I'm posting this to see what comes of it. Maybe someone who works for Blackboard will find it and get to work. Maybe they're already at work (please, please)...
Blackboard is neat--if you don't know anything else. I'm hoping they will make some major upgrades to their stuff in the days to come. Several courses at IWU use it now. But if I'm ever involved in starting a new program, I will be desperate to search options in this area.
First, though, let me mention two strengths Blackboard has over some other educational software:
1. You can do grades on it.
2. You can give quizzes and tests on it.
These are really great features especially for professors, and being able to watch your grade is a really neat thing for students as well.
Now for my down side list so far:
1. It isn't visual--it's all text oriented. It's not like the internet--not icon oriented. It's like a TXT file versus a DOC file. You don't click on pictures; you click on a bunch of words. No wonder science and math types seem to like it--it has no aesthetic appeal whatsoever.
2. It's not built for community (a second blip on the science and math types). It's one course oriented. There are no common community spaces for everyone in a program or in a community. It is a very left brain logical: course 1, course 2.
3. You can't have multiple windows open at a time. This is my biggest pragmatic complaint. If you are writing something in one area and need to look at something in another, you have to close and go back, then reopen. Better write it down, because if you forget what you looked at before you can get it into the other place, then you have to close everything and go back to the first place, then come back to the second place.
4. You have to close, and close, and close. Yes, alright already, I'm wanting to close.
5. Even though it is text oriented, the text space is fairly confined, embedded. You can't enlarge it to the whole screen. This again fits with the cold feel of it--it's two dimensional, not three dimensional.
6. You can't attach multiple files. If you want to post two things for the class, you have to make two completely different posts.
I may return to this from time to time, both with further strengths I discover and further weaknesses...
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Once again this showed up as a Google News Alert in my inbox, since you used the full name of IWU.
I don't know how much APS uses it here. The traditional side is currently dabbling with it "on the side."
I think it is used at a lot of big name universities. IWU was an early adopter because it's on the leading edge of online teaching. But I don't know whether Blackboard is still the best or not?
I also don't know the other options. One tip for you, Ken, that I use for my class is to use Mozilla Firefox when using blackboard... you can open other windows/tabs really easily with that... then I just work off of 15 or 20 differently student submissions at the same time, pop in the grade on the first tab, then close the tab that had the submission in it. Works like a charm.
-David
(PS - although I now notice that the new Explorer has stolen the firefox tabs idea, although I haven't had an online class since fall to try it out with)
I'm using this post to continue to post both pros and cons of our version of Blackboard as I discover them. I found out there are actually some more expensive versions that might take care of some of these.
The next inferiority I want to mention has to do with archiving. In First Class, you simply click and drag to the archive icon and you're done.
In Blackboard, you have to go into archive, then click on each specific thing you want to archive. These came up on my screen in alphabetical order--not in terms of the individual threads!!! That means I had to go one by one trying to figure out whether it was old discussion or discussion that was still going on!!!
And of course I had to click and click and click to open and close all these things.
A positive of Blackboard is the ability to email the whole class. I don't think First Class has this feature. But... if you don't want the email to go to everyone including site administrators, you have to once again click individual boxes corresponding to the students (I suppose I could do the extra effort of putting them all in a group so I can email them by group, but this is exactly what I just said--extra effort). If I hit "all users" on the email, then there is no way to delete individuals in the send line. In First Class, as in all normal email, I could delete individual names just by highlighting them.
Who came up with this dinosaur?
Another complaint: if you've read something, you can't (or I haven't figured out how) to make it "unread." Other programs (e.g., Outlook) allow you to put something you have read back in bold so you can deal with it again later.
I tried to send an email to a class using the Blackboard email to class function. Normally this is an improvement over First Class, because I don't think FC has an email to class function.
But today I tried to attach a large PDF file to the email to the class and the wimpy Blackboard buckled. I had to start all over and send the PDF through an alternative route.
Down with Blackboard!
By the way, I am not alone:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=I+hate+blackboard&btnG=Google+Search
Depending upon which version you are using, you can mark things unread (among other tricks). In your forum there should be a button in the upper right that says "show options". Or you can click the red triangle in the middle.
As David Drury said, you can see multiple windows. Just right click the link and choose new tab or new window.
And I hate the extra clicks too.
I totally agree, with point 6. Not being able to attach multiple files at once is a real miss. I become furious just thinking about the time lost by that excessive clicking.
Anyway, 120 more files to attach.
Once again I have typed an email to a class from Blackboard (as usual without bold or italics or all the things that make for good communication—Blackboard doesn’t do HTML). I no longer even try to send PDF files—I have never successfully sent a PDF by way of Blackboard after multiple attempts (notice the italics I cannot use with Blackboard emails). But today study notes for a final have, yes, dropped into that great oblivion I call Blackboard. After I send this rant, I will have to type it in all over again.
Wasn’t Blackboard really designed to accompany the traditional classroom, not to be the classroom! (note again the italics—only advanced programs like Outlook can do things like this) I swear I will design supplemental sites of my own to accompany any MDiv classes I teach if we stick with Blackboard, just so that my classes will have color and three dimensions and links.
Pleadingly,
Ken
P.S. Although I had suspended these rants, let me now mention the one I passed over. You can weigh things in Blackboard gradebook, but as far as I can tell you have to weigh all the things in a certain category the same. So if I make quizzes 35% of the grade, Blackboard insists that each quiz that makes up that 35% be of the same weight. The long and the short is that I have been forced back to Excel this semester and to do only portions of my grades on Blackboard, which I must then join in some Frankensteinian way to Excel (and I will have to do them one at a time, since you can’t click and drag over the whole lot and paste them).
I want to register an ironic comment on Blackboard here.
1. First, I was finally OK with Blackboard as of about a month and a half ago. What convinced me was the gradebook function, which allows you to open, close, make comments, and enter grades on assignments straight from the gradebook.
2. However, IWU has experienced a horrible fiasco with a Blackboard upgrade. We lost 10,000's of dollars because what was supposed to be a three day hiatus for upgrade turned out to be a two week fiasco that ended with us going back to the previous version--without the previous data and course materials.
This is a major, major black eye for the university. And it seems as if this has happened before with Blackboard upgrades at other places. Readers of this comment beware!
If I were in charge, Blackboard would be hearing from the IWU lawyers. And I imagine IWU needs to shuffle some things to... perhaps including a jettison of Blackboard all together.
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