The Blackboard Strait-Jacket

We continue to be stuck with the old frame set-up of Blackboard.  There are literally hundreds, probably thousands, of digital apps out there, but we have Blackboard and it's ten or so features. 

Content In, Garbage out

That might be BB. One minute I am happily adding tests in some BB courses; the next minute that option disappears from the menus. I have no control over the users in my courses (can't delete, can't add) - I can't even get a list of them. You would think that for the amount of the contract that our state system has with BB that you could at least get some things that work.

Blackboard and the Veil of Darkness

I quote from one of my recent posts elsewhere;
'Finally, while I am no big proponent of Blackboard for various reasons, one of the big problems that I have with it is the veil of secrecy that drops over everyone's courses. It is almost as if we are back to the secrecy that surrounds me teaching in a campus environment. If there are great innovative assignments or technology being used, who can find out about it. It is also hard to share information across courses. One of the great advantages of the web is its universal access and availability, and we can see what is being done in other courses. The MIT open courses, while not a great example, are a kind of good example of what can be done out there.

New Semester; Same Death Wish for Blackboard

It is unbelievable how much stupid, time-consuming work BB brings with it as a result of poor design.
Thousands of people around the country have to spend their days fixing things, and entering data, poof. Look I followed all the nice directions about setting up new courses for the fall, copy, delete, import; but, wait, some things, likes tests, for some reason don't get copied. Now it is damage control and another ten hours in front of the computer trying to figure out things. It is nice for administrators to laud Blackboard, how it allows faculty to set up "online" "learning" environments to facilitate 24-7 education. It would be nice if some admins actually sat and tried to use BB for some time.

New Blackboard Not Much Better Than the Old Blacboard

The more that they seem to do with Blackboard, the less it seems that technology is saving us any time.
The course copy process is a nightmare; a simple thing such as entering grades could take forever when you get the "saving" prompt; there is no way that I can sort my courses on my "personalized" BB home page, but you can do blogs now!

Hey, We're Getting a New Blackboard

Joy, of joys. We have been told that we are updating from Blackboard 8 to Blackboard 9. This, of course, means that the whole system must go down, and when it comes back up, everything will be new and different. Just can't wait to see what tricks the BB folks will play on us this time, and what new features will be available!

Is Teaching with Blackboard Teaching?

Been wondering about that. I have a lot of colleagues who spend considerable amount of time in the classroom, working with students, developing new assignments and activities, personalizing their instruction. But then they teach online with Blackboard. They create reading assignments from a textbook, set up some multiple-choice exams that are automatically graded by Blackboard, maybe have students look through some textbook-publisher-provided Powerpoints, and, oh, yes, have students post to one another on an online forum. Is that college-level instruction?

Students Love Blackboard

Informal polling of those students using Blackboard at our college reveals that almost 50% of those students "love" Blackboard. Maybe BB 10.1 will be better.

New BB 8.0 Sets New Standards for Un-Usability

Well, we haven't even started using a new upgrade of BB at our college--8.0 in this case--and people are already praising it to the heavens, especially the the newly-redesigned "Grade Center." Look, I wrote about this in a previous post. One of the main problems with BB is that is tries to span the teaching scale from grade 1 to college, and to do that, as is obvious, it tries to pack too much garbage into the overall package. Some of these grading features are perfect for a fourth grade teacher; not so for a college instructor, and not needed! It would be smarter if the BB team had targeted versions of BB for specific ed environments.

Even More questions about Blackboard

Just realized that my son's second grade class has access to Blackboard, and so do the fifth graders (where homework assignments from the teacher are supposed to be posted). They use Blackboard in the Middle School, and it is used in the High School (where students can post and submit assignments). And we are supposed to use it on the college level. Now, someone please tell me, how this BB CMS is appropriate across all of these educational levels; is it that brilliantly-designed with so many options that can be tailored to the individual learning needs of vastly different audiences? Hardly!

Still More Blackboard Badness

Well, try and do any batch-type action in Blackboard, and I promise that you will go through a lot of extra steps. For example, I had to inactivate some students from one of my Blackboard course gradebooks. This involved going to control panel, list students, check their properties, and then make the appropriate change to "not available." This had to be done student by student, with a lot of screens, submits, confirms. I could not just go down a single list of students and change the properties and submit it all. These folks no nothing about productive use of an instructor's time.

More of Blackboard as bad, bad, bad

Continuing my previous post:
1. It is very difficult to link to anything within Blackboard.
2. If you don't think like the Blackboard design team--most of whom I'm guessing have little actual educational experience--than nothing will be intuitive about the system. Look, I've used a lot of Blackboard. Try and do something simple. For example, enter a grade for a student in the gradebook; it is a lot more difficult a process than you would think. I've had to write it up with about ten lines of directions for some of my adjunct instructors. Try and make a suggestion about what would work better, forget it. Changing the corners and colors of the buttons does work well.
3. Why doesn't Blackboard recognize that I am an instructor when I log in so that I have the tools that I need as an instructor available to me from my carefully chosen menu buttons?
4. I also think that BB is close to being illegal by seeming to protect instructional materials from perusal and use by the citizens of the state that have paid for those materials.
5. BB destroys the entire premise of the web which is the free access and sharing of materials across all disciplines and boundaries. If I create something for one of my history courses, other students in other courses can have access to those materials and use them if they wish. They can learn! The web is great at fostering collaboration; but not BB because you can't get to or share anything in there unless you have the magic password.

Blackboard, let me count the ways that it is bad, bad and bad

1. It uses an archaic frame-page set up that was long ago abandoned by most web designers. With the current way that BB run, you get about 30-40% of a computer screen (in the target area) to design with. Boy, that is real exciting! You can really do a lot with graphics and images in a 400x400 pixel box.
2. Blackboard depersonsalizes (sic) the educational experience. When you take classes in person at any college in this country, every time you step into a different professor's classroom, you experience a different learning environment (some are good; some are not so good), but all are different. Everyone teaches slightly differently from their colleagues, even with the same course. Well, Blackboard aims for uniformity of expression' although the BB people do allow you to change the color and style of the buttons. Wow, that makes for a different classroom experience.
3. It is ugly. Enough said; oops, maybe I should say BB is really, really ugly. There is no aesthetic sensibility about it.
4. The BB setup also rewards those instructors who don't want to go beyond the technological requirements of being able to create and upload a Word document. The web and the "cloud" have a lot more potential than a black-and-white, text document.