For those of you who don’t know, many universities (especially in the US) offer courses leading to bona fide degrees online; and there are various programs that are used to enable professors to give instruction and to grade student work.
Among them is BlackBoard, which is aptly named. Chalk in classrooms when out of fashion years ago. First came whiteboards, and then electronic ones which could print what was written on them.
It’s aptly named because although its many problems have been identified, the company has refused to correct them. Here’s what a colleague has to say about the most recent edition.
“[T]here is NO CHOICE but to copy in order to have the material display properly in the course shell. If you attach a file, then students have to click on the folder link, then the file link. Too much clicking around.
“In the previous version of Blackboard, all you had to do was attach a file, select the proper display you wanted, and the material opened right in the lesson window (no file links cluttering up the screen and no extra clicking around to open the file).
“But in this always-very-problematic-for-more-than-a-year-now-and-STILL-not-fixed version of BB, this does not work. So one has no choice but to copy/paste. UGH! What a monumental waste of valuable time.
“ESPECIALLY since nothing copies properly and you have to go back through the material, line by line, and FIX all the errors from the copy/paste process.
“And oh — all those OTHER snafus that I wrote about several times in the last year? NOTHING of that has been fixed.
“Blackboard has made design work a major drag, a most unpleasant experience, and way too much wasted time. It used to be much simpler than this. I have been pushing my college to dump Blackboard and go with something else. For pete’s sake even Moodle is easier to work in than BB and I am not a Moodle fan either, although I understand why colleges use it — it’s very cheap. But you get what you pay for. Except in the case of BB. They’ve got some serious tech issues with the course platform.
“Back to wasting my time in BB today when I could be doing other more constructive tasks.”
The irony in all this is that when my colleague complained the last time, BlackBoard invited her to participate in a conference call so she could make suggestions on how to improve it. But, as you’ve seen from her comments, nothing changed.
You have to wonder why that is. What’s the point in asking your customers what problems they’re experiencing if you have no intention of fixing them? Perhaps this company is satisfied with “passing” work, rather than earning an ‘A.’
