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.
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.