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Comment by neovive | Hacker News Reader

Best of luck to them. It's quite difficult to convince faculty to switch over from tools they are comfortable using -- especially porting over their existing lessons and modules. Focusing on the UI is definitely the right approach as Bb is clearly lacking in this space. Regardless, the LMS market is long overdue for a shake up.

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.

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> It's quite difficult to convince faculty to switch over from tools they are comfortable using

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.

When I was at NYU, we all had blackboard. We mostly used various google offerings to route around it (google groups for class mailings, google docs for sharing, etc).

No one I've ever met who has used Blackboard has ever expressed anything nice about it. Professor friends of mine actively avoid it; they use Wordpress instead. Others use Moodle.

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.

I have a professor who uses Sakai (the university as a whole used Blackboard, but switched to Moodle, another open source option, this year). Sakai may be better than Blackboard, but that's not saying much. The ui is still terrible and it's filled with inconsistent and confusing behaviors. I've no idea what it's like from the instructors perspective, but as a student it's barely usable.

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.

I agree that there are some UI issues in Sakai. I particularly dislike how the back button does not work as expected due to the way the sessions are maintained. However, with the source being available, it is only a matter of time before improvements are made.

Sakai's forum feature is pretty impressively broken, I had a professor try to get students to use it and it was an enormous, ongoing disaster as people were thwarted by the UI at every turn.

I am alum/tech support/TA at Univ. of Michigan which is one of the major contributors to Sakai so I have seen all sides of it. The actual services are pretty good, but the user interface is horrible. In defense of Sakai, the developers know the UI is horrible and are working on it. I have my doubts they will succeed since it's such a huge project.

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