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Comment by dreen | Hacker News Reader

Blackboard is terrible software. I have a feeling it's the most classic example of "design by committee" where all decisions lie with admin staff who never ever have to use the software. They just approve whatever has the biggest list of features. They earn so much money from tuition fees and care so little for usability of basic tools its astounding.

I'm not in education software myself but it seems to me a solution of sorts would be to push for standardization:

- open data exchange formats

- open communication protocols

- open social identity platforms

This doesn't fix the problem but at least it gives power to the people to do so. However, it won't happen on its own because it's not in the best interest of anyone currently in position to do anything about it.

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Yes blackboard is absolutely horrible. One of (many) experiences I had, was a course coordinator for a project course where students submitted a research report at the end. We needed to get the reports uploaded to turnitin through the platform, the interface for doing this was horrible enough, you essentially needed to check the reports in a big table and press upload selected to turnitin. The thing would just randomly fail and no reports would be generated. After much fiddling I found that the process failed likely (I don't quite remember how I found this) because in the background blackboard would generate a zip or tarfile and then upload that to turnitin. The thing was the VMs they seemed used were horribly under provisioned, so the zip or tar process would run out of memory and be killed. The thing was, there was no easy way of knowing how many reports reliably worked, so the solution (proposed by blackboard support) was I should just go to every report individually and upload. A process that took about 3 h because the interface was so horribly slow. Considering that I was already completely overworked (80h weeks) not a suitable solution.

Fortunately, many universities are moving to other platforms. Where I am now we use canvas, which is open source and really like night and day compared to blackboard. I also heard good things about moodle (another OSS solution).

I've used Moodle a couple of times, including building a course from scratch three months ago. It has a good feature set out of the box, has plenty of plug-ins for add-on functionality and - for me, the best thing - a really helpful and responsive user community. (See the forums [1])

Documentation is also refreshingly comprehensive and up to date.

[1] https://moodle.org/mod/forum/index.php?id=5

Moodle is a nightmare to admin, though. Or at least was a couple years ago when I got out of it.

So you are aware your dislike of Blackboard for reasons above are misplaced:

  - TurnItIn is a 3rd party Blackboard extension and the school selected to use this.

  - The school was also likely self hosting an under provisioned system.

I'm sure there are plenty of valid reasons for you to dislike Blackboard, but above cases are the school in question and TurnItIn.

- I know that turnitin is a 3rd party extension, however it was failing on the blackboard side if I recall correctly.

- The university was not self-hosting as far as I know. I was not in the IT department, so would not know 100%, but in my interactions with IT they said that the service was hosted by blackboard and we had limited control over the system, e.g. pretty much every issue had to be escalated to blackboard.

“Terrible software” is an understatement. Backboard gave rise to this epic rant: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/01/christ-i-hate-b...

Do you have any experience with EdX[1], out of interest?

While I can't speak for the specific formats and protocols they use, they're a non-profit, are founded & governed by educational institutions, and develop their service using an open source software model.

Those aren't guaranteed to result in a better result for users and institutions of course, but they would seem to avoid some of the worst-case scenarios that fee-based for-profit platforms might find themselves developing into.

[1] - https://www.edx.org/about-us

EdX was trying to create a community around their software as well. Although the person I know who was there working on that left and I don't know the current status.

That's only part of the solution though. Even if EdX, as far as it goes, is an open platform, someone needs to run and support it for schools, you need email and doc sharing, etc. etc. It's fine to say that everyone should just run Linux, OpenOffice, and so forth and just shrug if that's too complicated for a lot of students and teachers. But that's not an actual solution.

In principle, the government at some level could do its own collaborative/learning software and host it but people would perhaps rightly then ask why the government isn't using readily available commercial off the shelf software like most companies do.

I felt like edx squandered a bit of their value by being so harvard focused. Like, they built a search engine so that instructors could search through all the course materials created across all edx courses. But then it was only available at Harvard. And there lacked a connection or understanding that edx could be very useful for traditional courses as much as moocs and could have benefited from user interaction studies there. Oh well. All that is still doable. But apparently education is happy with blackboard and zoom.

I never really felt the Harvard focus. I've taken at least MIT and Harvard courses on it. Maybe others (not really sure what has been Coursera and which EdX). Probably the biggest issue for me is a general one with MOOCs. They mostly solve for something which really isn't that much of a problem (broadcasting a video). Other things not so much.

My experience over the past nine months is that there are a lot of platforms with work pretty well with experience facilitators for a modest-sized group. And nothing that is really very satisfactory for interactivity at scale, especially with a heterogeneous audience (except in the most glancing way like poll questions).

I used to do research on how students use educational technology, like video lectures, in moocs. So I guess I'm probably biased because I know a lot of the edx people and some of the behind the scenes stuff.

I agree that interactivity at scale is super difficult. The problem is that in a course you are teaching more or less solved problems to bring students up to speed to where the field is. So the same questions get asked from class to class and group to group. There's the idea that you can compile all this knowledge and questions and then provide that as a resource to students. But actually the hardship of getting through those questions, even though they are the same, is how they learn. So the resources are nice for instructors but not as useful for students directly. There's definitely a lot of space for innovation but most of the people doing that either lack the technical expertise of developers etc because they come from education departments or they lack the domain knowledge of education research. There's a somewhat large space to fill with people who are good at both.

My experience with EdX is servers getting owned because the security was terrible.

This already somewhat exists in the form of LTIs[0] and the Common Cartridge format[1], which are standards for application interoperability (i.e, how an app exchanges data with an LMS) and data exchange (export course content from one LMS and bring it into another), respectively. Social identity isn't really used, instead most institutions use Shibboleth/Gsuite/Azure AD as a SAML Auth gateway that authenticates users to services. All of these standards are supported by Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle and pretty much every other LMS that wants to get traction now (since all your other software expects it).

0: https://www.imsglobal.org/activity/learning-tools-interopera...

1: https://www.imsglobal.org/activity/common-cartridge

Jira is another good example. Or enterprise software like oracle or salesforce to a degree.

When the response to your question to the customer of "what features do you want" is "every part of my job I don't like" it's going to end up that way. Or you'll loose the bullet list bingo during aquisition.

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