Bye-bye blackboard
mhs.ox.ac.uk
mhs.ox.ac.uk
Once you clear away the essentially non-interactive uses, is it really "disappearing"? Except for maybe a few whiteboards instead of blackboards, it's not going anywhere any time soon, I think. I've never seen a digital replacement that even comes close.
All the blackboards they show that are plausibly snapshots from real classes (as opposed to the three or four that are being used just a political polemics) would still be blackboard-based today, quite likely.
Princeton removed all their white boards and replaced them with black boards. Reason the professors kept using permanent markers on them and the person in-charge replaced all of them that summer. (2007)
However, I'm not sure a basic whiteboard is any better than a chalkboard. I also found it amusing at how often the whiteboard pens in a classroom did not work. That certainly isn't a problem with chalk. I also prefer the contrast of light writing on a dark surface over the opposite.
We have some smart boards and they do pretty well. People do go a bit wild with color and shapes though, much like people in the 80's using every font in a document when they got a Mac.
I prefer chalkboards when I teach because no one else disposes of their empty whiteboard markers, so the tray slowly fills with useless hunks of plastic that look identical to the marker you set down. And whiteboard erasers get disgusting pretty quickly.
Black boards are still better for certain uses. Most "Smart Boards" are just Power Point players.
Full disclosure - I work at SMART.
Using powerpoint slides to set up the problem and then a microsoft surface to work through it is what one of my current professors does. It's amazing. I used to feel the same way you did, but it is going away. To be able to record this with his voice is what makes it special.
Modal styling (ala WordStar and all its descendants—tools requiring you to break flow to find the Bold button), and markup languages like LaTeX or SGML, are crutches to deal with the limited interaction model the TTY + keyboard setup gave us.
There's another, very different interaction model for entering text, though—the IME, where the OS keeps a buffer of keys, presents menus, retargets modifier keypresses to itself, and delivers its own synthesized objects (which don't have to be characters, but usually are) to the application in place of your typing. The TTY brain damage has caused us to think of the IME as merely a domain-specific tool for entering international characters, and sometimes for accessibility. (Or, in a maddeningly singular out-of-domain use, for entering identifiers into IDEs.)
But a "math IME"[1]—or a "rich-text IME"[2], or an "AST IME"[3]—would be much simpler to wrangle than a markup language, or a styling mode. You could stay in flow, in about the same way Emacs' Paredit and Outline modes keep you in flow.
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[1] As an aside, the program Mathematica acts like a "math IME"—but it's an illusion, and only works for the "text" that stays within its confines. It isn't using your input to directly manipulate a sequence of real Unicode characters (or MathML, or whatever) that happen to render through the OS as a mathematical expression, which you could copy and paste into and out of the program as you please and so forth. It's just using your input to shape an internal tree structure, and then rendering that tree structure itself. It's more like a very clever WYSIWYG markup editor, like LyX.
[2] I've noticed lately that Tumblr's post editor (of all things) is half-way to a rich-text IME given that it can do inline menu-driven text replacement. But it doesn't do the key thing: buffer the user's direct text input at the "menu-driven" layer. Yes, if they did this, and the user was using an OS IME, this would result in a sort of "IME stack", where the user's IME resolved into text in the application's IME buffer, which you would then tell the application to resolve. It works, but it'd be much better if the application could just hand off a descriptor file or plug-in of some sort to extend the OS's own IME with the application's formatting options. (Where browsers could then expose that capability as an HTML5 API, etc etc.)
[3] Seems crazy that it's editors, and not IMEs, that automatically balance bracket pairs, no? Picture a Unicode codepoint for "enclosure of list of length N" for all reasonable N, and a set of combining characters to tell it what kind of list it is (S-expression, vector, set, dictionary literal, etc.) If your IME can intelligently insert those, and your text-rendering system understands circumfix/interfix combining characters, then you get your brackets (and probably commas or whatever else) for free, and it becomes literally impossible to have unpaired brackets or invalid lists, because at the character level, what you have is a prefix-length serialized tree. And modern OSes would handle that fine! (And, most fascinating of all, the difference in such a system between rendering a function call as "(a b)" and "a(b)", or a list as "[a b]" vs "[a, b]" comes down to your font choice.)
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Where-Mathematics-Come-From-Embodied/d...
Here is Miles Davis on the great 1957 album, 'Round About Midnight:
The LMS (learning management system) sales decision in made by either the university administration or the office for information technology (using a checklist made by the administration). Neither of these groups have significant contact with the UX, so they don't really care about it. And the people that do have contact with the UX (teachers/students) all want different things, but have no way of having their concerns heard by the decision makers.
One of the very important checklists items is that there be thorough documentation provided on how to preform every course relevant action. This is so that the computer illiterate art teacher can be hander a 500 page manual and be told that he now has no excuse not to use the LMS. This has the side effect of making UX improvement basically impossible, because the improvement would likely break the manual (that no one actually uses) and thereby violate the terms of the sale contract.
From the perspective of a UX designer, working in this space has all of the downsides of designing for enterprise plus all of the downsides of designing for multiple user groups that all want different things. I really wish I had understood this when I started that project.
EDIT: I got an email asking if there are any ways to make this market work from a designers perspective. One that I've seen work quite well is to borrow the textbook business model: Ignore the administration, cater to faculty, fuck the students. TopHat [1] has had a lot of success with this model. Just like with text books, a teacher deicides to use a tool, and then forces all of the students to pay for it. Your 2 users personas are tech-savvy teachers and college students. Both of these groups are prepared for frequent UX tweaks and UX improvements are rewarded with more repeat business instead of indifference. So it's a big win from a designers perspective. The business model is borderline immoral, but the more I learn about the higher ed market, the more convinced I become that it is the least bad option for operating in a very broken system.
The reason is teachers only care about Blackboard insofar as they are forced to use it by the administration. They don't really get anything out of it. This is different than interactive lecture software like TopHat, which teachers like. Students on the other hand do get something out of a working Blackboard: they get info they want to see such as homework due dates, what to study for exams, homework help from other students, etc. Unlike with TopHat there is also a strong network effect necessary, which you would get out of focusing on students.
What activity would students be voluntarily engaging in on your Yammer.edu that would be so awesome it would be viral, and then your best monetization plan would be to give schools backend access?
- What homework is due for the next lecture
- Which chapters of the book were taught
- Notes copied from the blackboard (real life blackboard), and recently I see more and more students take a picture of the blackboard with their phone instead
Instead imagine a web application for doing this collaboratively. One student puts the lecture schedule in the calendar. When the prof says that homework is due on october 5, another student puts this in the calendar. Instead of having to go to 10 different personal web sites and 10 courses in blackboard, and look in your personal agenda, you can just take one look at the calendar to see which homework is due next week. Blackboard photos taken with smartphones get uploaded. If you don't understand something you can ask a question, and other students or the professor can answer. Some professors already put a lecture schedule on their personal websites, and if you make it easier than doing it manually in HTML they may be tempted to switch.
It is really hard to convince professors to use such a system, and I think it's much easier to convince students. You need some students to boostrap it and enter the information for some courses, so that other students want to use it to find that info, and hopefully contribute some of their own info. Students take different courses, so if a student learned about this in one course they may enter the info of the other course they are taking. Some students take courses in different universities, so it can even spread beyond one university.
What would the super-over-achievers like in exchange for their effort? Job offers/interviews (companies like conscientious team players)? Bragging rights (a la stackOverflow)?
Plagiarism, mostly :-/.
and not this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_system
As for software itself, if you are interested, google "new learning experience blackboard". This is 1 year old initiative to bring friendlier UI and as much as possible focus on student, instead of schools. And with acquisition of MyEdu there is push towards students owning their data, not schools. It is hard from both political (schools hate idea of not owning data) and technical standpoints, but we are slowly getting there :)
The most honest feedback I can get you is this: for your own moral rectitude, quit this job and find yourself a more ethical job.
Blackboard might have a poor UX, but it at least serves a useful function. Can you say the same for the web 2.0 companies that only exist to spy on you and sell your info to advertisers?
If you have evidence of actual corruption, then let's hear it. You can and should get someone to prosecute if the evidence you have is real. Otherwise maybe you should stop making false accusations. This isn't slashdot.
I will fix it from inside.
Also - if you don't already have an overwhelmingly strong picture of what is wrong with blackboard, I'd suggest that your heart isn't invested in improving it, and you might be better off at a company whose software you love.
Otherwise, I'm sure you'll learn a lot from the attempt.
1. What homework is due?
2. When and where are my lectures?
3. What was taught or will be taught in some specific lecture?
4. What do I need to study for my exam?
5. At the start of the semester: Which courses are available, and info about each course (topic, teacher, book, etc.)
Now, the promo video doesn't show very much, but let's see how you would find out about homework in current Blackboard. I need to log in (it doesn't keep you logged in). Then I click on "courses". Then for each course I need to click on that course and browse the course's pages to find out if homework is mentioned somewhere. And of course because the professors find blackboard terrible too, most of them put the homework on their personal webpages instead, so not even half of the info is there. All in all it's about 100 clicks to find out the answer to question (1). Maybe the professors are just putting the info in the wrong place which makes it hard for the students to find, but this also counts as a failure of Blackboard.
What should you do instead. Keep people logged in. The main page right after logging in should be a full page calendar with the schedule of lectures, exams, and homework due. Then for each course there should be ONE page. Current blackboard has zillions of pages per course, but 99% are empty and the info related to one course easily fits on one page so you don't need to hunt among the empty pages for the info you need. The professors who have the course page on their personal website always use one page, and it's much more usable. On the page of a course there should be general info, and info for each lecture (but not on a separate page per lecture!). The lectures in the calendar should link to the per lecture info, which is on that one page per course, scrolled down.
This way question (1) and question (2) can be answered by one glance at the calendar homepage. Question (3), (4) and (5) can be answered by clicking on a lecture in the calendar, i.e. one click away from the homepage.
Now for a very important point: let the students edit this info! If some professor does not use blackboard or uses it badly, make sure the students do. Let them put up a page for the course, enter the lecture schedule in the calendar, mark when homework is due, etc. Blackboard is much more useful if all info is there. Of course you get nightmares about letting students edit this, but trust me it will be good. If wikipedia can let anonymous people all around the world edit it, blackboard can let non-anonymous students of a particular course edit it.
The real problem of course is that Blackboard isn't built for students, and isn't built for teachers. It's built for the people who make the decision to buy Blackboard. That's why Blackboard will die like a fly to a competitor that does get this right. They will provide all this for free, initially, and students and teachers will use it out of their free will, and Blackboard will be even more empty than it already is. If you're losing 70% teachers who put info on their personal homepage, and are willing to learn HTML to avoid having to use Blackboard (!), imagine what a halfway decent competitor that isn't "code your own website in HTML" could do.
I think [1] might give you better idea (although it is too much time to spend unless you are really interested in it.) You will notice, that some parts of UI are still old, but these are going to be replaced bit by bit, since Blackboard moved to continuous deployment model (which again, became possible only recently as schools became more relaxed toward keeping data "in the cloud".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLontYaReEU1tCbsCDP-u_...
Messages: nobody will use this, everyone uses email or facebook. You cannot win that battle. Replace feature with an email address link.
Calendar: great, make this the homepage and display WAY more info per page.
Assignments: good, but no need for a separate page; should just be accessible via the calendar. More ways of getting at the same info is bad.
Activity stream: should just be in the calendar.
The UI shown there is also still quite bad. Watch the discussions video for example. "You can easily create a discussion right on the course content page" -> click on "courses" -> select the course -> click on (+) circle -> click on "create" -> click on "participation and engagement" -> click on "discussion". Really?
Of course this is another feature that nobody will use. No student is going to participate in a discussion topic opened by a teacher on blackboard. Instead should replace this with a feature where students can post a question (like stackoverflow) and where the teacher and other students can answer. THAT is useful, if students can actually know that somebody will actually read their question and they are not just posting in a place that nobody will ever look at. Therefore it needs prominent placement on the course main page. Not a link to the discussions tab, which has further links to each question, which is a page with the actual question. The actual questions that were asked should be right on the course's main page.
I'm fairly sure students could've written a better tool as a senior project.
(edit: oh, hey, Blackboard bought WebCT a while back. Eww.)
An East Texas jury gave Blackboard 2.5m in damages in a suit against a competitor in 2008 using this patent. Read the patent, it a complete cockup, by the already low standards of the USPTO. The abstract is laughable because its so broad:
A system and methods for implementing education online by providing institutions with the means for allowing the creation of courses to be taken by students online, the courses including assignments, announcements, course materials, chat and whiteboard facilities, and the like, all of which are available to the students over a network such as the Internet. Various levels of functionality are provided through a three-tiered licensing program that suits the needs of the institution offering the program. In addition, an open platform system is provided such that anyone with access to the Internet can create, manage, and offer a course to anyone else with access to the Internet without the need for an affiliation with an institution, thus enabling the virtual classroom to extend worldwide.
In the UK the abstract is part of the patentee's submission, but examiners would redraft them as needed to make them useful. IIRC the USPTO doesn't spend any resources on abstract re-drafting(?) and so abstracts are very poor.
US6988138 is "EXPIRED DUE TO FAILURE TO PAY MAINTENANCE FEE" as of 2014; note that in 2010 it was "EXPIRED DUE TO REEXAMINATION WHICH CANCELED ALL CLAIMS"!
At a previous job, I had to bend Blackboard a little to do what I needed it to do and this was my only exposure to Blackboard from the admin/instructor side. I had interacted with it as a student and found it sufficient.
From the admin side, it was certainly unintuitive, like most other enterprise software. However, also like most other enterprise software, once you used it enough and/or did the necessary training, it did make more sense.
I'd be curious to know examples of enterprise software that is easy to learn and use without having to build experience or go through training.
It's an artifact of the types of organizations which buy enterprise software and how well they [don't] handle communication and responsibility internally. Fundamentally, the results are rarely good when someone is buying software on behalf of someone else unless they have a deep understanding of how the other group works and where they spend the most time. One really common manifestation of this problem is when senior managers buy the software which gives them the reports which they want but doesn't consider how painful the process of entering the data is or whether the system design biases that data.
Enterprise software exacerbates that problem because the business model is a one-time decision to make a very expensive purchase. Since correcting a mistake is hard-to-impossible, that tends to lead to “requirements” which include everything anyone has ever thought they might need, which favors the really large vendors who can afford to check most of those boxes and promise that their expensive consultants can customize the software after the fact to get the remaining ones, which has a near-certainty of resulting in the problem mentioned where someone implemented just enough to say they satisfied a requirement but will never improve it before the next round unless you cough up more money and since it's customized per-customer there's limited ability to get improvements which someone else paid for.
Another example or analogy that everyone probably has experience with is the old Robert Conquest's "Third Law" or fourth or whatever about all organizations devolving into appearing to be ruled by a cabal of their enemies, and if you think that manual hand operated torture devices are painful, wait until the same gang implements automated computerized high performance torture implements upon their organization. An organization that can tolerate the destructive influence of its leadership in a manual process arena might not survive automation of the destructive processes.
But enough comedy (or is it merely snarky insight?)
Two business sociology problems are empire building by complicated processes and projecting power by gatekeepers, both being short circuited by "the big automated system".
There is also a psychological trap where automation systems are more accurately described as micromanagement systems, and two outcomes are possible under computerized micromanagement, one is a spontaneous rebellion where everyone knows they and everyone else are better off if the project fails so they do the obvious, and the other outcome is an organization that can be micromanaged is either already dead or solely exists as a theoretical construct, so the project flops.