The Problem with Blackboard 9
Monday, October 19, 2009 by Kelly Sutton This post is part of our ongoing Blackboard Week.
;)
For our first post in our Blackboard Week, we will be giving a state of the union. This post will go over how Blackboard came to be what it is, some of the competition out there and some of the big problems with the software. Throughout the week, we'll be offering up ways to solve these problems.
The Origin Story
Blackboard came to be in 1997. Two guys by the names Stephen Gilfus and Dan Cane started the company CourseInfo, LLC, which would eventually become Blackboard, Inc. Their first product was the Blackboard Learning System, but they have added a few other products since 1997. They have absorbed a few companies during the march to where they are today. Blackboard has been involved with a decent amount of legal issues stemming from patent lawsuits. The Blackboard Learning Management System (LMS) is currently on its ninth iteration.
Today Blackboard has nearly 1,000 employees and are a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: BBBB). In business terms, they appear to be doing very well.
Competitors
Blackboard has its fair share of competitors. Given that the LMS space is not rocket science, we're seeing plenty of new startups enter the area.
- eCollege.com - A "comprehensive, on-demand eLearning solution"
- ANGEL Learning - A statistics gathering and student portfolio management system recently acquired by Blackboard.
- Moodle - Probably the most popular open source LMS (my high school uses it)
- Sakai - A close second to Moodle when it comes to open source solutions
- OLAT - Another open source LMS
- Claroline - An "open source eLearning and eWorking platform"
- Desire2Learn - A fast-growing, sued-by-Blackboard competitor
- JoomlaLMS - A nifty component that can be installed on top of Joomla!, an open-source CMS
- haiku - An LMS in da cloud
(Note: If I've missed one (which I most definitely have), please shoot an email to corrections@hackcollege.com)
Problems
If it's possible for an entire industry to succumb to feature creep, this industry would be it. While doing research into competing platforms, it's obvious that all of these systems are behemoths and are being reviewed as such. For example, edutools.info reviewed eCollege.com and commented that it did not have "Bookmarks" in its "Productivity Tools" toolset. Isn't that what a browser or fancy Firefox extension is for? The problems plaguing current LMSs is not that they don't have enough features, but that the things aren't that useful.
That being said, Blackboard also has its fair share of curable problems, outside of feature creep-related shenanigans.
Different Versions, Different Skill Levels, Many Locations
One of the key problems with Blackboard is that there are many versions of Blackboard in the wild with each university having its own team dedicated to maintaing each system. The same system is installed thousands of times around the country, making it prone to user error through configuration and corner case problems. A common response to features not working on a particular campus is that the on-campus team didn't install it correctly. This leads to a blame game where there is only one loser: the student. This is a problem. Software should be easy to install and maintain, and it doesn't need a team of 30 holding up a fragile system. Blackboard 9 is surprisingly fragile for such a mature system.
This also has some upsides for Blackboard. Because they've inadvertently created a Blackboard community, they can do things like offer training and consulting on how to use/install the product.
While Blackboard offers the Managed Hosting option, many university personnel are still wary of letting data leave the campus (which is no fault of Blackboard's). But university's need to get with the times. A countless number of legal and credit card transactions are performed every day online. I think it's okay to transact with secure information online. The Managed Hosting option is also not cloudlike: someone on Blackboard's end has to set up Blackboard in their end for every school. When I sign up for a GMail account, I don't have to wait for Google to install some software on a server on their end. Boo.
Focus on Useless Features
Blackboard seems very interested in promoting some features that are useless. Blackboard 9 comes with a slew of new features and reasons for upgrading, among them:
- Themes - Themes are not new features, just new skins.
- Blogs and journals - I am all for "interactive dialogs." I think they are great. They should probably take place inside the classroom.
- Connecting with multiple learning environments - If a school is running different pieces of software, that school is stupid. Have LMS import functionality, or implement the popular features of your competitors.
- Facebook integration - Facebook is a time-waster, not a productivity enhancer
- NBC News on Demand - Who needs this?
Teacher-Centric
Blackboard is admittedly educator-centric. From a business standpoint, this makes perfect sense: professors and staff are the ones signing the checks. Any students that complain will merely be shuffled out in four (or five) years. Blackboard has student frustration threshold of four years. This is a problem. I'm in my fifth year.
Simple systems should encourage use. Remember the Milk subliminally encourages me to be productive. Basecamp helps to stay organized and results-oriented. Getting work done and collaborating is nearly effortless.
Blackboard is a chore. Lists don't have simple things like sorting options, but I can start a blog for a class. I am denied access to things that I can see exist (why not just not display it)? I can change the color of the answers of a discussion post, but if I accidentally reload the page the text itself is gone. Teachers praise the system for the ease of use, but the same is not true for the students.
A Messy System
One of my peeves in analyzing Web apps is the structure of its URLs. While it may seem trivial (people stop caring once a URL is past a certain length), a URL can tell you plenty about the internal structure of the system.
For example, the URL for the homepage of my database systems class is:
https://mylmuconnect.lmu.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_151_1%26url%3D
There are many things wrong with this URL. For the most part, we can say that this system was designed in 2002, or it at least adheres to that mentality. There is an awful lot of useless information contained within the URL and the spaces aren't prettified. Shouldn't my tab_tab_group_id be associated with my user? For example, Facebook remembers (too) many things about me, but its home page URL is facebook.com/home.php. Simple, elegant, bookmarkable.
My databases class url should look like:
http://mylmuconnect.lmu.edu/2009/fall/cmsi486/section1
or
http://mylmuconnect.lmu.edu/class?year=2009&course=cmsi486§ion=1
This might seem vain, but the structure of a URL can (sometimes) tell you a lot about the organization of a system. Blackboard is clearly disorganized.
Follows Old Standards
Blackboard uses frames. Yuck. The application is not "RESTful"; state information is not contained within a URL which means I can't bookmark specific pages of specific courses. Blackboard pages also do not validate correctly by W3C standards.
What else irks you about Blackboard? Have you experienced any problems not found on this list? Let's get a discussion going in the comments.
Reader Comments (24)
On top of that huge list of fails, there is its lack of support for Firefox (may have been fixed more in newer versions) but in older versions it hates Firefox and often refuses to work.
Also Sharepoint, while not meant to be a LMS is often used as one, and could be added to the list. I still think moodle is best
Has anyone tried to use Blackboard with Chrome? How about Opera? Just wondering. . .
Thanks, HackCollege, for keeping up with this topic. I have used both moodle and blackboard, and moodle is clearly superior both from a student and from a professor standpoint. Blackboard is the Microsoft Word of online class tools -- many unneeded or marginally useful functions, poorly documented for the user, slow to operate, too many cross-linked items which confuses the issue of which attachments are current, not enough integration with other useful software. "Affluenza" at its worst.
IMHO.
My university is still running Blackboard 7.3. >.<
I really hate Blackboard with a passion. It creates more problems than it solves, especially when professors try to use it for anything more than basic functions. There are so many better ways to do pretty much everything Blackboard does.
Also, because of Blackboard's frames, the new version (which my university is beta testing with a few courses) instructs Safari users to change their security settings to "Allow All Cookies" in order to use the Blackboard Scholar module. This is bad form on so many levels…
You've got a pretty good summary of the LMS marketplace, but I have to take issue with two of the things you list as worthless features. They aren't worthless for online courses, but I think it illustrates why people think Blackboard sucks - the product is rather schizophrenic. Should it be a replacement for a traditional campus classroom? Should it complement a lecture or seminar classroom? Should it facilitate student projects?
You've got the important point - there has to be a way to have meaningful and collaborative dialogue. The blog/journal tools aren't ideal for most situations, but probably do work for some. I think the reason it's being touted is because people still think "Blogs" are a fresh web 2.0 technology. Many of us in instructional technology gave up trying to get faculty to use blogs in 2005.
Would that we could have a single LMS work for every program, every course, every discipline and every inane policy, but that's not going to happen in my lifetime. This is especially true for larger universities where college A's curriculum relies heavily on one toolset, whereas program B needs to enroll students who are not allowed to go in to the main LMS because of policy issues.
One additional benefit of this functionality is that you can run your old LMS inside the new one, and faculty and staff can migrate courses and content to the new LMS on a relaxed time line.
Overall, I can't agree with you more: The loser in this equation most times is the student. I suppose we should be going for the best student experience (you are our customers, after all), but student groups aren't as well organized as the faculty, and stories of students choosing specific schools based on the LMS are nonexistent.
@afreed
Regarding the blogging: I think there are certain classes that could benefit from blogging (journalism courses, for example), but there are many platforms out there that could do simple blogs much better than Blackboard could ever hope to, namely Tumblr and Wordpress.
Regarding the toolset: It might seem weird, but I feel like these LMS companies might be trying to convince colleges A and B that such features are actually required. If convinced, the colleges buy the new versions. The problem set of organizing a school's common information is tractable and much less complicated than people make it out to be. Any policy issues preventing information from being shared represent fundamental issues of the school's organization and (probably) a bloated, bureaucratic chain of command.
Regarding migration: A true competitor will import its opponents. Again it's a translation and import. Not rocket science. There should be no timeline for faculty migrations; it should be entirely automated and instant.
My University uses Desire2Learn and I have used it several times to download course content and twice for online classes. Some professors uses it and others don't. I have heard about Blackboard but never have experienced using it.
We've held off deploying BB9 due to the well documented issues. I've a large number of gripes with Blackboard though and I'll start with the simplest.
As an academic, the minimum number of clicks for me to upload a document or presentation is 6. I'd rather Blackboard focused on integration with an Office suite, rather than Facebook and iPhones.
As a student, I'm bored of going to Blackboard to find out nothing's changed. I'd rather receive notification as and when something happens. (And this is fairly simple to do, we've done it as a test to prove its techinically possible, it took a little over 15 minutes to design 3 solutions).
2 simple ones for starters - I'll stop there before it turns into a rant!
I have posted on here before about the shortcomings of Blackboard, so I will save you all from a rehash. However, as far as being Teacher-Centric and the claims of being great for the teachers, I don't know where that is coming from. As a student, about half of my professors at one time or another have expressed downright anger and frustration towards Blackboard, even cursing it to hell in front of a 300 student class. Don't think it is just students that have problems with Blackboard, teachers have even MORE problems because technologically unfit people are trying to use a system that is way to complex and bloated. Even last week my professor accidentally allowed the answer key for an upcoming test to be visible to ALL users of the course, when he was just trying to send it to the other professor, course administrator, and the TAs. It was on Blackboard for a good hour before a TA realized his mistake. Needless to say he had to completely rewrite the test. Granted this is user error, but I can almost guarantee the true fault lies within the complicated user management of Blackboard. That professor is so frustrated that he has sworn off Blackboard forever, only using it to submit grades. So is Blackboard really Teacher-Centric? I am sure it tries to be, but it fails miserably.
My University just switched from an old version of blackboard to moodle. They reviewed a bunch of LMS based on benifits (cost didn't come into it). They did get student feedback, trialed moodle for a semester on 10% of the classes and both teachers and students generally liked it. Moodle isn't perfect the way they have set it up anyway, but at least it gets the basics right. It also has iCal integration.
Blackboard gave me endless session errors, javascript links which I couldn't bookmark or share, browser problems etc.
I just stay away from Blackboard. I cringe when a teacher says something is on blackboard, especially quizzes or discussions. Even just downloading PDFs can be a pain at times. And like many others have said, more often than not teachers avoid/curse it more than students.
I don't know if this has been done, but perhaps this could work better if a desktop client is made that syncs using the same principles but is taken out of a browser environment. I have to think that's easier in a number of ways in terms of getting around browser/web difficulties like frames and URLs mentioned above. Though it does provide a much more difficult upgrade scenario since it can't be done on the backend alone.
And I guess you can't access it from anywhere, but maybe there could be a skeleton online version for mobile access. It really just is dumbfounding that in such an era of technology and such great software out there, that this particular feat hasn't been well achieved.
It's interesting and very helpful to see this type of dialog among students and educators and to know that people are sharing ideas about what does/n't work.
As someone affiliated with Haiku LMS, I feel compelled to respond to @afreed's comment "It might seem weird, but I feel like these LMS companies might be trying to convince colleges A and B that such features are actually required." That may be the case with other companies and I understand the sentiment having been a student in other LMS as well, but know that Haiku works very hard and very closely with teachers to learn what they and their students really need and what would just be feature bloat.
Oops - I erroneously credited @afreed with the comment I responded to. I should have quoted Kelly Sutton. My apologies!
@John
I don't know how it's possible to suggest that this professor's mistake is the result of a bloated and complicated system. If the professor left his answer key on his office door for another professor pick up, do you blame the university for its complicated inter-office mail policy? He screwed up--plain and simple.
I've stated this before...I'll state it again. Why do some many people have unrealistic expectations on how technology actually works. As a Bb Admin, if there were actually as many "system errors" that people claim, our servers would be on fire.
One of the more interesting LMS startups I've tumbled onto is Instructure... unlike Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Moodle and Sakai, the focus seems to be on linking to course materials in their natural habitat (i.e. blogs, youtube, etc) rather than pulling everything into the system.
@BbAdmin
I dunno - a 404 error or session error page results in a smaller query than the page the student was trying to get to. It might be all the system errors that are giving your processors a break. :)
Wow. Its as if people were paid to bad mouth Bb. I have actually tested most of the LMS's listed on the page. By far Bb is the best. Sure it has lots of tools but you can hide tools you don't use. Usually when I see someone having an issue with Bb it is operator error and not Bb.
To each is own I guess. Our campus will never give up Bb and our students are better for it.
I dunno - a 404 error or session error page results in a smaller query than the page the student was trying to get to. It might be all the system errors that are giving your processors a break. :)
Super great read. Really!
If only I had a penny for each time I came here.. Incredible writing.
I am currently facilitating two Executive MBA online modules. As I was sitting down to grade papers held in our Turnitin account within Blackboard, I checked my email. Waiting for me was this message:
"Blackboard’s Virginia datacenter is experiencing network issues causing the system to be down. Blackboard is working to resolve the issue. We will update you when the system becomes available. Unfortunately we do not have an ETA."
What fun. I will post again later with details of what transpires.
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