educational users are familiar with the model already because of Facebook.

You may have heard of this thing called RSS. It allows data, typically blog posts, to be fetched by 3rd party programs. If courses had RSS feeds showing upcoming events, it would be even more convenient for us students. Simularly, your calenders are close to useless because they don’t support iCalender or CalDAV, forcing us to enter all the info manually into our desktop calendering programs. It’s not a security issue; Google Calendar is a fine example of how this can be done while preserving privacy.

It’s not a great commentary on your product when manually entering all the posted course info into a dead-tree daytimer at the beginning of the semester and never visiting Blackboard again is a better user experiance than going to the course site twice a week. The best software is that which does it’s job and stays out of the way. Thus, feeds are the future for software like yours. Indeed, feeds are also the present. In this respect, Blackboard is already obsolete.

Sincerely,

–Disgruntled Student

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  • http://gsoc-tor.blogspot.com/ Runa

    Sounds just like It’s Learning ;) ( http://www.itslearning.com )

  • http://gsoc-tor.blogspot.com/ Runa

    Sounds just like It’s Learning ;) ( http://www.itslearning.com )

  • Rob

    Version 9.0 handles notifications and integration with Blackboard to stay on top of work: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/27/blackboard

  • Rob

    Version 9.0 handles notifications and integration with Blackboard to stay on top of work: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/27/blackboard

  • James

    Yeah, I’m not sure that Blackboard 9 actually addresses my complaints.

    They say they have integration with other course management software like Moodle, but that doesn’t actually mean anything for students unless their institution goes to the extra work of setting it up.

    There is a Facebook app that they’re touting as part of this new release, although it’s been around like a year already, apparently. It’s backwards compatible with the version of blackboard my university is using. It’s also horribly buggy and almost completely useless. Most of the reviewers back me up on this.

    They do have an alert system in now for assignments on the main Blackboard dashboard. This is a step in the right direction.

    Additionally, the main page of each course is now actually useful, but they accomplished this by mashing a lot of modules onto the same page, resulting in a horribly cluttered look. Unfortunately, from what I can work out, all of this is still confined to blackboard.

    They have a new skin and some Ajax on Blackboard 9, but it’s not actually used for new functionality, just making rearranging panels less clunky. This is a major bullet point in their feature list, but there’s nothing about RSS or iCalender export, so I have to assume they’re still not supported.

    Extremely unfortunate. They’re polishing up what they have, but what they have is a basic CMS system with quiz and gradebook features, sans feeds. It’s not actually as useful as it might be.

  • James

    Yeah, I’m not sure that Blackboard 9 actually addresses my complaints.

    They say they have integration with other course management software like Moodle, but that doesn’t actually mean anything for students unless their institution goes to the extra work of setting it up.

    There is a Facebook app that they’re touting as part of this new release, although it’s been around like a year already, apparently. It’s backwards compatible with the version of blackboard my university is using. It’s also horribly buggy and almost completely useless. Most of the reviewers back me up on this.

    They do have an alert system in now for assignments on the main Blackboard dashboard. This is a step in the right direction.

    Additionally, the main page of each course is now actually useful, but they accomplished this by mashing a lot of modules onto the same page, resulting in a horribly cluttered look. Unfortunately, from what I can work out, all of this is still confined to blackboard.

    They have a new skin and some Ajax on Blackboard 9, but it’s not actually used for new functionality, just making rearranging panels less clunky. This is a major bullet point in their feature list, but there’s nothing about RSS or iCalender export, so I have to assume they’re still not supported.

    Extremely unfortunate. They’re polishing up what they have, but what they have is a basic CMS system with quiz and gradebook features, sans feeds. It’s not actually as useful as it might be.

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