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Comment by ph0rque | Hacker News Reader

...the problem is that Blackboard produces (apparently) rubbish software and has horrible customer support. Angel (apparently), lives up to its name in that it provided access to source code, super-fast responsiveness and generally angelic customer support.

We used Angel at Penn State, and that software was broken and cumbersome to use... I can only imagine the hell that is Blackboard.

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Trust me, it is worse. The interface is so unintuitive that even after 3 years of using it I make the same mistakes (clicking on news items expecting to go to the relevant page, trying to view grades for class x on class x's page, ect.).

Furthermore, the instructor interface is so bad that only about 10% of my classes even use it, despite the fact that the professors are clearly computer literate, many electing to create their own website from scratch.

Thankfully, there are better, free alternatives out there to either Angel or Blackboard. Sakai (http://sakaiproject.org/) has the more substantial "big school" base, and looks like a good platform on which to build if you're okay with a Java app stack, and willing to put up with some "design by committee" architectural choices. Moodle (http://moodle.org/) on the other hand is much easier to get up and running quickly (it's just a standard PHP app), and has an active community of extension, theme, and patch contributors, albeit at the cost of some of the typical PHP framework's tendency to grow warts.

We evaluated all of these, as well as some less-known (free) learning management systems (LMSs), and they are all quite painful and unintuitive to use, compared to current web apps.

I would honestly say that they're all pretty equally terrible, across both the paid and free/OSS segments on the market. Making any of them useful for your environment requires customization, training, and plain old time.

When I was working at a school that had to pick a new LMS, we eventually settled on Moodle simply because it was the only option that was sufficiently hackable for us to turn it into something usable.

Help me understand, after 10's of HN posts about Blackboard (and no exposure to it ever) why anybody uses this. What merit do schools see in it?

I'm guessing it is sold via charisma and connections to people who will never have to use it.

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