First, the user interface is designed as if the programmers were incentivized to maximize the number of clicks required to get anywhere.
Second, it has the responsiveness of continental drift.
Third, editing and formatting text is an exercise in torture. When I want to delete text that I am writing, half of the time, the delete key won't work (I'm exaggerating, but not joking). Formatting of text is quasi-random. Want red-colored text? That works about 90% of the time for me. The other 10% will give me gray text (This time, not exaggerating). If you are brave, you can edit your text as raw HTML, but, my God, you'd better bring the anti-hypertension pills, because the HTML will blast you with a tsunami of <span> elements. Sometimes the <span> elements (unnecessarily) surround individual characters, sometimes they surround _parts_ of words.
Third, it is nigh impossible to set useful defaults. Why can't the due dates for assignments be defaulted to the end of the day instead of the current hour and minute? Do you honestly think that I would ever want my assignment to be due at 4:33 PM?
Fourth, it tries to do too many things. I already have email. I don't need Blackboard's email functionality getting in the way.
I could go on (for a while), but it's time for those blood pressure meds.
Oh my god. WTF has the US Patent Office done to itself?
They must have been asleep at the wheel, and granted them this patent. They must have gotten starry eyed with all the wizardry of a web browser back in 2000, that they thought, this was a new and compelling technology.
The description of this patent, is just for a web site application, that will distribute assignments to students. The idea behind it is really not any more different than the GUI programs that were written on Windows 95 like the AOL program. They just splashed some fancy new words like "Uniform Resource Locator" and "World Wide Web".
This is another valid reason why software patents should be abolished. This is pure insanity. This is government and bureaucratic corruption of the highest order.
I think the patent office has absolved itself from all responsibility and shifted it to the courts. This mostly hurts small businesses that want to avoid court as much as possible.
You'd think more people in leadership positions would try getting end-users involved in acquisition decisions. There seems to be a significant bias against doing that sort of thing in large organizations.
In general, if an organization runs more efficiently, it reflects well on the leadership of the organization. Exactly how that benefits a given leader in an organization varies greatly, but if the leader's incentives aren't aligned with the organization's goals, that tends to lead to an unsuccessful organization.
An organization that gets its workers good tools that improve their productivity rather than wasting their time will get more done with the same resources. It will also have an easier time with hiring and retention. Even if there aren't direct pay bonuses or similar incentives, this will likely make life easier for the leadership.
And that's not even getting in to the basic human decency that you should care about other people.
I was lucky to meet a guy who is running a company that id working on an extremely polished alternative, called Edubase. (I’m not affiliated.)
It seems both the students and the teachers love it. And I can see why. He demoed it to me and for example for Math exams it supported equivalent form solutions. That’s definitely not the trivial kind of stuff. And the list went on, both the capabilities were off the chart and the user experience was top polished. It’s already used on universities and in some private companies. Definitely check it out if you need a solution from the space.
Thanks! EduBase is both a complete LMS and a pluggable exam/quizzing tool for existing LMSes (like Canvas). EduBase Quiz features automatic scoring, grading and reports with lots of question types, including matrices and mathematical expressions, LaTeX support, easier, centralized content management with access control and cheating prevention tools. This makes it even perfect for STEM subjects (but not limited to them)! Our engine also supports question parameters (always changing numbers in texts and formulas), taking practicing and examining to the next level.
Thanks for sharing, and I just want to say I love Edubase! As an adjunct frustrated with Blackboard, I basically went rogue and started using Edubase for my courses, converting a few faculty along the way.
My favorite part of Quiz is how easy it is to set up special answer types, such as matrices, equation editors, etc. And the editor is a dream compared to Blackboard.
The Blackboard -> Edubase Classroom switch resulted in 80% fewer student support requests (like trouble turning in assignments, questions about grade details, etc.). And with competitive pricing to Blackboard, it was a no-brainer.
"Second, it has the responsiveness of continental drift."
That's just poetry. Well written and I can only fully agree on Blackboard. Any usability of this software comes from the consumer remembering how to get to places likes it's a GTA cheat code. Just a random sequence that you can only find if you know.
Canvas is for sure much better, but has its own issues. It marketed itself as the anti Blackboard, but it's begun sagging under its own bloat, and feature development slowed way down. It doesn't help that Instructure just got bought by a private equity firm, and fired a bunch of their employees.
Piling on the Blackboard is horrible train, my kids school system uses Blackboard, Fairfax County, VA, FCPS. Its true awfulness was on full display when the school system tried to switch to FT remote schooling back in the Spring. Parents, students, and teachers all clamored to not use Blackboard. Administration did not listen. It did not go well. From the time schools shut down until the end of the school year it was essentially no school. The Director of IT for the FCPS took the fall, but Blackboard was at root the problem. Blackboard tried to shunt all blame onto FCPS. I suppose in a sense FCPS was at fault, in that they bought the steaming pile of crap in the first place.
> Director of IT for the FCPS took the fall, but Blackboard was at root the problem
Rightly so. The Director of IT should have known better than to push a flawed product hard on parents/teachers, for months. I'm wondering what Blackboard's sales practices are like that they can get school's IT people on their side!
I wonder if Blackboard is any better since 2016 when Bill Ballhaus took over as CEO. I met him when I was an intern at SRA International and was beyond impressed in my brief time there. Besides his obviously impressive technical and management credentials, this was a titan of industry who remembered my name and always initiated conversation whenever I ran into him. We also had the same car (a GMC Yukon), although his was older.
I suppose I could just have been subject to his charm and I suppose this could be a ridiculous heuristic, but I definitely have a lot more confidence in a company (and its software) when the CEO drives a practical car and is kind to the interns. Hope Blackboard gets better under him just because it’s so deeply engrained in educational institutions.
My university has been a Blackboard customer for awhile, and so I've used it since 2011. My sense is that the software has gotten marginally better in some ways, marginally worse in others, and overall still sucks.
They redesigned it, in what is apparently an attempt to make the software more usable from a mobile phone. So (on a laptop), less stuff appears on the screen at once. This was billed, as usual, as an "improvement".
Also -- and quite frankly, this is ridiculous -- when I need to merge two sections of my course, I need to ask IT to do it for me. (Example: a big calculus lecture, which is broken up into multiple TA sections that have different course numbers.) It used to be that I could just do it myself, no problem. Then the option silently went away. I was informed that we used a plug-in (??) made by a third-party vendor (????) that enabled individual instructors to merge sections, but the third-party vendor went out of business and so this is no longer possible.
Makes me speculate that the codebase is a giant pile of spaghetti.
Even more is that many schools were suddenly served a huge plate of spaghetti– or a metaphorically similar type of grain– and in a time crunch to understand how to dish it out to their students.
I worked at SRA for many years and Bill destroyed what was once the best corporate culture I had ever experienced. Among his accomplishments was introducing stacked ranking. Under his management SRA became just another body shop.
I guess I can't blame him too much. That is exactly what Providence Equity brought him in to do.
If I were sampling perceptions of Bill's effect on the company, I'd obviously place a higher value on your experience than my own short time at SRA. Didn't know about the stacked ranking thing; I'm not a fan of it (and I'm glad people have started to believe Jack Welch's implementation of stacked ranking at GE wasn't such a brilliant move that should be copied elsewhere).
But if I were CEO of a big company one day, I'd definitely want to interact with the rank-and-file the same way Bill interacted with me.
Gradefinity (https://gradefinity.com) is a kind of Blackboard + Scantron LMS alternative that is really targeted in terms of what problems it intends to solve (in-person and online tests, gradebooks, and communication).
Full disclosure: I built it-- I'm very receptive to feedback and feature suggestions though and am looking for pilot schools if anyone is interested in shaping the platform/knows someone who might be.
Some questions: does Gradefinity have the ability for teachers to publish learning modules for collaboration purposes? And orchestrate tasks among themselves? For example two teachers both writing up 200 vocabulary words to make a 400 vocabulary words quiz - can that be merged? Sharing content both between teachers and between classes is extremely important and seems to be underserved by Blackboard. Also do you model classes as being able to span terms, i.e. a two-semester class is a single entity?
In its current form, no-- but the content collaboration and task management you're describing seem reasonably straightforward to implement.
Courses as they exist now are unaware of semesters or terms, and are only tied to the students enrolled. So if the students enrolled in a particular class don't change (or change very little) between two semesters, you could continue use the same course for a 2nd semester if you wanted, or you could import your students into a new class and name the new class "Class Semester 2" for example.
I'm happy to work on features to fit your use case if you're interested in offering suggestions or are looking for a better solution than your current one; my email is brad [at] gradefinity [dot] com and I'm generally pretty available to talk about features/suggestions/demo stuff, etc.
We use Moodle since we can not afford the privilege of paying a lot of money for such a crappy experience. I notice a lot of other schools went with Canvas for the same reason.
Ugh, this brings back terrible memories from grad school. It was horrible as a student, horrendous as a TA, and that one time I filled in for my advisor, it was a nightmare!
Wow, surprised to find this and I totally agree. I've had to deal with it for a remote math course I've been meandering through. It's so unpleasant, and the materials are not very mobile, with nested iframes and such. I figured it would be a more obscure reference.
It's by no means pretty, but my university is using it and from a students perspective it's working decently well, and better than the systems from other universities I've attended. It also handled the increased load from the online semester quite well. Not sure how much customization they did on top of it, and judging from the screenshots on the official website it's definitely not the latest version.
We're building Eduflow (https://www.eduflow.com) – a light-weight LMS born out of some of the same frustration aired in this thread: LMSs are to enterprisey and seem to be designed with somebody else than the actual end-user in mind.
(Plus, we were in YC batch S17 with the predecessor to Eduflow – Peergrade)
First, the user interface is designed as if the programmers were incentivized to maximize the number of clicks required to get anywhere.
Second, it has the responsiveness of continental drift.
Third, editing and formatting text is an exercise in torture. When I want to delete text that I am writing, half of the time, the delete key won't work (I'm exaggerating, but not joking). Formatting of text is quasi-random. Want red-colored text? That works about 90% of the time for me. The other 10% will give me gray text (This time, not exaggerating). If you are brave, you can edit your text as raw HTML, but, my God, you'd better bring the anti-hypertension pills, because the HTML will blast you with a tsunami of <span> elements. Sometimes the <span> elements (unnecessarily) surround individual characters, sometimes they surround _parts_ of words.
Third, it is nigh impossible to set useful defaults. Why can't the due dates for assignments be defaulted to the end of the day instead of the current hour and minute? Do you honestly think that I would ever want my assignment to be due at 4:33 PM?
Fourth, it tries to do too many things. I already have email. I don't need Blackboard's email functionality getting in the way.
I could go on (for a while), but it's time for those blood pressure meds.