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Comment by hippich | Hacker News Reader

A lot of issues were because of laws/policies required to install software on the premises... And making such complex software to perform well, when school sysadmin manages it, can be hard to make bulletproof. As laws and mindset changes, Blackboard moves to SaaS model with much more precise control over configuration, deployment, etc.

As for software itself, if you are interested, google "new learning experience blackboard". This is 1 year old initiative to bring friendlier UI and as much as possible focus on student, instead of schools. And with acquisition of MyEdu there is push towards students owning their data, not schools. It is hard from both political (schools hate idea of not owning data) and technical standpoints, but we are slowly getting there :)

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I just watched their promo video, and it's still terrible, but with a less ancient looking skin. Interesting how they can so completely miss the point.

Would you mind explaining what is it missing? I work at Blackboard and would love to get honest feedback :)

Blackboard is institutionally bad. The company is rotten to the core. It's pushed onto universities and schools through bribery, corruption, and deceit. I have seen this first-hand at two different places. The admins choose because it looks enterprisey and expensive. They figure they've spent the money, so the problem is solved. They also frequently get some very nice kickbacks for accepting to buy this piece of crap. It's buggy, hard to use, horrible to modify, expensive.

The most honest feedback I can get you is this: for your own moral rectitude, quit this job and find yourself a more ethical job.

Thanks for hateback, but i choose to stay. Otherwise if all good people leave, who going to develop good software? (because blackboard will not die even with bad software per your post :))

I will fix it from inside.

You won't solve the problem as a software developer. It's not a software problem. Try to climb the ranks into management and weed out corruption as you see it.

Me and other good devs will solve software side of problems, and other good people will fix managerial one :)

Are you saying that everyone in management and engineering had been replaced and Blackboard is essentially a startup which happens to have inherited all the exciting contracts? If so, then maybe you stand a chance.

Otherwise, I'm sure you'll learn a lot from the attempt.

There is a lot of new people indeed (both managers and tech.) Quite a few startups were acquihired too. But I think most important factor - management openly concerned about competition and tries to push toward better product. And it appears to be much better timing too - institutions are more open to "cloud" today, than they were 10 years ago.

"Cloud" in the hands of a corrupt company... will not be good.

You really won't. This isn't mean to be a knock on you, but even the CEO probably can't fix this. Do some research on distruption theory and you'll discover that your company is built to withstand the very kinds of change that you seek. Even a Jedi has to exit when they have no leverage in a given situation.

Also - if you don't already have an overwhelmingly strong picture of what is wrong with blackboard, I'd suggest that your heart isn't invested in improving it, and you might be better off at a company whose software you love.

Oh please. Overdramatic much?

Blackboard might have a poor UX, but it at least serves a useful function. Can you say the same for the web 2.0 companies that only exist to spy on you and sell your info to advertisers?

If you have evidence of actual corruption, then let's hear it. You can and should get someone to prosecute if the evidence you have is real. Otherwise maybe you should stop making false accusations. This isn't slashdot.

There isn't anything missing, on the contrary, there's too much so that the things that people actually care about are not easy. Nobody cares about an "ecosystem of applications", or "out of classroom experience". Put yourself in the mind of the student. What are their top questions?

1. What homework is due?

2. When and where are my lectures?

3. What was taught or will be taught in some specific lecture?

4. What do I need to study for my exam?

5. At the start of the semester: Which courses are available, and info about each course (topic, teacher, book, etc.)

Now, the promo video doesn't show very much, but let's see how you would find out about homework in current Blackboard. I need to log in (it doesn't keep you logged in). Then I click on "courses". Then for each course I need to click on that course and browse the course's pages to find out if homework is mentioned somewhere. And of course because the professors find blackboard terrible too, most of them put the homework on their personal webpages instead, so not even half of the info is there. All in all it's about 100 clicks to find out the answer to question (1). Maybe the professors are just putting the info in the wrong place which makes it hard for the students to find, but this also counts as a failure of Blackboard.

What should you do instead. Keep people logged in. The main page right after logging in should be a full page calendar with the schedule of lectures, exams, and homework due. Then for each course there should be ONE page. Current blackboard has zillions of pages per course, but 99% are empty and the info related to one course easily fits on one page so you don't need to hunt among the empty pages for the info you need. The professors who have the course page on their personal website always use one page, and it's much more usable. On the page of a course there should be general info, and info for each lecture (but not on a separate page per lecture!). The lectures in the calendar should link to the per lecture info, which is on that one page per course, scrolled down.

This way question (1) and question (2) can be answered by one glance at the calendar homepage. Question (3), (4) and (5) can be answered by clicking on a lecture in the calendar, i.e. one click away from the homepage.

Now for a very important point: let the students edit this info! If some professor does not use blackboard or uses it badly, make sure the students do. Let them put up a page for the course, enter the lecture schedule in the calendar, mark when homework is due, etc. Blackboard is much more useful if all info is there. Of course you get nightmares about letting students edit this, but trust me it will be good. If wikipedia can let anonymous people all around the world edit it, blackboard can let non-anonymous students of a particular course edit it.

The real problem of course is that Blackboard isn't built for students, and isn't built for teachers. It's built for the people who make the decision to buy Blackboard. That's why Blackboard will die like a fly to a competitor that does get this right. They will provide all this for free, initially, and students and teachers will use it out of their free will, and Blackboard will be even more empty than it already is. If you're losing 70% teachers who put info on their personal homepage, and are willing to learn HTML to avoid having to use Blackboard (!), imagine what a halfway decent competitor that isn't "code your own website in HTML" could do.

Zillion empty pages is old interface, not new one. In new interface, me and many other are actively working right now, UI is way less cluttered. This is what me and others were hired to fix. Promo video probably did not address it well enough (which is good to know.)

I think [1] might give you better idea (although it is too much time to spend unless you are really interested in it.) You will notice, that some parts of UI are still old, but these are going to be replaced bit by bit, since Blackboard moved to continuous deployment model (which again, became possible only recently as schools became more relaxed toward keeping data "in the cloud".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLontYaReEU1tCbsCDP-u_...

That looks much better, but most of what I said still applies. Too many pages, info that people actually need is missing or hard to get at. It looks like this is focused on middle/high school though, where that may not apply. For universities a lot of info that students need seems to be missing, but those videos show a teacher's view so maybe it is there but not visible to teachers.

Messages: nobody will use this, everyone uses email or facebook. You cannot win that battle. Replace feature with an email address link.

Calendar: great, make this the homepage and display WAY more info per page.

Assignments: good, but no need for a separate page; should just be accessible via the calendar. More ways of getting at the same info is bad.

Activity stream: should just be in the calendar.

The UI shown there is also still quite bad. Watch the discussions video for example. "You can easily create a discussion right on the course content page" -> click on "courses" -> select the course -> click on (+) circle -> click on "create" -> click on "participation and engagement" -> click on "discussion". Really?

Of course this is another feature that nobody will use. No student is going to participate in a discussion topic opened by a teacher on blackboard. Instead should replace this with a feature where students can post a question (like stackoverflow) and where the teacher and other students can answer. THAT is useful, if students can actually know that somebody will actually read their question and they are not just posting in a place that nobody will ever look at. Therefore it needs prominent placement on the course main page. Not a link to the discussions tab, which has further links to each question, which is a page with the actual question. The actual questions that were asked should be right on the course's main page.

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