Google Docs to Blackboard, "Your days are numbered"
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 by Kelly Sutton
Is it true? Did Christmas come early? I read TechCrunch yesterday morning and just about couldn't believe it. Google has launched a home page for students (kind of, see picture). The page is a landing page for Google Docs, with Google Doc templates for RAs, TAs and other student leaders. Even in the first few seconds, Google is much more in tune with the student population than Blackboard.
The simple landing page also points out a few other applications for college living.
Let us not forget that before Facebook, Microsoft Word was the defining software of education. A big part of college life revolves around essay-generating efficiency. Over a few decades, Word became the norm. While Microsoft Word transitions to the online space to cater to modern students' needs, Google has come in as the sleeper.
Surprisingly, many students still have no idea of the existence of Google Docs. I have a debate tomorrow morning and I insisted that our group use Google Docs to organize ourselves. The other 3 group members had never used nor seen Google Docs, but are already converts.
Google is also taking another tack and attacking from a top-down approach. The tried-and-true GMail system has many universities jumping off their own in-house email servers. LMU recently switched to a Google-controlled backend. Now I can actually check my school email. Notre Dame and other schools are doing the same.
I'm guessing that it's only a matter of time before Google starts stepping on more toes of Blackboard's. Online, concurrent word processing is a difficult task to solve (Google Docs). Providing a database of course documents, a forum and a syllabus is not (Blackboard). Google could turn these things out overnight.
If I were Blackboard, I would be shaking in my boots.
What do you think? Will Google edge out Blackboard? Do you, for one, welcome our new Google overlords?
Reader Comments (14)
i would be so happy to gt rid of blackboard, its so big and slow and out of date. i'm rooting for you, google docs
Blackboard is dead. It is bloated, doesn't meet the current needs of students and teachers, and is constantly having service problems (at least at my school). I already use Blogger and Google Docs as a TA to spread class announcements and host class documents in case Blackboard goes down (which it already has for 3 straight days this semester).
The templates are a great idea for Google, if they made it easy to upload a CSV file of students and automatically fed it into a grade tracking spreadsheet, that would be amazing and a time saver by itself, let alone the easy hosting of documents and ability to also have mass collaboration with students.
My school uses blackboard....I hate it. ANYWAYS I am a google fanatic, I use it for EVERYTHING! I tried to convert a project group of mine to google docs but it was a big failure unfortunately. I do know our department has switched the faculty email to google, and I can imagine it is just a matter of time till everyone gets some :)
ALL HAIL GOOGLE.
My school switched to Gmail and has been pushing all of Google's Apps. I've been a Google convert forever and would welcome any sort of effort they put out to kill Blackboard. I can't believe nothing better has come along yet to convince schools to switch.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: BLACKBOARD BLOWS!! IMHO, it can't die soon enough. If they keep it around, it should be renamed "bleakboard" or "blecch-board".
I think this is a revolutionary step, google are going to make library access so simple, life so easy! Does this mean when studying at uni we won't have to make a trip to study in the library every other day?
UGH...I'm looking forward to the day that I never have to visit Blackboard EVER again! I LOVE Google! I wish more of my fellow students used Google Docs! It would be SO much easier to collaborate on projects instead of e-mailing documents in circles!
What about controlled online quizzes and such? Those are required for some of my classes that utilize Blackboard. Can Google Docs recreate that feature?
You could use the "Forms" feature in Google Docs. It dumps right into a spreadsheet :)
I would love nothing more than for Google to replace Blackboard. BB has become a complete mess.
Full disclosure, I'm a designer at Desire2Learn, an eLearning software provider.
The software category you are referring to here is a learning management system (LMS). Learning and teaching online are very complex tasks; while student-centred content creation is an extremely important part of that process, it's actually a small slice of the pie. It's also a very progressive, complex, UI-research-intensive slice of the pie.
As far pie slices go, the feature list for complete LMSs is (overly) huge. How do you grade things? How do you import student information from an SIS? What about rubrics? Course content creation? Discussion forums? Group management? Collaborate with just your group? Grade those conversations as a TA? How about managing institutional permissions? Registration, deregistration, late registration, keeping track of all of that?
Desire2Learn as a single platform, does this complete set of things better than any other LMS or major software offering.
Yet we are (very) aware of the challenge of keeping up with the state of the art of document creation, collaboration, networking and other things where Google Docs, Zoho, and others are doing amazing work. After all, many of us are users of that software ourselves :) It's intimidating at times, yet the prospect of potentially integrating these services into our platform is a worthy challenge.
One unrelated point - Not everyone is keen on being subject to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, nor the Patriot Act, specifically when academic information is concerned. Self-hosted options are very important to global customers.
With thanks,
D
Our school uses Angel which is now owned by Blackboard. I don't use Angel but I found a great use for Google Docs, reference desk statistics. I wrote about it at http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/2009/09/18/finally-a-use-for-google-docs/
I use google docs everyday and love it. I'm glad it replaced Blackboard.