Is it just me or all academic course management systems(CMS) suck (aka Blackboard, webct, moodle) | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or all academic course management systems(CMS) suck (aka Blackboard, webct, moodle)

22 pointslyime32 comments

I am sure many of you are familiar with WebCT/blackboard. Your current/old university most likely uses either webct or blackboard. If you know what I am talking about, these CMS just plain suck. They don't follow web standards, they have a horrible user experience, they are not easy to setup, and most importantly they are ridiculously expensive.

Many of us are focusing on building amazing innovate apps/services, but I don't think any one has given these companies competition.

This is one killer app this is missing from our web ecosystem.

I really want to do something about it and want some feedback from you guys.

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The hardest thing is to sell into educational organisations. They aren't exactly the mosyt forward looking. WebCT has some inertia you would need to displace.

The only way to do so is to get a leading university to use the product first and you could leverage sales of that hence peeling away the webCT monopoly. The software side seems pretty easy though. I have no doubt you couldn't make a better product.

Perhaps the reason that there is no innovation in this market is a function of the inertia of these customers and the lack of financial incentive to build something better.

Schools are an interesting ecosystem. As anyone who has walked from building A to building B to building C to building A to work out some issue can attest, inefficiency and resistance to change may be part of their DNA.

At my university, we use blackboard.

But if we want to submit grades, we can't use blackboard. We have to fill in bubbles on paper by hand.

I also have noticed how terrible blackboard is. I'm the head of a student group that does a major software project every year. Every year, we mention that this is an area that really needs work, and every year we end up doing something else. I've thought a lot about why there isn't any interest in replacing these systems when everybody in the group is negatively affected by them, and all I've come up with is that it's not that much fun.

These systems are enormous and filled with checkbox features that are poorly integrated. The customers are mostly government institutions and the marketplace has one major player. These things combine to make it a very unattractive product space to get into. Most successful web startups are small, feature light programs that gain momentum and features as they gain users. You can't use that model with Universities. You need to demonstrate that your program offers the same kind of functionality as webct and then offers something more. What self respecting developer wants to get into that mess? You can't even get quality feedback until after you've been working on the product for years.

When the best programmers are agile, it's hard to get them interested in a dinosaur market.

At the University of Pittsburgh, Blackboard is used, and I've never really had too many complaints about it. The one thing that does bother me is the discussion board. In one of my classes, we're required to participate in a discussion board talking about assigned readings. I'm not sure whether it uses Java or what, but whenever I make a new post or reply to a post, it starts to load, then Firefox hangs for 5-10 seconds before the page finishes loading. Sometimes it won't unfreeze and I have to force close the browser. I had a problem once where images wouldn't show up in an online homework in firefox but worked fine in IE. I sent a message to support and it was fixed by the next day.

The software that the university and UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) uses that really sucks is PeopleSoft. Two years ago they started upgrading everything to the PeopleSoft software. It's so buggy, and the back button is broken. Pages take forever to load. It's clearly designed to work in IE, and pages reload every time you move to a different field in a form. If you don't do things in a particular order, you get an error and have to start over. This is really annoying, especially when I'm putting in a large order for the lab where I work and at the last step there is an error and I need to start over again. It's clearly a system that's not designed for what they are using it for, but they insist on using it (and probably paying absurd licensing fees) and hacking together "modules" to do what they want.

Pittsburgh's abuse of PeopleSoft is a double whammy: It is not good software to begin with, and they insist on using it for things it has no business doing.

I just found this. This is a huge problem. Blackboard has patented the CMS system for educational institutions. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/08/blackboard_elearni... This discourages innovation and new players int he market.

There has got to be prior art for some of this from the old "Orange Book" (aka compartmented mode workstation) security model. CMW included audit trails for everything, even things like cutting and pasting information from windows running at different security levels.

Oh that right, I forget.. blackboard does this over the Internet. How silly of me to overlook the significance of that technical leap.

Edit: I should have read the links in the article. The prior-art already gathered on Wikipedia is pretty impressive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_virtual_learning_env...

Blackboard already has an AJAX interface in private beta. Don't know if it will be an improvement or not, I just heard that from our tech people. To be honest though about half of what makes blackboard suck is that teachers aren't very effective at using it. As professors get more savvy and the tech improves I think it will be at least a tolerable solution to most people. It used to drive me crazy but lately I don't notice it so much anymore.

It's the same as all enterprise software - it sucks because the people who buy aren't the people who use, and the people who buy make decisions based on criteria that have exactly nothing to do with usability. And so the problem is that you can't compete with the vendors on usability; you have to compete on seemingly meaningless features, and you have to compete with very large and well-connected sales organizations.

I'm at the University of Maryland, University College, or UMUC.edu. I'm almost done, and I've completed most of my degree online. UMUC is a "Forbes Favorite" for online education. And, while I think that WebTycho, their custom academic CMS system is okay, it's soooo.... 1999. It could really use a facelift and an upgrade. Also, towards the end of the semester, the system slows to a crawl.

So, yeah, it's a big problem that's begging to be fixed with something better, but you'd have to sell to Universities and colleges, which would be a nightmare. Not only do you have to schmooze the right people, the decision would spend months in committee. And then, implementation would take a long time, because you'd have to interface with whatever legacy database they are using.

I can think of a bunch of other ideas I'd rather do in terms of start ups, but if you want to tackle it... more power to you. You could make life better for thousands of students.

I think rather than trying to get universities to change from a system they're familiar with, it might be better to focus on software for elementary and high schools. My mother is a teacher at an elementary school, and all their grades, amongst other things, must be done online. The software made me cringe when I saw it. It's all ActiveX, and most of the time it doesn't work. The database on the backend is horribly slow, and it stops working at random intervals. It's also impossible to use if you don't have broadband, and there are still many areas where my parents live where broadband is not yet available.

My mother told me that just before Christmas when their grades were due, she had 18 students to put grades in for (ie, A, B+, C, etc) for 4 subjects. It took her 5 hours because of how slow the system was. This is not a large school system, so they probably had at most 6 people using it at once.

A lot of school systems, especially smaller ones, feel they need to go more digital to "keep up", but their IT people, to put it frankly, are idiots. They spend a lot of money implementing a system that does more harm than good. These are customers that are just starting out, so there is no issue with convincing them to change from their current system like with a university.

This was actually what my partner and I proposed for the very first Summer Founder session, but as Paul Graham pointed out, building great software to serve this purpose would only be 1% of the work.

I agree with you an many of the discussion here is pointing to that it might not be the software but rather the culture. As entrepreneurs and innovator I think our job is more then just make good apps but persuade the customers to use the right products.

A compsci student at the University of Alberta wrote a web app https://bearscat.su.ualberta.ca/ that scrapes the U of A's WebCT install and can drive WebCT's UI in the background to do basic registration stuff. It's infinitely more usable.

For some reason the university administration seems to resent the fact that it exists.

oops, I was confused - I was thinking of PeopleSoft rather than WebCT. As bad as WebCT is, PeopleSoft is far worse.

There are a few problems with trying to take on the WebCT/Blackboard gestalt. As others have already mentioned, out-of-the-box integration with ERP systems is a big selling point for the commercial solutions, even though it largely doesn't work. CIOs and other college administrators sometimes don't look beyond the sales pitch, though, so the inflated promises of the sales drones go a long way.

Secondly, many organizations are understandably nervous with hosting core academic resources off-campus. That attitude may shift over the coming years as outsourcing of other systems such as student email becomes more common, but in the meantime, most IT staff in higher education still get squeamish about letting some 3rd party become solely responsible for managing such critical systems. That breaks the usual web startup model of being able to host the app, and forces you to do support for on-site installs.

Have you heard of the following:

LAMS, http://lamsinternational.com

dotLRN, http://dotlrn.org - great user or class-scoped calendaring and private forums scoped per-group, whatever that group may be plus other stuff (and can integrate with LAMS)

There is Sakai, although they are woefully late on delivering what they have promised to deliver. http://sakaiproject.org

Why don't you write up something that looks at these projects and explains what is missing from them?

You don't get it. They aren't being used by universities because they're good, they're used because their massive sales force was able to get the long term service contracts.

I can't find the link, but I think Joel (or Eric Sink?) said there are 3 acceptable pricing levels for software:

1) $5-$99 - this is for consumers/regular expenses 2) $100-300 - this can bought within a normal company budget with a purchase order 3) $10,000+ - this is for organizations that require a huge sales effort to reach.

The price here was totally unrelated to product quality. It's just that a $250 piece of software, even if it's better, is too cheap for a huge enterprise to consider buying. Hence Oracle, Blackboard, etc

Want a job? michael at coursesonfacebook.com Founders Fund backed. We're not exactly building a CMS. We're building something different/better.

Yeah. UI designers especially.

http://apps.facebook.com/courses is our first product and we are looking to build sweet tools for students and professors/teachers as we move forward.

We have put a lot of thought into how to get our products into schools -- without all the shrimp and cocktails -- and we think we have some good ideas and great opportunities lined up.

send me details please dodeja@gmail.com

You put a lot of thought into how to "get [your] products into schools," and you thought Facebook was the right platform to work with?

If you're just using Facebook as a quick marketing plug to get folks interested in your service, that's one thing. Otherwise, you might want to talk to a lawyer and get them to explain FERPA to you, and check your business for compliance.

I work in IT at a small college, and at least as far as we've been told, no college can allow enrollment records to become visible to anyone not enrolled in or teaching a class. That means that even displaying the current course load for a student is considered a privacy breech for which the college is liable.

Of course, there's also the fact that purchasing decisions at most schools are made on 6-10 year schedules. No responsible administrator is going to gamble on putting key academic resources into a system as new and unproven as Facebook. FB (and the whole FB app ecosystem) have a long way to go to convince anyone that they're in it for the long haul.

Absolutely, it's not going to be easy and we are aware of the legal problems with privacy. But yes, the facebook app is just our first product. We are working on off facebook stuff as well.

or hit me at mpstaton at gmail.com

These crappy systems survive largely because of their support for enterprise integration. I know my school bought one on the basis of its integration with their banner management system. Not to mention that universities are demanding customers. (seems like a lot of enterprise software customers are)

This one doesn't suck: http://www.theclassconnection.com

I only reason I know about it is because it uses similar technology to my site (GWT). Don't know of any schools using it though.

God, I hate WebCT. My school currently uses it; it's poorly designed and even harder to navigate.

I'm working on a web app that would eventually be a(n indirect) competitor to CMS systems.

lyime, email me at myoung8@stanford.edu or ping me at myoung8 on Skype, i've got some information/experience in this area that should be helpful to you.

Blackboard is a steaming pile, that's for sure.

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