Ugly Software (like Blackboard) Gives Education a Bad Name
smartlyedu.com
smartlyedu.com
Very often people seem at grasp at a hand wavy, superficial explanation. For example, a few days ago there was a thread on restaurant sites. A lot of comenters seemed to conclude that this is because service providers to this market suck. While that's almost axiomatically true, it should just trigger another why.
If you are off to fix the restaurant site problem, you need to answer the second why. Conclude that service providers suck stopping there will lead you try fix the problem be starting a web site design business for restaurants that doesn't suck. But restaurants didn't just magically all end up with bad service providers. Surely some good ones tried and either failed or started to suck. There was a reason.
Same here. The "horrible mentality" of schools is s symptom, not a root cause.
This is a horrible meme. No other company that I know of has its potential competitors talked out of the business by this gossip of fear.
Hint: not everyone is operating in the U.S.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of other companies that sue competitors instead of trying to compete with them. I mean, one such company is currently in the #1 spot on the front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2081938 Need I list more?
Blackboard bought my startup in 2001, and I worked there for about a year after. After they bought our company, our product was discontinued and our unique perspective was lost. The remaining employees were integrated into Blackboard's existing teams. Some of them have become excellent leaders at Blackboard, but after the acquisition they were advancing Blackboard's vision, not our vision.
WebCT was the only other large competitor in this market, and Blackboard used its IPO cash to acquire them in early 2006. Together Blackboard and WebCT had over 80% of the market, maybe closer to 90%.
Plus there's the traditional enterprise software problem: when the buyer is not the end user, product skew happens. When IT staff evaluate software alternatives, they're looking for IT features, like LDAP support or integration with a student records system. They know the end users need certain features like "a homework dropbox," but they're not able to evaluate the subtleties of those features. The IT department can't be as familiar with those subtleties as the end users are. And it's rare that an IT department would study internal users in depth, like a product designer would.
There claim was spurious anyway, just because they have trademarks on the 'Blackboard' (a generic term anyway) regarding education software, doesn't mean they have a claim to the word 'Chalk' for non-educational software. Blackboard just have over-active lawyers.
I worked for an education startup between 2003 and 2006 that made a learning management system similar to the OP. We also laughed at the terrible UI and outdated technology used by our competitors. Little did we know...
The problem is that you only have two choices in education. You can try marketing to individual teachers using Adwords or the like, but there aren't many teachers who want to spend their own money on classroom tools. Districts aren't keen on it, either. This is strictly microISV territory.
The other alternative is to market directly to school districts or universities. That means you need expensive sales reps and money to burn on travel budgets, trade shows, etc. The sales cycle takes about a year, even for the smallest customer. Your customers are the administrators on the purchasing committee, not teachers or students. The admins are far more concerned with back-office functionality like tracking attendance or whether teachers are following the curriculum than the quality of the UI. In fact, the UI was basically irrelevant so long as it was physically possible to do everything on their list of requirements.
Educators make it extremely expensive to provide them with software. But they don't have deep pockets either, so the margins for software developers are extremely tight. There are no competitive pressures in education. Districts are perfectly happy to use obsolete technology indefinitely. There are still thousands of schools using applications based on Access, Foxpro, and DBase IV. (seriously!) The only thing in your favor is that once you sign a customer, they are extremely reluctant to move to a competitor regardless of how outdated your product becomes.
Thus, the standard business model in education is for the large players like Pearson or Blackboard to gobble up small independent companies with locked-in customer bases built up over many years, cut investment in new development to a minimum, and milk the products until they're unviable.
TL;DR: The people buying educational software don't care and won't pay for good UI.
I think I've identified a few causes: 1. Design by committee 2. Winners are determined by relationships and lock-in 3. Educators don't care about finding the best, just good enough 4. Great developers don't want to work in this sector
The first should be obvious. Anything run by government tends towards design by committee, and educational software almost tries to be bad in this way.
The second is true of other sectors, but it is especially true in education. Intermediate Units (I work in PA) and school districts don't try to work together by default. Even at the top, deals are done by who knows who or who hates who. And, the enormous cost of switching products for the large systems creates a lock-in environment. People will say/promise anything to get a sale, because they know they will really have to screw up to lose customers.
Third, educators as a rule are afraid of technology or are at least more unaware than anyone here on HN. They don't want to spend the time to learn; they want to spend whatever it takes to get the problem off their plate. Remember, there are a great deal of people who went into education because of the vacation time. Some people really care and work hard, but the percentage is lower than other industries, I think.
Finally, for all the reasons above, the greatest developers don't want to work in education. The bosses are almost never developers; winners aren't determined by quality; most code is CRUD type code with lots of rules and exceptions from state law/procedure.
I get excited at the thought of change, which is why I stay. I want to be part of that change. But, on the low days change seems impossible, and I start thinking about other jobs.
One side note: why isn't there more OS in education? This really bothers me, as it seems like a perfect scenario for it. I'm thinking it goes back to points #2 and #3. People want to pay for something now rather than funding something everyone shares. If I could be part of the change in one way, this would be it (I'm looking for ways now).
EDIT: One more: pay. Because most code is crud code, and because bosses aren't developers who can discern good from bad code, the perception is developers should be paid like teachers (or worse). Not going to attract the great developers that way. In the long run, all these software costs more to develop as a result of not hiring the best, but non-developer bosses can't understand that.
When I was an undergrad I found a CSRF vulnerability in their product Banner. I tried contacting SungardHE on my own, but couldn't contact a human being, so I brought it to the attention of the IT dept at my university. They asked me to prepare a demo against their dev server. After seeing the demo, IT brought this to the attention of Sungard.
A day or two later, someone at Sungard called the school's general counsel and demanded that they bring charges against me for some ambiguously defined computer crime. A professor I was working for went to bat for me and smoothed things over.
We reached an agreement where I wouldn't disclose until they had distributed a patch and they would acknowledge me for the fix. They reneged on their end of the deal, so I released to Bugtraq.
I'm all for someone eating their lunch.
[0] I'm referring not just to the software they produce, but the arrogant mentality and litigious nature of the company as a whole
As far as getting good software into education, you're fighting both your competition and the establishment. Not an enviable position. Most of my experiences with how UK schools procure their IT equipment and software have reminded me of 'enterprisey' corporations and the disconnect between purchasers and buyers. (At least their excuse is they have neither enough time or money to do a good job.)
Approved bidders, closed lists, hugely expensive bidding processes, it's calculated to keep the market sewn up by the education IT vendors (usual suspects, Capita, Fujitsu, etc.)
At a time when the UK is looking to save money, the state of school software provisioning is shameful on multiple levels.
Although it's in place, it's been severely restricted due to irrational concerns over security and other illogical arguments. In order for the buying to even occur (keep in mind this was free for the school), there must be knowledgeable IT people in charge.
This is a much smaller scale here since it was for a high school instead of a college, but you'd be surprised at how incompetent people can be.
Right now in the IT people I work under at the university are smart, but lightyears behind when it comes to good user interfaces and the latest technologies.
It was decided well above my pay grade that grade checking, admissions, financial aid, registration, and online courses would use Oracle, PeopleSoft and Desire2Learn.
Your assessment is 100% accurate.
> Current e-learning platforms ... are riddled with unattractive and unusable interfaces that are counterintuitive. This presents a problem to the teachers who are less likely to create content for students, but also for the students themselves.
Yes, yes, yes. Somebody, please weather the Blackboard onslaught and fix this.
That's why I don't bother with my idea. Nobody would be dumb enough to fund it and I can't scrounge up the cash I'd need to fortify the defenses.
It seems like you can use that patent as a template and just replace 'education' with the human interaction of your choice and have just as 'valid' a patent.
Moodle was prettier. That's all most of the student's noticed. I'm reminded of the chapter in ReWork 'Tools Don't Matter'.
With either system, the great teachers were still insightful, engaging, and likable. Two years of Moodle didn't change that.
Decent article about them: http://mfeldstein.com/instructure-canvas-a-new-lms-entrant/
The CEO founded Mozy. Team is solid. Free for teachers.
which gives a lot of insight into the issue.
I'm currently a student and my university uses BlackBoard. The software is simply awful. Every professor chooses a different ugly template for their own course, so there is no consistency. In my university, the more able professors have started making their own websites to put up lecture notes, tutorials and grades.
Even the new updates are just a skin of their poorly designed product. No new functionality is added(or even improved), but instead it's just a 'prettier version' of the older system. And the amounts they charge universities for such tools is crazy.
But as someone already mentioned, they have a monopoly in the education sector, and they make it really difficult for universities to switch to an alternative tool [1].
[1] http://www.dowling.edu/mydowling/tech/bbdocs/bb-exp.html
Eben Moglen even gave a keynote on this: https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Keynote+-...
The keynote was followed by an open discussion with Blackboard's lawyer: https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Lunchtime...
As Eben Moglen put it: "Preventing people from learning how things work is the opposite of education."
Due to my frustration using WebCT for classes I TA'd as a graduate student, I recently partnered with another student to build a simple alternative in Django. Check it out at http://thiscourse.com It's designed to provide access to the crucial features as quickly as possible. We're always interested in getting feedback and have had a few classes use it successfully so far.
I don't understand why companies make such useless web sites.
One of the Bb products we use (transact/envision/cash registers), they basically ship you the server with the software, and updates are handled by their techs. We actually resorted to disk-to-disk type cloning of that server to give ourselves a backout plan for when their engineers break stuff.
Most professors prefer not to use it but are forced to by the College since they are paying for BB services.
I personally feel the education sector is a wide open game, create something that will increase learning potential and bring more value to a students degree and you will have success.
Ugh...
<blink>Processing...</blink>
you know... just in case ;)
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc.
Founders:
* Cornell 1. http://www.linkedin.com/in/dcane
* Cornell 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Gilfus
* American 1: http://www.linkedin.com/in/chasen
* American 2: http://investor.blackboard.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=177018&dc...
I can name a few problems with Blackboard (the webapp). I've seen both sides of it; I've suffered through 7 semesters with BB as a student, and 2 as a teaching assistant.
It uses frames. When you open a link in a new tab, you get the bare page without the top/left nav bars. Really? They couldn't even use a little 1998 Javascript to get the page to reload inside the frameset?
Too many modules are enabled by default, which causes confusion when profs use things differently. Does the syllabus go in "Course Information" or "Course Documents"? Or, since it contains the prof's email, "Staff Information"? Do homework assignments go under "Assignments" or "Course Documents"?
There are two ways to upload files. One is convenient for both students and teachers, one is not. Guess which one is more obvious? The nonintuitive one, Digital Dropbox, is buried two pages deep. It has two choices: "Add File" and "Send File". If you add a file, but don't send it, the teacher never sees it. From the teacher's end, Digital Dropbox renames files, for your convenience. Yes, BB, thanks so much for renaming my students' Java files so that I can't compile them. Also, for your convenience, any .html files that are uploaded get their extension changed to .rtf, prompting more shell scripts just to de-BlackBoard your students' files.
The better upload option is for teachers to allow submissions in the Assignments tab. This makes way more sense, since you can view and complete the assignment all on one page. To enable this, the teacher has to select an assignment type of "Assignment", instead of the default "Content Unit". As a TA, I only knew this existed because one semester, one of my profs used this. (Once, out of all the classes I took that had digital submission.)
The grading page is horrible. It has a table for the grades, like you would expect, with one column per assignment, and one row per student. If you have more than 5ish assignments or 15 students, it overflows the page. This would be fine, except the table doesn't respond to the scroll wheel. It has a scrollbar on the right, and a scrollbar on the bottom, and watches their position with Javascript. When you scroll one of these, the table contents are updated to reflect that position of the table. This makes scrolling awkward every time - the screen flashes a bit, and you have no idea how many columns Blackboard decided you wanted to scroll until you look at the header row. Oh, and every time you resize the page, the table is reset to the top-left.
TL;DR These people need some serious UX help, fast.
Is there a way to quickly download all submissions for an assignment at once? So far, I've been stuck with going into each submission's sub-page and clicking the download link.
The grading page is horrible. …
Also, columns you tell it not to use in grade calculation may simply not appear anywhere.
My point is that Blackboard is not a piece of ugly software. It is fully functional and has a nice and intuitive design to it. The article says that:
Badly designed software with poor usability goes hand in hand with general appeal
I think that the author of this post should rethink Blackboard.
Granted, my university does not use the latest-and-greatest version (yet) of Blackboard Learn, but for someone with your history of using the application these should not be totally alien points.