31–40 of 53 posts
I hope they are successful. Not sure I would have used the slide about Napoleon's march into Russia though.
OK, despite having read the article, the thread, and working for a major US university, I still have no clue what this Blackboard thing does, or what LMS stands for (though I have learned that everybody hates Blackboard). Can someone explain what class of product we're discussing?
LMS = Learning Management System Blackboard hurts Universities because it's overly expensive and unintuitive for the price. This new site looks great. I worked on http://moodle.org/ back in the day which is a great opensource alternative. It's now deployed in most if not all California State Universities. This is a great space to work in.
Every single student at my university would cheer for joy upon hearing this news. Blackboard is as stunted a piece of development as they come and additionally is an incredibly expensive piece of software, especially considering the quality. The user experience is so bad that many course lecturers make their own site or just avoid using websites at all. The only question I have though is how do you pitch it to univer…
OK, despite having read the article, the thread, and working for a major US university, I still have no clue what this Blackboard thing does, or what LMS stands for (though I have learned that everybody hates Blackboard). Can someone explain what class of product we're discussing?
LMS = Learning Management System Blackboard hurts Universities because it's overly expensive and unintuitive for the price. This new site looks great. I worked on http://moodle.org/ back in the day which is a great opensource alternative. It's now deployed in most if not all California State Universities. This is a great space to work in.
Most of the CSU campuses are still using Blackboard. MOODLE is used by around 6 of the 23 campuses and is being piloted by a few others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc.
and
Blackboard is a terrible piece of software. This should be viewed as a charity mission to rescue students from the ineptitude that is Blackboard.
Agreed. I work tech support here at my university, and the calls received about Blackboard are ridiculous and are always no fun to troubleshoot. I like the company name, 'Instructure', but where does 'Canvas' come into play? Didn't we just see that with 4chan's new shindig?
Best of luck to them. It's quite difficult to convince faculty to switch over from tools they are comfortable using -- especially porting over their existing lessons and modules. Focusing on the UI is definitely the right approach as Bb is clearly lacking in this space. Regardless, the LMS market is long overdue for a shake up. On another note, many universities already run and contribute to the open source Sakai LMS…
I have a professor who uses Sakai (the university as a whole used Blackboard, but switched to Moodle, another open source option, this year). Sakai may be better than Blackboard, but that's not saying much. The ui is still terrible and it's filled with inconsistent and confusing behaviors. I've no idea what it's like from the instructors perspective, but as a student it's barely usable. Moodle is about the same as Sa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
LMS = Learning Management System Blackboard hurts Universities because it's overly expensive and unintuitive for the price. This new site looks great. I worked on http://moodle.org/ back in the day which is a great opensource alternative. It's now deployed in most if not all California State Universities. This is a great space to work in.
It's now deployed in most if not all California State Universities. Most of the CSU campuses are still using Blackboard. MOODLE is used by around 6 of the 23 campuses and is being piloted by a few others.
http://campustechnology.com/articles/2008/11/csu-system-adop...
although I think http://www.moodlerooms.com/ is slightly different.
Most of the papers teachers post open up using scribd which is so much easier than dealing with a docx file or pdf.
I think Instructure is taking a step in the right direction, and I hope they can make through all of the crap Blackboard and Universities will give them.