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Comment by yincrash | Hacker News Reader

Many Universities already use stuff like Blackboard[1] which for the most part is TERRIBLE (at least how I remember it in school.) These pieces of software are already around, and if anything competition in the space will hopefully make things better.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc.

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My University uses Moodle, which is also TERRIBLE. I do all my grades and such in Google Docs, since Moodle is a UX nightmare. Something as simple as entering grades in Moodle requires a lot of clicking around for each grade. We have multi-page documents describing how to perform even the most basic tasks, they require constantly clicking and going to new pages of indiscernible icons. Menus are impossible to navigate without help.

Moodle is such a terrible thing to happen to the education ecosystem.

It's free/open sourced, meaning that every education system with a budget finds it appealing. Once implemented though, the organization will need to spend buckets of money to design, roll out, and maintain Moodle.

What you end up with is organizations installing Moodle, rather than some higher quality, equal-cost education software they should have installed from the beginning.

> I do all my grades and such in Google Docs

You upload all your students grade information to an external private company? Which university do you work for where this is allowed?

http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/

It's probably not allowed, but I think apps for education actually includes a promise from google to obey FERPA.

Tragically, the larger the organization, the more likely computers are to increase manual labor and repeated data entry, rather than reduce it. In the days before automation, you'd have simply written a letter on a piece of paper, in a second or so per student. I am not surprised to hear that "designed by committee" results in replacing something fast and easy with a long complicated process.

It is totally allowed BY having a separate ID system. If no one can ID the student then no one would gain the information.

But as far as I know, Blackboard (or Moodle or Sakai or...) data is stored locally at your institution, not housed on a Google server somewhere. I think the data mining possibilities are much lower in that case.

I'm all in favor of disruptive competition in that market, mind you! But I don't think it's easy.

Not true. Blackboard has a cloud offering. Plus, many competing products also rely on centralized servers.

What little information I can find, indicates that Blackboard is self-hostable, and that the "hosted" option they provide is actually an extra service.

The argument is against a solution that has no possibility for self-hosting and maintaining control of data. That they offer a hosted/SaaS option is irrelevant, because they also offer a regular self-hosted solution.

My university used a combination of Blackboard and Moodle, both of which are terrible. Your memory serves you correctly.

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