Students want to know lots of info that is in blackboard, on the professor's personal web pages, and things that were said in the lectures, tips for exercises. In each lecture each student writes down:

- 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.

> But I don't know what academic activity students would want to engage in when they are not being forced to do so.

Plagiarism, mostly :-/.

Blackboard is institutionally bad. The company is rotten to the core. It's pushed onto universities and schools through bribery, corruption, and deceit. I have seen this first-hand at two different places. The admins choose because it looks enterprisey and expensive. They figure they've spent the money, so the problem is solved. They also frequently get some very nice kickbacks for accepting to buy this piece of crap. It's buggy, hard to use, horrible to modify, expensive.

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.

There isn't anything missing, on the contrary, there's too much so that the things that people actually care about are not easy. Nobody cares about an "ecosystem of applications", or "out of classroom experience". Put yourself in the mind of the student. What are their top questions?

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.