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.
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)