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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

> But Gatsis also claimed that even with the security flaws he exploited, Demirkapi could never have accessed Follett data other than his own. Demirkapi counters that he "100 percent had access to other people’s data," and says he even showed Follett's engineers the password of the friend who had let him access his information.

So - someone is lying. Isn't lying about the extent of a security breach a fairly serious matter? Blackboard operates in the EU. Is the disclosure portion of the GDPR retroactive?

Of course - I'm not making any presumptions about which of the two parties is a liar!

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Have you ever seen or used Blackboard? It's probably the worst "large" software system I've used outside of something built within an enterprise.

Blackboard is awful. When I was at uni, I actually wrote a scraper to auto-download my course content so I didn't have to use the Blackboard UI. It's upwards of £100k/year too. Definitely a market ripe for a competitor!

My university switched to something called Canvas (right after I graduated, of course) and it's incredibly slick, on top of it being fully OSS. Sakai is out there too — the quality isn't much better than Blackboard but at least it's free!

https://www.instructure.com/canvas/

https://www.sakailms.org/

My school transitioned to Canvas from Sakai, it was like night and day in usability. I used Blackboard in highschool so even Sakai offered a major increase in usability.

Sakai and Canvas seem easy enough to setup that I can't imagine Blackboard can continue making money for much longer.

There's another system called LON-CAPA (written in Perl) that seems ancient compared the other competing systems. It was very easy to use and "just worked" but it felt like it was straight out of the Web 1.0 era.

I think most of the universities in California have been switching to Canvas. I also use Moodle, which is also FLOSS; personally I strongly prefer the UX to Canvas, but it may be less enterprise-y.

The awful UI and pervasive install base shows that Blackboard's fitness in the market is not tied to their UI or other tech decisions. Building a successful competitor to Blackboard is not predicated on your ability to design a prettier, faster, more usable interface or a simpler, more powerful feature set. It's 100% based on your ability to do enterprise sales to universities.

In the early 00's I developed a test LMS (SCORM) for courseware the company I was working for at the time was building... only because all the LMS software was a convoluted mess.

That test LMS became the LMS for a few major airlines and a large fortune 50 company (uplifted through a few software shifts). It lasted for more than a decade before being replaced by an "Enterprise" solution, I think it was Blackboard (took 2 years to get it setup right, and people in the know still don't like it.

Changing from Blackboard is a lot of work, and the replacement isn't guaranteed to be better (although while you're using Blackboard it does seem that any replacement at all would be better).

Blackboard has a lot of useful features built up over the years, and they're not all bugs.

Just because the incumbent lacks finesse doesn't mean you can 'eat their lunch' without having better features or a better UI.

People need a reason to change the software they use; when it means retraining a district full of teachers then the reason needs to be good.

It's not just a bad UI, it's also extremely buggy.

The problem is that the market is next to impossible to get into. They're like Photoshop - they've got an army of people trained in using their super complex UI. It's the de facto standard in the market; they've built a massive moat which will be extremely hard to get past.

A better product may be necessary, but it's definitely not sufficient.

Absolutely.

Sometimes, unfortunately, you can get away with a worse product and better marketing!

And honestly, blackboard got worse over the years! They got a UI overhaul a couple of years ago and I hardly recognize it. But it seems like everything is harder to find than it used to be.

Back when I was a SE student, we wrote an application for our university that students could use to access their examination schedules without having to look through the Blackboard calendar.

Which was so much better, because you did not have to log in and it was faster than going through Blackboard's UI...

I think Rutgers in NJ used Sakai. As well as some other schools. It’s not much better but it’s far cheaper.

Canvas is the new kid on the block. Even Canvas has issues though so it’s great as a replacement for Blackboard, but there’s still plenty more that can be disrupted and improved.

When I was at school they were using Moodle. And I gotta say Moodle was very solid. The UI wasn't terrible and everything worked.

But the big plus: Open Source and completely free to self-host

Except they have patents on 'e-learning'.

So it’s the worst software system short of 90% of the other stuff you’ve seen?

I'd assume they meant "built within an enterprise" in terms of internal tooling.

It's possible he got read-only access while they're saying he wouldn't have gotten read/write access.

My highschool's records were similarly unsecured - I got a surprising amount of read-only access (including how much money was on students' IDs for lunch), but couldn't change anything.

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