I develop free software because of CUNY and Blackboard

Harvey Mudd's taken that approach for a few courses, having student projects develop fairly course-specific management/grading/feedback tools. They're less general, but tend to be less crufty and a good fit for the course as a result. The tools for the intro C++ & data-structures course, for example, integrated with revision control, a submission system, gcc compiler, tests, and various lint-type tools, and an automated early-submission system that would give students basic feedback on whether their submission was compiling and passing sanity checks. Also, there was a grading interface for entering comments (with some things pre-selected, like failed tests, and easy cross-reference to the source code), which would then record the results, and produce & email nicely formatted results emails when done.

It was an amazingly bad awakening when, after that was my first-ever TA experience, I TA'd a course in grad school using Normal Course Management Tools, which by comparison didn't really automate much of my job at all, nor particularly seemed designed to fit with what the course was doing.

eCollege from the standpoint of an TA was absolute crap, we as students experimented with several professors with Moodle and found it MUCH MUCH better than anything eCollege had to offer.

The biggest problem is that both eCollege and Blackboard hold many patents related to the space, AND any solution has to follow certain guidelines/requirements set forth in some law somewhere (never did try to get more into it, our proposal was shot down hard).

In my humble opinion, blackboard and the like (moodle, sakai...) are mainly useful for core classes that have a lot of students taking quizzes or writing papers or doing readings.

Faculty and instructors, I think, sometimes forget when they have academic freedom to teach their course whatever way they see best (sometimes they really don't have this choice though, like for much government/military/corporate training). They can use stuff outside of blackboard if they wish. Also though, they may not have the time or skill to set up their own online course tools.

There are alternatives that many faculty are embracing such as wikis (wikispaces, etc.), blogs (wordpress), and even some universities are exploring more decentralized or cloud-based alternatives that don't box you into a walled garden, like wordpress hosting, drupal tools (harvard's openscholar), google apps, and see what BYU is creating (although I'm not sensing that it will be open sourced): http://learningsuite.byu.edu/ (described in the educause article below)

The newest LMS tools like Instructure (and the newest version of Blackboard) are basically trying to emulate Facebook, for better and for worse, with dynamic streams of information and connections to social networking tools. Some believe Blackboard will not dominate the market for much longer: http://mfeldstein.com/emerging-trends-in-lms-ed-tech-market/

Anyway, there are plenty of articles exploring the effects (negative and otherwise) of learning management systems like Blackboard: http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterly... http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ar... http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ar...

Unfortunately many academic IT departments are primarily just consumers of vendor technologies, they aren't big enough nor do they have enough money to develop custom software tools. Purdue and others are some exceptions: http://campustechnology.com/innovators

An even bigger problem is probably that most faculty have no training in instruction and pedagogy and learning theory and design. As one person put it, "College teaching may be the only skilled profession for which systematic training is neither required nor provided–pizza delivery jobs come with more instruction." See http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/50-examples-of-the...

I was doing a very small elearning startup at the same time Blackboard started. We were all at the same edu tech conferences, knew the same people, etc.

At the time, Blackboard and WebCT were the biggest players in the elearning space. I think Blackboard simply did a better job of winning contracts and selling. You have to remember, when they started these companies were installing systems on campus (there was no SaaS initially) ... so it was a big deal if other campuses in your area used it and/or if it worked with your student information system.

Blackboard got a strategic partnership with microsoft (I think money too), they absorbed some smaller players (like Prometheus) and eventually acquired WebCT.