3 ms·

Why does something this "simple" (compared to photoshop, at least) have a learning curve? The problem, especially when it comes to web-based apps, is never the

Why does something this "simple" (compared to photoshop, at least) have a learning curve? The problem, especially when it comes to web-based apps, is never the user when it's a question of findability or usability. The onus is on the software interface designer and information architect to make things usable and findable. Especially for something so easily organized as "Courses, users who can access the course, assignments and turned in assignments, tests/quizes and grades, communication between students and students, and students and teacher." Blackboard is an incredibly inefficient and confusing user interface for what it is. The concept of blaming the user for usability problems is disheartening...

dkarl 18y ago
In this case it's blaming the professor for problems encountered by students, and I agree wholeheartedly with that. There are professors who were dragged kicking and screaming into the e-mail age five years ago and immediately forced to basically manage a web site. They go through what is to them a series of meaningless magic rituals, the chapter 10 section 3 homework assignment gets uploaded to the chapter6/Mondays/quizzes/attic/old/personal_photos/onion_on_my_belt/tarnation directory, one foreign student with an exaggerated impression of the consequences for missing a homework assignment actually clicks through every folder on the site until she finds it, and the professor gives a 0 on that assignment to every other student in the class because they didn't turn it in. And that, my friends, is a true story (merely the worst of many) though directory names have been changed because I can't really remember. That said, Blackboard was really awful when I used it, which was six or seven years ago. It was archaic and felt like a careless amateur effort. Even on the best-organized Blackboard class site, everything was a few clicks further away than it should have been. It doesn't sound like they've had much incentive to improve it since then.

dkarl 18y ago

In this case it's blaming the professor for problems encountered by students, and I agree wholeheartedly with that. There are professors who were dragged kicking and screaming into the e-mail age five years ago and immediately forced to basically manage a web site. They go through what is to them a series of meaningless magic rituals, the chapter 10 section 3 homework assignment gets uploaded to the chapter6/Mondays/quizzes/attic/old/personal_photos/onion_on_my_belt/tarnation directory, one foreign student with an exaggerated impression of the consequences for missing a homework assignment actually clicks through every folder on the site until she finds it, and the professor gives a 0 on that assignment to every other student in the class because they didn't turn it in. And that, my friends, is a true story (merely the worst of many) though directory names have been changed because I can't really remember. That said, Blackboard was really awful when I used it, which was six or seven years ago. It was archaic and felt like a careless amateur effort. Even on the best-organized Blackboard class site, everything was a few clicks further away than it should have been. It doesn't sound like they've had much incentive to improve it since then.