11–20 of 63 posts
My school used eCollege, a Blackboard competitor. From what I have heard from professors that have used both they are both on par with each other in terms of being absolute shit. When I was still in school the students attempted to push the administration to go for an open source alternative called Moodle which is miles ahead of anything else. Speaking of Blackboard, apparently some security vulnerabilities were foun…
My school used eCollege, a Blackboard competitor. From what I have heard from professors that have used both they are both on par with each other in terms of being absolute shit. When I was still in school the students attempted to push the administration to go for an open source alternative called Moodle which is miles ahead of anything else. Speaking of Blackboard, apparently some security vulnerabilities were foun…
Is there any particular reason undergraduate courses prohibited?
My school used eCollege, a Blackboard competitor. From what I have heard from professors that have used both they are both on par with each other in terms of being absolute shit. When I was still in school the students attempted to push the administration to go for an open source alternative called Moodle which is miles ahead of anything else. Speaking of Blackboard, apparently some security vulnerabilities were foun…
PS: I should add that this was a good 3 years ago, so great things may have happened in the meantime.
I just started a postdoc at NYU and have been forced into using Blackboard to teach my class. Inspiring alternatives can't come fast enough.
I am not sure how inspired it is, but Sakai is a very good open source alternative to Blackboard used at many Universities. http://sakaiproject.org/
My school used eCollege, a Blackboard competitor. From what I have heard from professors that have used both they are both on par with each other in terms of being absolute shit. When I was still in school the students attempted to push the administration to go for an open source alternative called Moodle which is miles ahead of anything else. Speaking of Blackboard, apparently some security vulnerabilities were foun…
I haven't used eCollege or Blackboard, but I have used Moodle (as a student) in a couple of courses, and to be honest I found it to be a stunningly mediocre. If it really is miles ahead of everything else then the whole concept of that type of software probably needs to be radically rethought. PS: I should add that this was a good 3 years ago, so great things may have happened in the meantime.
That's pretty much what I thought, reading that. The college I'm at right now uses Moodle, and while it gets the job done it doesn't do so particularly well. Might just be because of how the professors use it (there's a lot of variability in how useful it is between classes), but even in the best cases it's nothing special.
Everyone gushes over the Kahn Academy approach of expecting perfection and permitting failure; they're right and I can run with it in Blackboard.
What I do: Write random question pools using Blackboards obnoxious question writing web interface.
Randomly generate quizzes from a series of different pools by subject.
Let my students take the quiz as many times as they want; offer zero partial credit
Blackboard automatically puts the latest grade into grade center (which is almost always the highest since they stop taking it when they're satisfied with their grade) which they can then access with their university login at any time without revealing confidential information about other students
There is a terrible, ridiculous, hackery way to dump to question log files into excel, clean up the data (takes about an hour) and get feedback on how often each question in each pool is answered correctly, so I know which subjects the students are struggling with. We go over those topics in later lectures.
This has had a huge effect in my sections because it feels like the students work twice as hard but are half as stressed about it. They can fix just about any result for the better by learning the material.
So tl;dr I love learning content management systems and by implication Blackboard despite its many egregious flaws.
In terms of startup ideas, I think there's plenty of space to work with Blackboard rather than try to replace it i.e. I don't think their proprietary quiz formats would be difficult to decipher at all, which means a clever startup could make a "We make making Blackboard quizzes easy!" product and do big enterprise sales with it. Universities love to feel they are on the cutting edge of "technology" and clearly have deep pockets for this stuff (if you didn't click on the expensive link in the article you should)
I understand that Bb is very litigious and has a pretty broad patent on "eLearning" but that doesn't seem like it's stopping its competitors.
I just started a postdoc at NYU and have been forced into using Blackboard to teach my class. Inspiring alternatives can't come fast enough.
I am not sure how inspired it is, but Sakai is a very good open source alternative to Blackboard used at many Universities. http://sakaiproject.org/
In the CS department we have a command-line utility for submitting homework and grades, and the classes just have a simple website. Everybody likes that system more than the one based on sakai, which should give you a good idea of how much functionality sakai brings.
Additionally, everybody is now using a system called piazza[1] as an online forum for the class instead of using the one provided by sakai. I rather like it and it has met considerable success in most of the classes that deployed it. Of course, some of my professors are very enthusiastic about this system; one of them even has a testimonial on piazza's main page.