6 ms·

I use Blackboard as professor a lot, and while pedagogically it can do amazing things technically it's poorly done and annoying. I think the author wrongly poo-

I use Blackboard as professor a lot, and while pedagogically it can do amazing things technically it's poorly done and annoying. I think the author wrongly poo-poos the one-stop-shop feature of Blackboard. The fact that the annoying quiz making facility grades automatically and posts grades to the annoying grade center that can't even do weighted grades right is still pretty great compared to the alternative (which is what? Getting my students to get their own logins to some other site, take a quiz, scrape that data automatically somehow to some kind of password protected database and get them to sign in to that and then check there) Everyone gushes over the Kahn Academy approach of expecting perfection and permitting failure; they're right and I can run with it in Blackboard. What I do: Write random question pools using Blackboards obnoxious question writing web interface. Randomly generate quizzes from a series of different pools by subject. Let my students take the quiz as many times as they want; offer zero partial credit Blackboard automatically puts the latest grade into grade center (which is almost always the highest since they stop taking it when they're satisfied with their grade) which they can then access with their university login at any time without revealing confidential information about other students There is a terrible, ridiculous, hackery way to dump to question log files into excel, clean up the data (takes about an hour) and get feedback on how often each question in each pool is answered correctly, so I know which subjects the students are struggling with. We go over those topics in later lectures. This has had a huge effect in my sections because it feels like the students work twice as hard but are half as stressed about it. They can fix just about any result for the better by learning the material. So tl;dr I love learning content management systems and by implication Blackboard despite its many egregious flaws. In terms of startup ideas, I think there's plenty of space to work with Blackboard rather than try to replace it i.e. I don't think their proprietary quiz formats would be difficult to decipher at all, which means a clever startup could make a "We make making Blackboard quizzes easy!" product and do big enterprise sales with it. Universities love to feel they are on the cutting edge of "technology" and clearly have deep pockets for this stuff (if you didn't click on the expensive link in the article you should)

jules 15y ago
What would an ideal tool for what you want to do look like?
- danteembermage 15y ago
  That's a tough question to answer, although just behaving sanely would be a start (if you overtype a grade in a neighboring column it destroys the old grade immediately and permanently, Blackboards solution to prevent this is to make you press enter in each and every cell in the table) A pain point for me is Blackboard can sort of create exam questions with a formula for answers, but it's quite buggy and very low featured (for example it claims to do exponents but I wouldn't trust it to calculate a standard deviation). Since professors using Blackboard for exams end up entering many questions into the system (unless the textbook vendor supplies a Blackboard test bank, talk about lock in!) making that as fast and as intuitive as possible is a good place to start. I did some Googling and found this: http://www.cod.edu/it/blackboard/testgenerators.htm#BYUI http://www.cod.edu/it/blackboard/testgenerators.htm#BYUI so apparently this kind of thing is doable.
niels_olson 15y ago
> I love learning content management systems and by implication Blackboard despite its many egregious flaws. Your obliviousness is obvious in your writing. So let me offer what you can hopefully take as a Penn-and-Teller-esque response. Student and former independent LMS developer here. No offense, sir, but profs like you are a major part of the problem. Any interest you have in LMSes is unnatural. You're a professor. Your students did not sign up to be your test subjects. Do you have any idea how much time is wasted by your students in the byzantine hell of your personal online frolicking? 3 sections x 20 x 1 - 2 hours a day makes ... we might be better off skipping your class and deriving Black-Scholes from first principles. Your university quite possibly has rewarded you for your LMS geekery by making you some sort of educational tech committee member, maybe even the chairman. Your students blow sunshine up your ass because you hold their futures in your hands, but I'm sure you ignore all that. Blackboard will blow what ever you want up your derriere, so long as you or your committee keeps telling the deans that Blackboard is making progress, or has new feature "x". In fact, Blackboard will blow harder if you question their utility. > Universities love to feel they are on the cutting edge of "technology" and clearly have deep pockets for this stuff Sir, you are one of them -- the people at the university -- that the author wouldn't mind actually taking what he has to say to heart.
- danteembermage 15y ago
  So sell me! Blackboard does a million things but I really only care about 1. posting syllabuses, links, and documents 2. making randomly generated auto-grading quizzes 3. auto-updating a gradebook. Does your software do these things better? Does it do things I didn't even know I wanted? What are the big ways you hope to make the world of LMS better? Non-techies experience great pain learning complex new software, what awesome improvements justify a switch? I'd love to have some alternatives and some ammo to back them with.
  - aufreak3 15y ago
    I think what niels_olson is asking for is to weigh your time saved versus the collective spent time of the students in some measure when considering the use of an LMS tool. (Disclaimer: I don't use Blackboard, but am curious about the state of LMS art.)
itiztv 15y ago
Just thought I throw this out here http://efrontlearning.net/index http://efrontlearning.net/index

jules 15y ago

What would an ideal tool for what you want to do look like?

danteembermage 15y ago
That's a tough question to answer, although just behaving sanely would be a start (if you overtype a grade in a neighboring column it destroys the old grade immediately and permanently, Blackboards solution to prevent this is to make you press enter in each and every cell in the table) A pain point for me is Blackboard can sort of create exam questions with a formula for answers, but it's quite buggy and very low featured (for example it claims to do exponents but I wouldn't trust it to calculate a standard deviation). Since professors using Blackboard for exams end up entering many questions into the system (unless the textbook vendor supplies a Blackboard test bank, talk about lock in!) making that as fast and as intuitive as possible is a good place to start. I did some Googling and found this: http://www.cod.edu/it/blackboard/testgenerators.htm#BYUI http://www.cod.edu/it/blackboard/testgenerators.htm#BYUI so apparently this kind of thing is doable.

niels_olson 15y ago

> I love learning content management systems and by implication Blackboard despite its many egregious flaws. Your obliviousness is obvious in your writing. So let me offer what you can hopefully take as a Penn-and-Teller-esque response. Student and former independent LMS developer here. No offense, sir, but profs like you are a major part of the problem. Any interest you have in LMSes is unnatural. You're a professor. Your students did not sign up to be your test subjects. Do you have any idea how much time is wasted by your students in the byzantine hell of your personal online frolicking? 3 sections x 20 x 1 - 2 hours a day makes ... we might be better off skipping your class and deriving Black-Scholes from first principles. Your university quite possibly has rewarded you for your LMS geekery by making you some sort of educational tech committee member, maybe even the chairman. Your students blow sunshine up your ass because you hold their futures in your hands, but I'm sure you ignore all that. Blackboard will blow what ever you want up your derriere, so long as you or your committee keeps telling the deans that Blackboard is making progress, or has new feature "x". In fact, Blackboard will blow harder if you question their utility. > Universities love to feel they are on the cutting edge of "technology" and clearly have deep pockets for this stuff Sir, you are one of them -- the people at the university -- that the author wouldn't mind actually taking what he has to say to heart.

danteembermage 15y ago
So sell me! Blackboard does a million things but I really only care about 1. posting syllabuses, links, and documents 2. making randomly generated auto-grading quizzes 3. auto-updating a gradebook. Does your software do these things better? Does it do things I didn't even know I wanted? What are the big ways you hope to make the world of LMS better? Non-techies experience great pain learning complex new software, what awesome improvements justify a switch? I'd love to have some alternatives and some ammo to back them with.
- aufreak3 15y ago
  I think what niels_olson is asking for is to weigh your time saved versus the collective spent time of the students in some measure when considering the use of an LMS tool. (Disclaimer: I don't use Blackboard, but am curious about the state of LMS art.)

itiztv 15y ago

Just thought I throw this out here http://efrontlearning.net/index http://efrontlearning.net/index