First, the user interface is designed as if the programmers were incentivized to maximize the number of clicks required to get anywhere.
Second, it has the responsiveness of continental drift.
Third, editing and formatting text is an exercise in torture. When I want to delete text that I am writing, half of the time, the delete key won't work (I'm exaggerating, but not joking). Formatting of text is quasi-random. Want red-colored text? That works about 90% of the time for me. The other 10% will give me gray text (This time, not exaggerating). If you are brave, you can edit your text as raw HTML, but, my God, you'd better bring the anti-hypertension pills, because the HTML will blast you with a tsunami of <span> elements. Sometimes the <span> elements (unnecessarily) surround individual characters, sometimes they surround _parts_ of words.
Third, it is nigh impossible to set useful defaults. Why can't the due dates for assignments be defaulted to the end of the day instead of the current hour and minute? Do you honestly think that I would ever want my assignment to be due at 4:33 PM?
Fourth, it tries to do too many things. I already have email. I don't need Blackboard's email functionality getting in the way.
I could go on (for a while), but it's time for those blood pressure meds.
It seems both the students and the teachers love it. And I can see why. He demoed it to me and for example for Math exams it supported equivalent form solutions. That’s definitely not the trivial kind of stuff. And the list went on, both the capabilities were off the chart and the user experience was top polished. It’s already used on universities and in some private companies. Definitely check it out if you need a solution from the space.
We have a webpage describing the power of EduBase Quiz at https://www.edubasequiz.com/en/ but you can even get started with the EduBase experience for free today on https://www.edubase.net/
My favorite part of Quiz is how easy it is to set up special answer types, such as matrices, equation editors, etc. And the editor is a dream compared to Blackboard.
The Blackboard -> Edubase Classroom switch resulted in 80% fewer student support requests (like trouble turning in assignments, questions about grade details, etc.). And with competitive pricing to Blackboard, it was a no-brainer.
My institution, unfortunately, uses Blackboard. Clicking on "Course Tools", I get the following, presented as one long list:
Accessibility Report, Achievements, Announcements, Attendance, Basic LTI Tools, Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, Blogs, Cengage Learning Mindlinks (TM), Contacts, Content Market Tools, Course Calendar, Course Health Check, Course Messages, Course Portfolios, ...
And that's just the first three letters of the alphabet.
That's just poetry. Well written and I can only fully agree on Blackboard. Any usability of this software comes from the consumer remembering how to get to places likes it's a GTA cheat code. Just a random sequence that you can only find if you know.
https://wjla.com/news/local/technical-issues-latest-on-virtu... https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/fairfax-schoo... https://www.tysonsreporter.com/2020/04/21/fcps-dropping-blac...
Rightly so. The Director of IT should have known better than to push a flawed product hard on parents/teachers, for months. I'm wondering what Blackboard's sales practices are like that they can get school's IT people on their side!
I suppose I could just have been subject to his charm and I suppose this could be a ridiculous heuristic, but I definitely have a lot more confidence in a company (and its software) when the CEO drives a practical car and is kind to the interns. Hope Blackboard gets better under him just because it’s so deeply engrained in educational institutions.
They redesigned it, in what is apparently an attempt to make the software more usable from a mobile phone. So (on a laptop), less stuff appears on the screen at once. This was billed, as usual, as an "improvement".
Also -- and quite frankly, this is ridiculous -- when I need to merge two sections of my course, I need to ask IT to do it for me. (Example: a big calculus lecture, which is broken up into multiple TA sections that have different course numbers.) It used to be that I could just do it myself, no problem. Then the option silently went away. I was informed that we used a plug-in (??) made by a third-party vendor (????) that enabled individual instructors to merge sections, but the third-party vendor went out of business and so this is no longer possible.
Makes me speculate that the codebase is a giant pile of spaghetti.
I guess I can't blame him too much. That is exactly what Providence Equity brought him in to do.
But if I were CEO of a big company one day, I'd definitely want to interact with the rank-and-file the same way Bill interacted with me.
Full disclosure: I built it-- I'm very receptive to feedback and feature suggestions though and am looking for pilot schools if anyone is interested in shaping the platform/knows someone who might be.
Courses as they exist now are unaware of semesters or terms, and are only tied to the students enrolled. So if the students enrolled in a particular class don't change (or change very little) between two semesters, you could continue use the same course for a 2nd semester if you wanted, or you could import your students into a new class and name the new class "Class Semester 2" for example.
I'm happy to work on features to fit your use case if you're interested in offering suggestions or are looking for a better solution than your current one; my email is brad [at] gradefinity [dot] com and I'm generally pretty available to talk about features/suggestions/demo stuff, etc.
(Plus, we were in YC batch S17 with the predecessor to Eduflow – Peergrade)
