The Reeducation of Blackboard, Everyone's Classroom Pariah | Hacker News Reader

The Reeducation of Blackboard, Everyone's Classroom Pariah

wired.com

44 pointsprostoalex37 comments

Blackboard is also known for harassing and suing its competitors based on frivolous patents, and for fixing prices. A mobile app and a UX redesign are nice, but hardly sufficient, when they're funded by those kinds of practices.

I once worked for a startup in the education industry. One day, when Blackboard released a new product that directly competed with us, we noticed that their new logo was an obvious, clearly intentional rip-off of our own. It was actually gratifying, as a group of mostly recent graduates, to so clearly have threatened a billion dollar company.

As a teacher and tech-enthusiast, I've used countless pieces of software designed to "aid" me in my teaching and administration.

I've yet to use a Learning Platform or MIS that wasn't tortuous to use and ended up generating more work for me than if I had simply used pen and paper.

The trouble always seems to stem from a lack of understanding of what teachers actually go through in a given day, whether it be setting and assessing work for students, tracking and monitoring performance, or reporting back to students and parents.

It's telling that the most effective way I found of having students submit work to me and for me to provide feedback, targets and grades was using GitHub. This is a product that is used internally within the organisation that produces it, and so works (almost) seamlessly.

For fun (and because ilearn sucks), I taught a computer science class where the students helped create a learning management system based on git. Each student's grades are stored in a repo that they own, and the instructors use signed commits to update the students' grades. I offered an extra credit bounty to anyone who could write arbitrary grades to their repo without getting caught, and had a few students discover some clever loopholes.

The documentation is super unpolished, but you can find the repos here: https://github.com/mikeizbicki/gitlearn

The "how grades are stored" file in the docs is probably the most interesting: https://github.com/mikeizbicki/gitlearn/blob/master/docs/gra..., but there's also docs on how to start up and run a class using gitlearn.

Out of curiosity, how would the students actually go about making their grades private. Free github accounts don't actually get any private repo's, so aren't you effectively requiring a student who wants to maintain some secrecy to pay extra?

GitHub != Git. Git is free and open version control software, GitHub is a commercial hosting service and social network that uses Git. You can use Git without using GitHub.

GitHub are quite kind to educational institutions and will give you private repos for free. I got 50 just by asking in an email. If the student is a member of your organisation, then when they fork the repo it remains private.

1. Github provides free educational accounts to students.

2. The repos could be maintained on any git server, so bit bucket would work just fine.

3. Even if the students had to pay for github private repos, the price would be far less than even the cheapest textbooks.

>I've yet to use a Learning Platform or MIS that wasn't tortuous to use and ended up generating more work for me than if I had simply used pen and paper.

That's because they weren't really designed for you the teacher, they are designed for administrators and required reporting to the government.

Teachers, sadly, are seen as mere data entry nodes for most of these systems.

What does that Github centered workflow look like for a given assignment?

1. My school organisation creates a repo for each kid's project.

2. Kid forks the repo then starts working on their project. Normally they add in their code, and use the README.md as the written part of their assignment.

3. When they are ready to submit their work, they put in a pull request.

4. I can view the README and code if it's their first submission, or just view the diffs if they're responding to feedback and improving their work.

5. Feedback can be provided using GitHub issues.

I would caution others to be careful about school policies before taking this approach. I teach in a university undergrad program and storing grades off campus is considered a violation of university regulations as well as FERPA. Putting projects on Github or Bitbucket is fine ( I do this as well ) - its the posting of grades that is problematic.

The University of St. Andrews has a homebrew administration/submission/marking system https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/mms-guides/ that works pretty well by now, after a lot of close-range user feedback. (Disclosure: I know the guy who wrote it https://jrn.me.uk//about/ )

The problem with Blackboard is it's almost entirely based on acquisitions. It's not like they added any of that functionality to their core product. Instead it becomes just another link on their portal. The only asset shared across acquisitions is marketing material.

While acquisitions are indeed happened and continue to happen, thing released today is part of bigger effort to get everything under one roof and become solid system of many microservices, rather than disjointed products with a "another link in the portal". I work at Blackboard.

What happened to Sakai? When I was starting undergrad my university had just switched to it and it was supposed to be the next big thing.

I've used both, and I much prefer Sakai. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a pushy sales team like Blackboard does.

It seems to have stalled. My university used it but my last semester there they announced they were switching to a non-open source CMS. They tested out several and there didn't really seem to be any real consideration of keeping Sakai.

Sakai continues to put out releases on a fairly orderly schedule, but it's lost several of the core, founding institutions as their IT departments move away from customized FOSS software hosted in local datacenters to SAAS software hosted by commercial providers.

For example: Indiana University was a core member of the Sakai Foundation that was rumored to have a $1mm+ budget devoted to heavily customizing Sakai for IU purposes and for running the software. IU seems to have moved away from the customized open-source approach to a consortial "buying club" approach to try to have influence in the commercial, higher-ed market. 10+ higher-ed institutions (many of them public institutions) have put $1mm each in a pot to try to better control their software destiny:

http://mfeldstein.com/unizin-indiana-universitys-secret-new-...

They're still releasing some solid stuff -- but from what I understand there were some political dust-ups regarding which institutions got their priorities implemented first, which led to people dropping out, which led to a lack of momentum to draw in new institutions.

These changes don't really seem to be addressing the real problems with blackboard which make it frustrating for instructors to do things. Too many clicks. Too many non-intuitive options.

These changes do address these issues. Not all of them in this release, but this is very first release and Blackboard switching to continuous deployment model vs one-release-a-year-deploy-at-schools-server-when-admin-have-time.

Probably because they saw Canvas eating their lunch. Although I've heard rumblings that Canvas is turning into Blackboard by tacking on the very same useless bullshit they said no to in 2012.

You can only buck the IT dept requests for so long. Eventually you run out of enlightened and powerful users to sell to and you start having to cross all the t's and dot all the i's the all-powerful IT dept wants. In so many large institutions (edu, healthcare, enterprises) it is IT and not the end users that have final say.

Having had to clean up after "end users" a couple times, I certainly prefer to have the IT department have the final say.

What kind of "i's" and "t's" are you referring to as a bad thing?

From personal experience? Access control and integration with authentication platforms, logging / auditing, various layers of site-wide policies on all configurable features. Preferred platforms (i.e.: Windows servers and MS SQL these days, Solaris and/or Oracle 10-15 years ago.) Lots of reporting features and professional service to support all of that.

Support for antiquated web browsers, often combined with Citrix is a personal nightmare and a royal PITA to test for. I've had to deal with MSIE 6 compatibility as recently as last year. This, obviously, was on some rinky dink locked down 6 years old PC used by back-office low-ranking clerical staff... Who's main job is to use our software.

It really limits what you can do as far as responsive UI if it has to degrade gracefully in MSIE 6, 7 or even 8. And given how many Win XP clients are still out there in corporate desktops, MSIE8 support is still going to be a thing for at least another year or two.

Another real annoyance is very slow deployment cycles. Getting client change control approval for even bug fix releases, let alone major upgrades is a real pain, doubly so if any hardware / resource requirements go up and now it's a capex line item that needs CFO approval. I envy the cloud folks.

> Access control and integration with authentication platforms, logging / auditing, various layers of site-wide policies on all configurable features. Preferred platforms (i.e.: Windows servers and MS SQL these days, Solaris and/or Oracle 10-15 years ago.) Lots of reporting features and professional service to support all of that.

From the sounds of it, you're running into how hard it is to balance security and usability. Personally, I prefer security, but I'm sure I'd say otherwise if someone was blocking me due to an old, outdated, policy.

As for antiquated web browsers, yeah, that's annoying. And it amazes me that there are companies out there who don't update their products, even when they're paid millions of dollars... Then there are the users who don't want to update....

> Another real annoyance is very slow deployment cycles. Getting client change control approval for even bug fix releases, let alone major upgrades is a real pain, doubly so if any hardware / resource requirements go up and now it's a capex line item that needs CFO approval. I envy the cloud folks.

That's not something I have had experience with. Sounds painful. Makes me glad to work in a smaller community college where I get to do mostly whatever I need to.

> From the sounds of it, you're running into how hard it is to balance security and usability. Personally, I prefer security, but I'm sure I'd say otherwise if someone was blocking me due to an old, outdated, policy.

What happens is the application will end up requiring dozens of roles juggling easily a hundred (discrete) privileges.

The LDAP, AD, X.500 enterprise directory you have to integrate with will not have that granularity so a whole set of interfaces will be needed to map group(s) from the directory to role(s) and then you need an overlay to allow super users to customize the imported users.

And you somehow need to handle the case where user disappear from the directory without breaking auditing. And you need to grow bulk modification interfaces and import interfaces for those user/roles/privileges.

And then somehow make the UI human usable. And suddenly you'll need special "users" for anonymous session that are API launched, a whole API authentication layer and your load balancer now suddenly need to be session aware, and they want single-sign-on.

And we've not actually implemented any core functionality, just satisfied the security dude that this will be SoX/HIPPA/ISO-27001 compliant.

Isn't Canvas a classic case study of the Andreessen bundling/unbundling theory?

Canvas dominated the higher-ed market with a single, lean, focused, simple product. They unbundled the sprawling, unfocused Blackboard suite. Now Canvas is in the next phase: re-bundling.

  1/The flip side of unbundling: Later on, the unbundlers tend to try to rebundle in the image of whatever they unbundled.

  2/So Yahoo adds an ISP and Google adds email/IM/sports-scores/stock-quotes.

https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/481554165454209027

Personally Canvas is terrible. I'm using it for multiple courses right now, and it is a mess. The students are semi ok with it, but the profs might be better off smashing it with a hammer and setting it on fire. They have no idea how to use the thing, let alone grade or comment on a project. I know it's the prof's fault, but after a year of the same issues they all have time and time again, its Canvas. Oh, also the damn thing won't work the same between Mac and PC, and god forbid you have linux or use any kind of add-blocking. Jesus, the whole corporate education software market is just total crap.

Mobile is important to students, and I like the time planning focus.

OA managed not to mention that little issue about patents some years ago which made me smile...

http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-invali...

UK: many colleges use the open source Moodle as a 'virtual learning environment'. A tad less clunky than classic Blackboard in my personal opinion. Universities mostly have something and last time I checked the split was 50:50 Blackboard and Moodle. The acquisition of WebCT by Blackboard caused some annoyance in some HE circles I recollect. All ancient history now and I hope the new people can come up with something easier.

Somewhat confusingly, Blackboard now sell Moodle, via a subsidiary. For those not familiar with the sector, this is a bit like Microsoft's recent moves towards open source.

That would be a support contract they are selling I take it? I can see sense in that. Otherwise just...

https://download.moodle.org/

Not just a support contract. MoodleRooms (http://www.moodlerooms.com/) was acquired by Blackboard a while back. They provide fully managed Moodle hosting. They provide a decent enough service. I certainly like not having to manage Moodle's backend...

Thanks for link. People are doing hosting in UK as well, it's quite a thing. One example...

http://ulcc.ac.uk/

I wonder if they managed to update the forum software so it doesn't take about 40s to load when the rest of the installation my uni have is lightning fast.

They have a long way to go, but it's better than the internal system we have as well.

If only they gave this much attention to their back-end APIs to Bb.

I used blackboard throughout high school and university. It was never the software that was the problem, it was always teachers and professors who didn't know how or didn't want to use it. For the most part, it was a glorified dropbox; a way for the professor to share slides and notes in a time when dropbox and google docs didn't exist.

A fancy UI and increased analytics isn't going to change user apathy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com