Instructure Launches To Root Blackboard Out Of Universities
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The user experience is so bad that many course lecturers make their own site or just avoid using websites at all. The only question I have though is how do you pitch it to universities when the people who suffer under the product usually aren't the ones making the purchasing decision?
This is my impression after 30 minutes of fumbling with it:
The look for end-users is clean and feels great. Way better than Blackboard for end-users. Canvas seems to promote a more self-service adhoc approach which would be attractive for small installs.
Unfortunately the admin interface seems non-existant.
How do I sanely create and populate thousands of courses?
User admin tools are primitive. Where is the ability for the administrator to change a users password? How can I see what classes they are enrolled in, what their roles are, etc? Can the administrator globally disable a user for non-payment without deleting?
How do faculty roll the content from one course into multiple sections and then roll that content over to a new course next semester? No anti-cheat integration?
Anyway those are the concerns I was able to find in the first 30 minutes.
It looks undeployable here which is a shame. Here is to hoping it gets better soon.
Edit: I just spotted the course copy functionality. Scratch that one off the list. Still not impressed with the central admin tools exposed in the UI. Our faculty would prefer not having to populate the user lists in their courses, etc.
Edit 2: Thought I'd be done playing with it but not yet. I can't get over how awesome the end-user UI is. As I just sent off to a co-worker: "The end-user UI is stupendously good compared to Blackboard. Stunningly good in comparison. It's like taking the best of Facebook and turning it into an LMS. Hide this from users."
Definitely has my interest.
From the sound of things I think you are using one of our free-for-teachers accounts, which gives you complete control over a course and not to the administrative tools that an admin would have. This is why it feels self-service and adhoc for small installs, because it is :)
We can integrate with a variety of SIS systems in batch/real-time for auto-populating thousands of courses. You can integrate with auth systems like LDAP and SAML too. We have features for migrating content from other vendors and also from semester to semester.
I'm happy to chat on the phone, answer questions here or you can set something up by emailing me devlin@instructure.com .
Blackboard is an LMS that many major universities use to provide online support for classes. At my university (University of Richmond), I can sign on to blackboard.richmond.edu and for each of my classes that semester, can download assignments/lecture/slides that my teacher has uploaded, upload assignments for my teacher to grade, view a roster of the other kids in my class, participate on a bulletin-board for "class discussions", view my grades, and my teacher can send out emails to the entire class fairly easily (enter text in a box, select which students of that class to send to, hit submit).
It's okay, but there are definitely some issues. Like, not being very user-friendly (I constantly help out my instructors with how to use it). Also it doesn't work very well in Chrome =/
Blackboard hurts Universities because it's overly expensive and unintuitive for the price.
This new site looks great. I worked on http://moodle.org/ back in the day which is a great opensource alternative. It's now deployed in most if not all California State Universities. This is a great space to work in.
Most of the CSU campuses are still using Blackboard. MOODLE is used by around 6 of the 23 campuses and is being piloted by a few others.
http://campustechnology.com/articles/2008/11/csu-system-adop...
although I think http://www.moodlerooms.com/ is slightly different.
On another note, many universities already run and contribute to the open source Sakai LMS. It's a Java-based LMS developed and maintained by a consortium of universities. A small to mid-size university can get it running very quickly as a pilot on 1 or 2 servers using Tomcat and MySQL. It's easy to customize and it integrates seamlessly with existing university portals via CAS. Throw in a SAN for user files and it's a very powerful, scalable and low-cost LMS option that is much more usable than Bb.
This statement assumes faculty are comfortable using Blackboard... I have yet to meet one who is. I've had to use it for my TA duties and the expression about running nails across a chalkboard is ripe for a pun.
In fact, it's so bad that my alma mater has put out a call for something else. http://webct.uwo.ca/owlflightplan/ (Admittedly, they make it sound like it's due to licensing, but if people were happy with it, they wouldn't be asking.)
LMS strikes me as a problem best dealt with at the course level, not the university level. Give profs some web space and let them put up something and go from there. The centralized "hub of all courses" seems overly complex.
Moodle is about the same as Sakai in this regard, but Blackboard is simply terrible. This is clearly a market that needs to be shaken up, and I hope these guys are the ones to do it.
(That said, I'm still planning an edtech startup. Best of luck to instructure!)
EDIT, Found it: http://www.blackboard.com/About-Bb/Patents/Patent-Pledge.asp...
...until D2L realized how bad they were making themselves look.
edit: I should probably disclose that my employer uses Blackboard and my brother-in-law sells moodle services.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc.
and
Most of the papers teachers post open up using scribd which is so much easier than dealing with a docx file or pdf.
I think Instructure is taking a step in the right direction, and I hope they can make through all of the crap Blackboard and Universities will give them.
Not sure I would have used the slide about Napoleon's march into Russia though.
One thing that bothers me, though (and this is based on a quick run-through of their demo, so I'm prepared to be set straight if this is not correct):
It looks like they've made the same mistake as Blackboard, WebCT, etc. by making resource type (files, assignments, discussion forums, etc.) the primary organizational method rather than organizing by instructional unit.
It may make good sense from a programming perspective to put all the discussion forums together, all the downloadable files together, all the external web links together, but that's not the mental model that teachers use. To a teacher teaching (e.g.) American history, the PDF of the Gettysburg Address and the PDF of the Declaration of Independence don't "go together". Instead, the Gettysburg Address "goes together" with the discussion forum on the American Civil War and the link to the National Park Service page on the Battle of Gettysburg.
Most teachers would prefer to build the Civil War unit in one place, rather than clicking back and forth between the file section and the discussion forum section and whatnot.
Canvas does have a "Module" type that lets you do this, more or less, but it's not the primary schema for organization.
If they want this system to have maximum comprehensibility and usability for teachers and students alike, I'd recommend that they promote their Modules to the top level, and make them the primary organizational method for the system.
Moodle gets this right -- few of the others do. When you start a new Moodle course, you see a list of weeks (or topics) to which you can then add files, discussion forums, web links...on an ad hoc basis. While you CAN click on links in Moodle to see all the files in one place, all the assignments in one place, and so on, in practice no one ever does that (except maybe at the beginning of the semester when the students click on the assignments link to make a note of all the due dates).
You don't have to copy Moodle slavishly, but please don't copy the organizational schemas of Blackboard and WebCT. They just plain suck.
Is PHP really considered old technology? FaceBook and a ton of other new and relatively new startups, including fflick.com use PHP. I am working on a startup and I certainly want to stay ahead of the curve with the latest technology; I have decided on PHP—because I am most proficient with this over the others. I know Ruby is like the hot, new girl right now, but that does not necessarily make PHP and Java old technologies. Am I wrong? Must I go after the hot new girl to keep my mojo?
Blackboard is an abomination.