I am a university professor who occasionally uses Blackboard. Some thoughts:
I certainly agree that Blackboard is overpriced and somewhat painful to use. I don't use it much. I mainly create my own web pages from scratch, which I find to be about as easy as using BB, and rather more conducive to my aims (which include making most course materials available to the public).
But then there's this:
> It forces, and reinforces, an entirely teacher-centric pedagogical model.
Um ... that assumes that the BB area is the class, which I find rather silly. I use my websites (and BB now & then) to get information to students, including handouts, announcements, solutions, links, and source code. I could do all this on a physical bulletin board, but the paper cost would be excessive, and it would require students to type in source code, instead of simply downloading it.
But my website is not intended to be some collaborative space where students learn together. On the contrary, the model I follow is to provide my students with resources, and allow them to learn as they see fit (together, if they wish; sometimes I require it). After all, high school is over. My students are adults. They run their own lives. And there are plenty of collaborative learning spaces around here. They are called "tables", and they are used a lot.
This is not to say I'm against the online-collaborative idea. Certainly, if someone figures out how to enhance the educational experience with some kind of computerized thingy, then I say more power to them. Let's get lots of start-ups in this area to come up with lots of interesting things. But in the mean time, I don't feel obligated to somehow "manage" my students' total educational experience.
> The very concept of a “learning management system” may itself be wrongheaded.
Oh, certainly. But after all, "learning management system" is just a term invented by marketing people. We don't have to take it to heart.
The whole Blackboard thing is interesting. But what I found most refreshing is that the author actually presents himself as a bona-fide public servant, and seems to give a hoot about what that is supposed to mean.
These days as a society we have collectively accepted certain economic ideas as gospel. Public activity == parasitic. Private interests == the american way. It's refreshing to hear a different story.
I use Blackboard as professor a lot, and while pedagogically it can do amazing things technically it's poorly done and annoying. I think the author wrongly poo-poos the one-stop-shop feature of Blackboard. The fact that the annoying quiz making facility grades automatically and posts grades to the annoying grade center that can't even do weighted grades right is still pretty great compared to the alternative (which is what? Getting my students to get their own logins to some other site, take a quiz, scrape that data automatically somehow to some kind of password protected database and get them to sign in to that and then check there)
Everyone gushes over the Kahn Academy approach of expecting perfection and permitting failure; they're right and I can run with it in Blackboard.
What I do:
Write random question pools using Blackboards obnoxious question writing web interface.
Randomly generate quizzes from a series of different pools by subject.
Let my students take the quiz as many times as they want; offer zero partial credit
Blackboard automatically puts the latest grade into grade center (which is almost always the highest since they stop taking it when they're satisfied with their grade) which they can then access with their university login at any time without revealing confidential information about other students
There is a terrible, ridiculous, hackery way to dump to question log files into excel, clean up the data (takes about an hour) and get feedback on how often each question in each pool is answered correctly, so I know which subjects the students are struggling with. We go over those topics in later lectures.
This has had a huge effect in my sections because it feels like the students work twice as hard but are half as stressed about it. They can fix just about any result for the better by learning the material.
So tl;dr I love learning content management systems and by implication Blackboard despite its many egregious flaws.
In terms of startup ideas, I think there's plenty of space to work with Blackboard rather than try to replace it i.e. I don't think their proprietary quiz formats would be difficult to decipher at all, which means a clever startup could make a "We make making Blackboard quizzes easy!" product and do big enterprise sales with it. Universities love to feel they are on the cutting edge of "technology" and clearly have deep pockets for this stuff (if you didn't click on the expensive link in the article you should)
> I love learning content management systems and by implication Blackboard despite its many egregious flaws.
Your obliviousness is obvious in your writing. So let me offer what you can hopefully take as a Penn-and-Teller-esque response.
Student and former independent LMS developer here. No offense, sir, but profs like you are a major part of the problem. Any interest you have in LMSes is unnatural. You're a professor. Your students did not sign up to be your test subjects. Do you have any idea how much time is wasted by your students in the byzantine hell of your personal online frolicking? 3 sections x 20 x 1 - 2 hours a day makes ... we might be better off skipping your class and deriving Black-Scholes from first principles.
Your university quite possibly has rewarded you for your LMS geekery by making you some sort of educational tech committee member, maybe even the chairman. Your students blow sunshine up your ass because you hold their futures in your hands, but I'm sure you ignore all that. Blackboard will blow what ever you want up your derriere, so long as you or your committee keeps telling the deans that Blackboard is making progress, or has new feature "x". In fact, Blackboard will blow harder if you question their utility.
> Universities love to feel they are on the cutting edge of "technology" and clearly have deep pockets for this stuff
Sir, you are one of them -- the people at the university -- that the author wouldn't mind actually taking what he has to say to heart.
So sell me! Blackboard does a million things but I really only care about 1. posting syllabuses, links, and documents 2. making randomly generated auto-grading quizzes 3. auto-updating a gradebook.
Does your software do these things better? Does it do things I didn't even know I wanted? What are the big ways you hope to make the world of LMS better? Non-techies experience great pain learning complex new software, what awesome improvements justify a switch? I'd love to have some alternatives and some ammo to back them with.
This. attitude. is. the. problem. Why don't you sit down and watch a student deal with this crap for a couple of hours? Anthropologically, empathetically, observe.
> Does your software do these things better?
Our motto was to make med school easier one less click at a time. Do that. Focus on that. All the time. And you'll find what you want, even if you have to hire people to write it. IF you have to hire people, make them hand code the solution for your population from scratch. It's cheaper and better than trying to wrap their heads around the steaming pile of crap that any existing LMS is.
It's not hard. An ical script, a document importer, a quiz module, connect the three with a database. Add LDAP functions so you can interact with the university's authentication system. The database can poop your grade book on demand. If you want a script to do that, I'm sure there are some abused 4th graders who could put it together for you#. A few med students hammered that out over a Christmas break and some 20% time. The rest is just trash.
I think what niels_olson is asking for is to weigh your time saved versus the collective spent time of the students in some measure when considering the use of an LMS tool.
(Disclaimer: I don't use Blackboard, but am curious about the state of LMS art.)
I know I always found these a huge imposition for no gain as a student. Email to a designated address: easy. Run a Unix command on the CS department server to submit: also easy. Deal with some bullshit LMS to figure out what it wants: hours of my time.
Even as a prof, they're a pretty mixed bag. For a lot of simple things, it's infinitely easier to ask students to just email me something as an attachment, with a particular subject line, and then set up a quick procmail filter to grab and process the attachments. Then you can actually run scripts on the result, which it turns out in computer science is something you sometimes want to do (you might even want to run tests on code!). The role of these LMSs appears to be to make it as hard as possible to just get a damn zip file with all the data so I can run my scripts, and then also difficult to upload my grading results back into the system. Maybe that would be okay if they included internally all the functionality I might need, but: 1) it's hard to use any functionality they do include; and 2) as far as I can tell, they don't include anything like compiling code with gcc and running instructor-submitted tests on it.
I feel your pain - both in terms of product features as well as the way Blackboard do business, which is exactly why we set about creating an alternative.
You might be interested in what we're doing with Lexim (http://www.lexim.com.au) - a new take on an old and outdated approach to delivering teaching online.
User enjoyment and efficiency are two of the main drivers in our design approach. In my (biased) opinion, I don't think it could be easier to get documents, links and your syllabus into the hands of students. We have randomised, auto-graded quizzes that update the gradebook (without destroying the previous marks) and a whole lot more.
Full disclosure: I am one of the founders of Lexim, and thus totally biassed in my view ;).
Thanks for mentioning your product; I signed up for Convergence using the sign up link at the top of the page. Is that the process to sign up for the trial? It looks as though your page is targeted towards University IT rather than individual professors (which is probably the right approach I suppose) but it makes me suspicious that I can't get the "5 professors, unlimited students" trial on my own.
Thanks for signing up, I appreciate it. The signup link is the correct way to get in at the moment; we're currently in closed beta, but once it opens up (soon) anyone can sign up and start using Convergence in minutes, without needing to involve IT (or anyone else).
We think individual teachers should be able to choose the best tools they use for their job, be it technological or otherwise. With this in mind individuals can signup and use Convergence without needing to wait for the institution.
Also worth noting the free plan isn't a trial - you could continue to use the free plan for ever. If you want to expand Convergence across your department or school, and bring in more teachers and courses then you need to upgrade to a paid plan, but for individuals you can use it for free without an expiry.
Thanks for the feedback on the page - we're definitely trying to attract individual educators, not their IT departments, so we'll take a look at how we're expressing that.
That's a tough question to answer, although just behaving sanely would be a start (if you overtype a grade in a neighboring column it destroys the old grade immediately and permanently, Blackboards solution to prevent this is to make you press enter in each and every cell in the table)
A pain point for me is Blackboard can sort of create exam questions with a formula for answers, but it's quite buggy and very low featured (for example it claims to do exponents but I wouldn't trust it to calculate a standard deviation). Since professors using Blackboard for exams end up entering many questions into the system (unless the textbook vendor supplies a Blackboard test bank, talk about lock in!) making that as fast and as intuitive as possible is a good place to start.
My school used eCollege, a Blackboard competitor. From what I have heard from professors that have used both they are both on par with each other in terms of being absolute shit.
When I was still in school the students attempted to push the administration to go for an open source alternative called Moodle which is miles ahead of anything else.
I haven't used eCollege or Blackboard, but I have used Moodle (as a student) in a couple of courses, and to be honest I found it to be a stunningly mediocre. If it really is miles ahead of everything else then the whole concept of that type of software probably needs to be radically rethought.
PS: I should add that this was a good 3 years ago, so great things may have happened in the meantime.
> If it really is miles ahead of everything else then the whole concept of that type of software probably needs to be radically rethought.
That's pretty much what I thought, reading that. The college I'm at right now uses Moodle, and while it gets the job done it doesn't do so particularly well. Might just be because of how the professors use it (there's a lot of variability in how useful it is between classes), but even in the best cases it's nothing special.
eCollege from the standpoint of an TA was absolute crap, we as students experimented with several professors with Moodle and found it MUCH MUCH better than anything eCollege had to offer.
We used Moodle in the engineering department at my Uni and let me say - its better than blackboard (what isn't?) but its not "miles ahead" by a long shot. Its still pretty awful. I think the space is ripe for disruption.
The biggest problem is that both eCollege and Blackboard hold many patents related to the space, AND any solution has to follow certain guidelines/requirements set forth in some law somewhere (never did try to get more into it, our proposal was shot down hard).
When have security vulnerabilities not been found in Blackboard? Seriously, anyone in Instructional Technology can tell you that Blackboard isn't worth the metaphorical paper it's coded on.
In fact, it's so poorly put together perhaps the paper isn't metaphorical at all, and Blackboard are actually writing out their code by hand and having trained monkeys type the result up.
I have trouble believing anybody who has used Moodle as either an administrator or a student would really believe it's "miles ahead of anything else" unless you'd literally never looked at another LMS at all.
Absolutely stunned by the cost of Blackboard referenced here: http://bit.ly/pjCNow. No software that is as poorly made as Blackboard should ever cost that much. Glad to know my now former university is ditching BB for a different service.
After seeing that figure, I'll be writing a letter to my current university asking them to ditch BB for a different service. What options should I suggest?
That's not too unusual, unfortunately, and not entirely the fault of one side. Selling to a system like CUNY, and the kinds of reporting, maintenance, and support requirements they have of these kinds of contracts, is hardly worth it unless you get big money. Maybe $1m/yr isn't the minimum for it to be worth it, but if you sell one of these big systems as a hosted enterprise solution and you're only getting $100k/yr, you'll have trouble breaking even. Just the trips out to meet with the various IT Strategy Boards and Educational Technology Review Panels and whatever will cost you $10k in travel, as one cost among many, and then there's some liability insurance to protect against things like security holes leaking grades, etc.
The thing with Enterprise software or, any software that finds a niche, really, is that it doesn't HAVE to be brilliantly made.
I'll be the first to agree that Blackboard is, pretty much, terrible. But it isn't cheap, and sells really well. What that tells you is that everyone screaming 'release, release' is right. If your product works and solves a problem, it doesn't have to be amazing to make money.
Their terribleness might open the doors to competition, but they're easily the market leader for a reason.
That's about $8 per CUNY student for both software and 5 years of hosting. Doesn't seem so bad to me-- I'd be surprised if a competitor would be much cheaper.
I'm working out of PSU on a humanitarian engineering and social entrepreneurship venture based in India. I have to say that Moodle is light years ahead of the competition. I'm speaking not just from a users perspective, but as a system administrator, it's an absolute dream to work with.
Which operating system would you like to run your LAMP server from? OSX? Not my first choice, but it works fantastically all the same.
For professors and instructors looking to try something new, see http://coursekit.com. We're in a private beta this semester and are still accepting classes.
What is the reason for Blackboard and eCollege's dominance? Is it truly because the school "IT departments are dominated by Microsoft-trained technicians and corporate-owned CIOs" or is there another reason?
I understand that Bb is very litigious and has a pretty broad patent on "eLearning" but that doesn't seem like it's stopping its competitors.
I worked in Higher Ed for a while, and when I left I thought "oh it should be really easy to create a company that makes better software than much of the academic software out there, probably for way less money as well". But then it hit me. Almost everything, even pretty inexpensive stuff is purchased by large and mostly unqualified committees (with a requirement that at least one member be insane). The process is usually drawn out over many months, even years (not just for blackboard scale sized products). The result is that to survive the key is not a great product, but to have patience and lots of salespeople in suits to send to listen to these committees and make them feel like you care. (In my experience even if you know what product you want, you still have to go through the ritual, the fastest I ever saw software purchased was 4 months, and that still required bringing in sales people even when we knew what product we wanted)
A team of 1-3 smart developers could create a product that is significantly better than blackboard and orders of magnitude cheaper in less than a year. But the process of selling the product would take more energy and resources than they could commit. A team of smart developers would quickly realize there are much better ways to make money and sell software. I believe this is the core of why most academic software (institutional level) is terrible, the only companies that would put up with this are ones that are more interested exploitation than creating great software.
A buddy of mine and I were looking into writing an open-source replacement for both that didn't suck. We did market research first. Absolutely no one would even consider switching, it's way too far embedded in the schools that we talked to that attempting to get them to switch would take much more effort than we were willing to put in.
That, and Blackboard loves to sue anyone that even breaths the words eLearning software.
Blackboard had the advantage of being one of the first commercialised learning management systems in the current incarnation. They were able to secure a large part of the market by being first, and then by acquiring others (WebCT/Angel/Prometheus etc - see http://www.quora.com/How-many-acquisitions-has-BlackBoard-ma... for a more detailed list).
Their really controversial patent ('138 - the one that pretty much patented anything that resembled a group of students accessing materials online), was overturned. Although they have a number of technology patents, and are litigious, it isn't stopping competition. There are quite a few out there.
(Full disclosure, I'm one of the founders at http://www.lexim.com.au - one of these companies).
I was doing a very small elearning startup at the same time Blackboard started. We were all at the same edu tech conferences, knew the same people, etc.
At the time, Blackboard and WebCT were the biggest players in the elearning space. I think Blackboard simply did a better job of winning contracts and selling. You have to remember, when they started these companies were installing systems on campus (there was no SaaS initially) ... so it was a big deal if other campuses in your area used it and/or if it worked with your student information system.
Blackboard got a strategic partnership with microsoft (I think money too), they absorbed some smaller players (like Prometheus) and eventually acquired WebCT.
Whenever Blackboard is mentioned here on HN, the message is very clear. Almost everybody agree that it is a piece of shit.
Doesn't anyone think that this is the perfect market to be entering these days? The market has a ton of potential (as evident by all the money that is being spent on it) and the satisfaction with the current leaders is seriously lacking.
Are there any YC companies that are tackling this area?
My school used blackboard and it was horrible. Instructure (http://www.instructure.com/) is a start-up that is competing with Blackboard. Their product, Canvas, is available as open source and their CEO, Josh Coates, was founder of Mozy (which was pretty darn successful).
We use a system built on sakai at my university. While it isn't horrible, it isn't brilliant either.
In the CS department we have a command-line utility for submitting homework and grades, and the classes just have a simple website. Everybody likes that system more than the one based on sakai, which should give you a good idea of how much functionality sakai brings.
Additionally, everybody is now using a system called piazza[1] as an online forum for the class instead of using the one provided by sakai. I rather like it and it has met considerable success in most of the classes that deployed it. Of course, some of my professors are very enthusiastic about this system; one of them even has a testimonial on piazza's main page.
I found Sakai, at least in the "T-Square" rebranding used at Georgia Tech, pretty annoying also (as of a few years ago), but at least it isn't sucking millions of dollars from their budget. At the time (possibly now fixed?) it had a very strong single-session assumption that would cause weird things to happen if you did obvious tabbed-browsing things like opening multiple users' assignments in new tabs. The "solution" was big red warnings at the top of every page about how you shouldn't do that.
After hearing endless complaints about Blackboard at Hofstra, I was just left wondering what the computer science students at all these schools were doing. This stuff doesn't seem that hard. One undergrad or Master's thesis, maybe a seminar on web development, and you've got it.
Harvey Mudd's taken that approach for a few courses, having student projects develop fairly course-specific management/grading/feedback tools. They're less general, but tend to be less crufty and a good fit for the course as a result. The tools for the intro C++ & data-structures course, for example, integrated with revision control, a submission system, gcc compiler, tests, and various lint-type tools, and an automated early-submission system that would give students basic feedback on whether their submission was compiling and passing sanity checks. Also, there was a grading interface for entering comments (with some things pre-selected, like failed tests, and easy cross-reference to the source code), which would then record the results, and produce & email nicely formatted results emails when done.
It was an amazingly bad awakening when, after that was my first-ever TA experience, I TA'd a course in grad school using Normal Course Management Tools, which by comparison didn't really automate much of my job at all, nor particularly seemed designed to fit with what the course was doing.
"The project is not pitched as a Blackboard alternative, for a number of reasons (primary among which is that the Commons’s Terms of Service prohibit undergraduate courses from being held on the site)."
Is there any particular reason undergraduate courses prohibited?
In my humble opinion, blackboard and the like (moodle, sakai...) are mainly useful for core classes that have a lot of students taking quizzes or writing papers or doing readings.
Faculty and instructors, I think, sometimes forget when they have academic freedom to teach their course whatever way they see best (sometimes they really don't have this choice though, like for much government/military/corporate training). They can use stuff outside of blackboard if they wish. Also though, they may not have the time or skill to set up their own online course tools.
There are alternatives that many faculty are embracing such as wikis (wikispaces, etc.), blogs (wordpress), and even some universities are exploring more decentralized or cloud-based alternatives that don't box you into a walled garden, like wordpress hosting, drupal tools (harvard's openscholar), google apps, and see what BYU is creating (although I'm not sensing that it will be open sourced): http://learningsuite.byu.edu/ (described in the educause article below)
The newest LMS tools like Instructure (and the newest version of Blackboard) are basically trying to emulate Facebook, for better and for worse, with dynamic streams of information and connections to social networking tools. Some believe Blackboard will not dominate the market for much longer: http://mfeldstein.com/emerging-trends-in-lms-ed-tech-market/
Unfortunately many academic IT departments are primarily just consumers of vendor technologies, they aren't big enough nor do they have enough money to develop custom software tools. Purdue and others are some exceptions: http://campustechnology.com/innovators
An even bigger problem is probably that most faculty have no training in instruction and pedagogy and learning theory and design. As one person put it, "College teaching may be the only skilled profession for which systematic training is neither required nor provided–pizza delivery jobs come with more instruction." See http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/50-examples-of-the...
I am pleased and interested by the somewhat heated exchanges going on and especially because of the focus on online education and which technologies do or might support online teaching and learning.
Online education is of great interest and importance to me. I started working in this field in 1983, and have had the opportunity to help shape it, study it, and I continue to contribute to the field. I come from the education side, and have written some books on this topic. I have had a company that developed online environments to support learning, and the result was a pretty excellent collaborative learning environment software that 16 years later I still use and which students are pretty positive about. However, my company put our dollars into development rather than marketing, and eventually found that the competition had a crappy product but alot of marketing dollars. So, I wound down the company in 2002. The market was primarily educational institutions, schoolboards, etc and they were buying into the 'lms' solution, where learning is viewed as something to be managed and packaged.
Primarily, I am a prof. and I have been teaching online since 1985: I taught one of the very first totally online courses, and it was based on collaborative learning. In fact, online education in the 1980s was almost all about group learning, team project, knowledge building---whether in secondary or tertiary or training education.
Phew...long lead it. But I provide it as a framework to my message which is that: online education can and has served as a major game changer in education, and is likely the key to the 21st century Knowledge Age.
I don't see much reference to that in this discussion.
Most of the comments so far seem to be referencing old paradigm ways of teaching and learning...i.e., lms stuff.
None of the software mentioned has achieved great or even mildly interesting or important learning gains. Mainstream elearning software are mostly associated with groans and frustration and anxiety, not excitement at new ways to teach and learn. Moodle is really a muddle, let's be clear. Like BB, Moodle was not designed nor developed for learning or teaching. Education was an add-on to this 1990's moo (aka mud).
Educationally, Moodle is just a bunch of things added on without rhyme or reason--anything goes, sort of. BB was initially and largely remains an administrative software. This was not about technologies designed to address learning activities but a slap dash kind of commercial "solution" (the fact that Moodle is open source does not, imho grant it dispensation or holiness). It is making a mess of online education and undermining and distracting the field.
Let's focus on learning, which should and could be really exciting and relevant adventures. About inventing! Innovating! Solving problems! ENgaging in Knowledge communities. Addressing realworld conundra! Let's talk about learning theory. WHat learning methods work best? How can we, educators and technology developers) support 21st century pedagogies and discoveries with new technologies?
The 21st century is a new paradigm and it is about Knowledge building. Our learning approaches and technologies need to support collaboration and knowledge building. That vision can help orient us to new ways of learning, to supporting new paradigm learning pedagogies and strategies.
Let's stop kicking around the 20th century can of learning strategies primarily based on 19th century factory-needs and models (lecture halls, rows of student desks bolted to the floor, obedience, memorization, repetition, etc.). BB and Mooooooodle take us backward. They waste time, money and talent.
Its time to innovate and make a difference, and the world of teachers and learners will thank you for investing your time and energy in designing real solutions.
It is a host it yourself website for Universities. It provides a way for teachers to provide lecture notes, give assignments, accept submissions, post grades, have a message board. All of the features are access controlled so only students in the class can see assignments, you only see your grades, etc.
Only it isn't done very well, and the company has a patent on using a website to manage a classroom or some such BS. So they sue rather than fix it.
A corporation; here, it's meant to refer to the Blackboard Learning System, which is Blackboard's course management software. Students can log in and view assignments, readings, etc. that faculty post.
It's closed source and <opinion> a colossal pain in the ass to use.</opinion> The institution I work at recently switched away from it to Moodle, which is the big open-source alternative (which, in the interest of full disclosure, I think is pretty great).
It's a company that pretty much owns the education market, despite their products being nearly universally considered to be harmful^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhorrible.
Edit: I should point out that my knowledge of blackboard is near non-existant, I haven't had to use it in any of my schooling (university in central florida, public education in silicon valley), so I don't have a useful opinion of it.
Blackboard doesn't own the market. There are tons of campuses that are using alternatives, and more than a few that are migrating off of Blackboard onto other alternatives.
I certainly agree that Blackboard is overpriced and somewhat painful to use. I don't use it much. I mainly create my own web pages from scratch, which I find to be about as easy as using BB, and rather more conducive to my aims (which include making most course materials available to the public).
But then there's this:
> It forces, and reinforces, an entirely teacher-centric pedagogical model.
Um ... that assumes that the BB area is the class, which I find rather silly. I use my websites (and BB now & then) to get information to students, including handouts, announcements, solutions, links, and source code. I could do all this on a physical bulletin board, but the paper cost would be excessive, and it would require students to type in source code, instead of simply downloading it.
But my website is not intended to be some collaborative space where students learn together. On the contrary, the model I follow is to provide my students with resources, and allow them to learn as they see fit (together, if they wish; sometimes I require it). After all, high school is over. My students are adults. They run their own lives. And there are plenty of collaborative learning spaces around here. They are called "tables", and they are used a lot.
This is not to say I'm against the online-collaborative idea. Certainly, if someone figures out how to enhance the educational experience with some kind of computerized thingy, then I say more power to them. Let's get lots of start-ups in this area to come up with lots of interesting things. But in the mean time, I don't feel obligated to somehow "manage" my students' total educational experience.
> The very concept of a “learning management system” may itself be wrongheaded.
Oh, certainly. But after all, "learning management system" is just a term invented by marketing people. We don't have to take it to heart.