It's funny to me because there's so much low hanging fruit in the business training industry but the clients tend to be absolutely fearful to make decisions beyond the norm.
The hardest part of convincing businesses that they don't need Blackboard or Moodle is reminding them all the features they don't use. Last year I featured our application to a client. I have a pretty scripted event that starts with creating a course with content in a few minutes and had people clapping because of the simplicity.
Despite that the first questions are always going over the "Feature Checkboxes" (Oh, you don't have wikis? What about a ticket system?)... it can be a very long sales cycle.
As soon as I saw you mention SCORM I had to speak up. SERIOUSLY, THAT STUFF IS A MESS!
I worked for a Tutoring/LMS company for a while. They specifically focused on english programs for businesses and government agencies. We had to integrate our platform with SCORM and had content developers create modules for it. That's a really rough space to be in. We were basically the layer in between SCORM content developers who want the freedom to create lessons and quizzes however they want and the people who wanted sophisticated reporting on top of all this free-form content. Good times...
In the context of the above: Here's a question to the experienced entrepreneurs. If a startup wants to take on Blackboard. What would be a good way to go about doing it?
We tried the typical SaaS startup freemium model for what we thought would be our Blackboard killer (hint: it wasn't).
We offered it for free to individual teachers with the strategy of enlisting an evangelist group of dedicated and passionate teachers at institutions. The plan went that once a critical mass of teachers from a given institution where onboard and using it, we would trigger the enterprise sales approach and sell the product to the institution.
We had some uptake from teachers, who universally loved the product. They raved about it in fact. We were super excited. We thought we were onto a winner.
They told their friends and colleagues who in turn signed up, and they too loved it. And raved about it. And told their friends about it.
Unfortunately the vast majority of them never actually delivered a course on it with live students. We were stunned.
After prodding and asking, and eventually getting to the bottom of it, we found that whilst the vast majority of teachers loved the product, and loved the idea of using it for their courses, they wouldn't use a product that wasn't centrally supported by the institution (or even in quite a few cases, couldn't use a product that was specifically prohibited by their institution - they were only allowed to use the prescribed LMS, which in most cases was Blackboard or Moodle).
So my tip for entrepreneurs trying to break into the enterprise LMS space is appreciate your an enterprise sales company. Your users are not your buyers, and even if they love your product, if you aren't selling it to the buyer you'll die.
I don't believe this is a market in which you can offer a freemium product to the individual with the intent of penetration reaching the masses through viral or other growth strategies. It might be worthwhile to do this to help get exposure, but don't expect to get actual sales, or actual usage, off the back of it. This isn't an industry in which a Yammer approach works (IMHO).
This is hugely valuable advice. Ignore the parent post at your peril! You need to be constantly vigilant about who your users are versus who your customers are. If there's a divergence, you need to make sure it's accounted for & benefiting you.
Many companies think "let's build the best thing we can, and the users will love it and win over the IT department, who will write the checks." Microsoft's ongoing record revenues, in a time when the PC market has shrunk and WIndows 8 sales are tanking, proves that theory wrong.
Having lived through this myself, my advice to to come up with price points that middle managers can expense without institutional review. But if you don't plan for this from the start, it can be a frightening to go from a sales forecast of 20-odd $100,000 sales to one that forecasts 100,000 $20-ish sales...with the same sales team.
Thanks - but right back at you with the price point threshold.
We called it the "credit card approval limit". If a divisional/departmental manager can approve a purchase on their credit card without seeking director or board level approval you'll have a much easier time getting past the penny gap with customers.
The reason I bring this up is because software is priced
three ways: free, cheap, and dear.
1) Free. Open source, etc. Not relevant to the current
discussion. Nothing to see here. Move along.
2) Cheap. $10 - $1000, sold to a very large number of
people at a low price without a salesforce. Most
shrinkwrapped consumer and small business software falls
into this category.
3) Dear. $75,000 - $1,000,000, sold to a handful of rich
big companies using a team of slick salespeople that do six
months of intense PowerPoint just to get one goddamn sale.
The Oracle model.
I found your comments to be hugely insightful. I am working on a project in the same general area (education) with a business partner and I was wondering if you'd be so kind as to let me pick your mind on the topic and learn from your experience. I have my email available in my profile although I am happy to reach out to you if you're open to it. In any case, like I said before, I found your insights very valuable. Thank you for sharing.
Isn't Moodle open-source? If you offered a wrapper for Moodle that made it a hell of lot nicer, maybe teachers could gradually move away from it towards a superior, affordable offering without the wrath of their powers-that-be. I don't know about Blackboard's internals, if you can do that too.
I wonder if a risky marketing tactic of "Everyone hates Blackboard but no one has the balls to use a better product [like ours]" might work to bait buyers in these situations? Liken it to the majority buying PC when kids might prefer Mac. Imply "Do you have the guts?" "A lot of prospects we speak with haven't had the authority to step away from the herd." i.e., do they want to think of themselves as having the authority, being at the forefront, having the balls, etc.
Blackboard is the Sharepoint of education software.
Universally loathed by people who know, but stacks up well on feature comparisons charts.
Players like Canvas[1] are sort of trying your idea. The front page of their website reads:
IS IT REALLY A LEAP OF FAITH WHEN YOU JUMP TO SOMETHING BETTER? “It just works.” “It’s easy to use.” “It lives up to high hopes.” “It’s the next generation of LMS.” These are just some of the reasons San Jose State University decided to switch to Canvas. And are glad they did.
They compete directly with Blackboard and seem to be doing ok.
Not sure if that's a good approach. Why do they need balls or guts to use your software? It's that risky? If your software is at the forefront, why is no one else using it?
I think most schools want to see something that's proven, low risk, and beneficial. If you can show them some of the top schools are using your software, and their faculty and students are raving about it, and how it's making their lives easier, reducing costs, and how the transition from BB was seamless.
The problem is obviously getting the first few schools. You need to eliminate as much risk as possible. You need a lot of credible sources backing you in this situation to make buyers more comfortable.
I acknowledged that it was a risky strategy, but the alternative is to not get noticed at all because the buyers get stuck comparing checkboxes rather than realising that feature creep can make for an unwieldy behemoth.
1) Choose business or educational. Pick one and completely walk away from the other.
Businesses (Generally Speaking) don't care about classroom training. Educational Institutions (Again, see above) don't care about learner org charts.
2) Embrace (#@%!) SCORM.
It's a requirement. It just is. Just don't base your domain after it. Use SCORM as an old api, but not as a model for your database.
3) Be multi-tenant from day 1
This is really hard to get right, but I think it's really important. There's too many solutions out there that require installing the entire software suite and not enough SaaS offerings.
4) I guess at this point do standard startup stuff
Find companies (or universities) that are looking to create a learning platform and reduce their requirements down to something that resembles a platform
1) Go to a college you have some connection to (e.g. the one you graduated from), find a decision maker who has authority to BUY your BB killer.
2) Sit down with him/her - see if they are interested at all. If not - try a couple of more times and forget about it - it's easier to fulfill the market, not create it
3) Now if they are interested - create a product they are willing to pay for (very important), sign them up.
4) Ask that decision maker or any other professors who are happy with your product to introduce you to their friends at other colleges.
5) Repeat
I think the problem with most companies who tried an failed is that they assumed that if they build a better product - colleges will pay for that. In many cases it does not work this way.
I would agree, finding and connecting with real decision makers on a personal level to show them how you bring value and have that personal connection is one of the best sales strategies around.
I am not talking someone who is high in the food chain, I mean the one who is the final say and can move the entire organization. Sometimes there is no one at a specific org that can do that, and if so, don't even attempt it.
Not an experienced entrepreneur, but FWIW, don't take on Blackboard's existing products. Make a gamble on what's going to be important for managing courses in 5-10 years and start building that.
Online testing is probably going to be more important; video-delivery of lectures is going to be more important; mobile access (especially for instructors) is going to be more important; massive enrollment is going to be more important. It's hard to imagine that Blackboard will do any of those well.
As someone who deals with a lot, it is garbage garbage garbage, and as some have guessed, little competition and enterprisey licenses and lock-ins guarantee they thrive.
Recently, I discovered their mobile app requires an in-app purchase to even use in iOS, provided that your university has the proper server-side set up (good for them they let you check with their database on the BB site without purchase).
I was under the impression such dirt-bag nonsense was even permitted by the App Store (there is zero functionality with this app, at all, until you do the in-app purchase (which is per year). I hated them before, but this put them in the scum list in my mind permanently.
Could someone please explain to me -- why do people actually use this software enough to hate it?
I am a math professor at a university which uses it, and so I use it to mass e-mail my students and to record grades. And for nothing else.
I can see it has a billion other features but can't fathom wanting to use them. It looks like it is designed to make simple tasks tedious and clunky, and the article confirms this impression.
Is it that professors don't want to learn HTML and maintain simple course webpages? Are faculty trying to do some kind of automatic grading? Do administrations require profs to use the obscure features? Are ... ?
From a student's point of view: I hated professors who made their own webpage just about as much as I hated Blackboard. A big downside to Blackboard was that every professor had their own way of using the tool, but it was worse with professors who made their own sites. At least on Blackboard some things were standard, and everything could be standard if the professor wasn't an ass. On their own websites, nothing was the same across classes. I'd have to learn how to use the site again every time I took a new class. Doubly true on both accounts for online classes.
Blackboard sucks, but at least it takes some work out of being a professor. Making your own site takes extra work, and extra work on top of that to make it friendly for students. They both still win out over the atrocity that is the Respondus LockDown browser, which my school required for some tests. Google it. It's bad.
On their own websites, nothing was the same across classes. I'd have to learn how to use the site again every time I took a new class.
I guess I had the advantage of less "creative" professors. Most of them did pretty much the same thing with the course web site. Click the "Syllabus" link to see the syllabus, click the "Homework Assignments" link to see the list of problem sets, etc.
Your course website looks very clear, easy to use, etc. (also, I like the approach you seem to be taking with the material, I learned from the same book and always thought the convergence test guesswork was silly)
Part of my personal frustration with custom Professor sites, and that of other students I know, is simply that it's yet another site to keep track of. For all the failings of large LMS's, they are effective at centralizing coursework into a location a student can check daily. When a few professors have custom sites, it's easy to forget to check one Prof's site for updates, announcements, etc. Even just for syllabus info, I have more than once gone to my LMS and groaned when I realized that I had to look up the address for a custom site or dig through bookmarks. I once had a semester where every Prof used their own site, and I had to cycle through 5 bookmarks daily to keep track of everything.
TL,DR: it's simply one more thing to keep track of, increasing the friction of information acquisition from a student's perspective.
> Part of my personal frustration with custom Professor sites, and that of other students I know, is simply that it's yet another site to keep track of.
It's worth noticing that this is a symptom of a much larger trend in academia: professors tend to be naturally siloed and need to put in effort for presenting themselves and discovering others' work. Journals seem to have some positive effect, but Elsevier seems to negate a lot of that effect.
Contrast this with something like the open source community, with its registries of projects and package managers and the current (long-lasting) trend towards platforms and APIs.
I think what I'm describing is what SCORM is supposed to be, but I've never actually used it, and I suspect SCORM is the XML of it. The "Yes, it does the job, but ohgodclunkymassivehugepain, save us Douglas Crockford, you're our only hope."
As a perspective from a biologist who was a student and took calc I'll give my impressions. First jkimmel's comment about keeping track of pages I never found to be the case. I can keep track of all of my course pages, that's easy.
Okay, page impressions:
- Homework downloadable, awesome.
- practice exams, awesome
- I'd grab both of the above a year/semester ahead of time or from a different professor, in case you were to remove them and then dole them out throughout the course
- no downloadable notes, boo. But it's calc and I actually enjoyed the worked problems in the lectures so it's okay.
- not on Blackboard, yay!
- this means I can easily use DownThemAll! to grab all the links you have
- also, I can check out your page, so I know what to expect
- "[the text] has not changed since last year, so please feel free to buy a used version from an upperclassman."
- Awesome
- "We will use a custom edition of this book, available in the campus bookstore"
- Not cool.
- on Amazon.com that used text is available for $10
- The campus bookstore has it available starting at $173
- Especially since that text is 90% problems which could be randomly generated by a CAS given appropriate parameters for each section. The remaining 10% is good, but your lectures and math tutors are probably better.
tl;dr:, I like your stand alone page, but I would be pretty upset about the textbook.
> . A big downside to Blackboard was that every professor had their own way of using the tool, but it was worse with professors who made their own sites.
In my view, this is the differentiating factor between MySpace and Facebook. On MySpace you have a lot of control over the webspace -- and it's horrible and atrocious for the visitor to the page 99% of the time.
Facebook makes the layout standard, and this benefits visitors to pages because people can find the information they're looking for.
(I am not a UI/UX guy, take my thoughts with a grain of salt).
This is true if you're only looking at MySpace and Facebook.
If you go back a decade, MySpace won the social network space because you had a lot of control over the webspace. Because setting up shop was more about expressing your personality online than about showing off your vacation pictures.
> (I am not a UI/UX guy, take my thoughts with a grain of salt).
Your thoughts are actually absolutely correct as long as you're not talking about social network sites. This is common wisdom in Information Architecture / User Experience. Which isn't surprising, since they wouldn't have a job otherwise.
In my school, probably 90% of professors create their own course web sites (I came across only 2 who use blackboard in 2.5 years). We don't have any problems you mentioned, really, most the web sites are very minimal (even without CSS, usually). It does it's job, everyone's happy. Problem solved :) for example: http://studentnet.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ugt/2013/COMP36111/
There were a few CS courses at UoM that required Blackboard... and I hated it. It became a running joke between my tutorial group and my tutor (who was, at the time, the director of undergraduate studies in the school) and sometimes they mentioned Blackboard just to make me rant.
That said, you're absolutely right. The system works perfectly well, but we are talking about a computer science department here and not a humanities department.
PS is Dr Latham still teaching and, more importantly, wearing those hideous shirts?
This is true in industry as well as education. In fact, it's why the enterprise sales cycle and pitch deck is so much different from what you might think sales is like.
"Is it that professors don't want to learn HTML and maintain simple course webpages?"
Here is your answer. In particular in the humanities. I had many professors who while they hated the software, were bad at using it and used it basically as a shared folder for powerpoint presentations, couldn't figure out a better solution. They felt that they were not skilled enough at technology to solve their problem on their own. Unable (and or unwilling) to create their own solution they bashed through with the software.
It is the official software of many universities. Because of this, there is a large amount of hostility by the administration to use anything else. Schools administrators keep using it because "it is the standard".
Blackboard is a well known company so it makes schools feel more at ease.
There is a great disconnect between the needs of students and teachers and the sales pitch
The amount of corruption and back-scratching that goes on in enterprise IT sales always saddens me. One of the appeals of Open Source is that you can more easily avoid the salesguys who want to compromise you morally for the sale.
Blackboard is still around because it was early to the game and higher education values tenure.
No one who has power really wants to change it. Professors don't care. Administrators don't care. Students are the only ones who want to change it, but they aren't even close to being powerful enough.
Using a good online learning software is not on any high school students list of why they want to go to a college.
Reputation is #1. If taking an action doesn't add to the reputation of the school, then they don't take the action.
There are 1,000 things Uni. admins care about before the UI of their online learning software.
That's not entirely true. I worked in academic technology for several years and, in truth, no one hates it more than the faculty and IT people who have to maintain it. The problem is that there just aren't always good alternatives.
Students, especially, have certain expectations about what they will be able to do online and through apps. If you, as a school, don't meet these expectations then the students will be very unhappy and will take it out on the professors at evaluation time.
Beyond that, there is definitely an element of ignorance at work. When you have a committee of teachers evaluating a complex software product, it isn't difficult for vendors to lie through their teeth and get away with it (Apple, a "good" company, does this just as often as any of the others, by the way).
I used to work at a large university. (Actually a couple universities.) That was sorta the case. IT people hated with a passion Blackboard and Talisma. Administrators hated it sometimes, but that isn't their job, because they aren't developers / IT people. Professors often jail break out of it if they can by running their own webpages with HTML table layouts because even that is preferable.
The bottom line I saw is that nobody once admitted to liking either of those systems, but the total amount of work and politics involved to change from those systems meant it was a conversation that never really even occurred.
Some observations I had with respect to migrating away from hulks like Blackboard and Talisma:
1. There were pretty talented people supporting Blackboard and Talisma working for the universities full-time with salary. Both systems were frustrating for them, but the huge amount of work to migrate away from those systems generally stops any hopes of beginning a conversation. Can it be done over summer break? If not, will you do it in parallel? Won't that require more salaries to be hired? can you get the buy in of the other departments who you'll put extra work on because their system already has been coded to chug along and work with those?
2. Politics. I once saw a different university choose an awful CRM because they did a better job courting the top IT advisors at the school. I've seen a university choose Microsoft over Google even though students voted overwhelmingly for Google (emails announcing the Microsoft win were sent out before the students could even have voted)
3. Politics, but this time personal ones. There are people whose role has been to support Blackboard or Talisma for a decade. Their kids are now in high school and all that time the household was supported because their role was Director of Something but really it meant, "make sure your team keeps Blackboard or Talisma going". They'll obviously be hesitant to switch.
As for 2, I'm currently studying at a university that this occurred in, I'm not sure if it was the same one, however mine was in the north east of England.
One of the reasons that was given (and which I felt was totally reasonable in this case) was that Microsoft provided assurances that the university could manage their own data, and none of it would ever leave the UK - something which Google couldn't do.
This was pre-Snowden, however I suspect that this was a big reason why Microsoft was chosen over Google.
As mentioned, faculty and IT staff hate it as much or more than students do. The problem I've found from personal experience, is that all the other options are equally poor.
User interface is just one area that Blackboard and most of its competitors fall down. Security is atrocious (shhh), performance is abysmal, and their support is a cruel joke. Installation is hideous, upgrades are a nightmare. Stability is not even the right word to use. Need I go on?
I am currently TAing a course which uses Blackboard and Piazza.
> Students are the only ones who want to change it
Your statement is incorrect. Students don't care about Blackboard because their interactions with it are minimal. They just submit stuff and use it to view slides, videos and grades. For this it works well enough.
I was a student user of Blackboard for a while before I saw the teaching side of it and I didn't have any negative opinions of it at all at that time. I did think the UI was a little clunky and dated but that was it. As a TA, I now realize it has lots problems. For instance, right now, I am trying to create a custom grade that is a weighted sum of other grades. And oh boy, what a fucking pain something that should be straightforward is turning out to be!
Professors and admins very much do care about providing a good learning experience. Why do you think Piazza has taken off in such a big way? AFAICT we do our best to use the best possible software solutions. Others have already touched upon why such systems are difficult to change, but change is definitely possible and is already happening.
At my university, I am seeing more and more stuff moving away from Blackboard and into Piazza and other custom solutions. Many CS courses use a custom homework submission system that enables scriptable grading. Course material is moving from being hosted on Blackboard to Piazza. This is despite the fact that Piazza's course page function kinda sucks and provides no real way of organizing slides and handouts. But then neither does blackboard and it's helpful to have the slides on the same places as where the questions come from. There are courses where Blackboard is only used to keep track of grades. I believe this wasn't true just a few years ago and I suspect there are university regulations which necessitate this.
The lesson I learned from Piazza succeeding is that if you make your tool actually useful and really easy to get started, professors will use it. And the success of Piazza directly contradicts what you're claiming.
Most professors I know hate Blackboard as well. There's just frak all they can do about it. University wide software purchasing decisions aren't so much the faculty's call.
Blackboard was first to market, went public and gained tremendous market share across Higher-Ed. They acquired much of the competition along the way (WebCT and Angel).
Desire2Learn was boot-strapped, slower to grow but had traction with state-wide systems. Blackboard sued them over patents, went into a whole legal mess and ended with a cross-liscence agreement for the 'greater good' of education. After litigation, Desire2Learn grew substantially and took on 80M of venture funding in 2013, and is on-track for IPO.
Instructure (Product called Canvas) is the newcomer and 'next-generation' platform. It's designed well and marketed far better than the incumbents. It's growing much faster (for good reason) then the others, and on-track for IPO as well. They've done a good job of UX and getting involved at the professor/teacher level to create a following for the platform.
Open source:
Sakai is a collaboration of several Higher-Ed institutions to develop their own platform. It was never great and last I heard support is dropping.
Moodle by market-share is the largest. There are several companies which offer hosting/support for Moodle (A large one in NA being Moodlerooms, which Blackboard also acquired).
From 2006-2008 i worked on a Blackboard compeditor. While back then, people ranging from administrators, teachers to students all hated the system, capturing their market share was a rough ride.
We landed one major university and several private training organizations,however ultimately got squeezed out and decided to move onto bigger and better things.
The issues people entering this market face range from Patents, that in my opinion should never have been issued, (http://www.google.com/patents/US6988138) to their insane license agreements that cost education providers a lot to walk away from.
We use it at my school and it's great. I also use their api as a developer at EmeraldExam.com and find it to be terrific. They're an open-source rails app: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms
EDIT: should also mention lore (lore.com), which was founded by some friends of mine and fairly recently purchased by a John Katzman company.
Canvas is amazing. I cannot say enough good things about it (and no, I don't work for them). Love their SpeedGrader feature (allows you to quickly flip through your students assignments).
I'm looking for the Instructure of business LMSes... does anyone have any recommendations? AFAIK Canvas is very ed-focused, but I'm still searching for a great equivalent in the business space that's playing David to Oracle or SAP's Goliath.
When I went to College we used WebCT. WebCT got swallowed by Blackboard. When I started working for that College we had just finished migrating to D2L. from my understanding its been seen as a vast improvement.
There's also the Clarion/Dokeos/Claroline line. About 5 years ago I had to decide on one LMS for a site, and I went with those ones (Dokeos a the time). It was simple but feature-complete enough to achieve what we wanted. To the teachers we showed Moodle, it felt like a big screen full of confusing buttons.
Blackboard bought out most of their commercial competition (WebCT, Angel) and tried to patent-troll the rest out of business (Desire2Learn for one).
Open-source wise there's Moodle (PHP based) and Sakai (Java based).
But from my POV within higher ed IT, my impression is that many of the big guys (Michigan, Indiana, Cal, NYU, Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford) are desperately searching for what's next. edX (Harvard+MIT along with contributions from Stanford) has open-sourced their software, I have no idea if it comes close.
The problem with starting up is that to make anyone happy, a new Learning Management System needs to have two things working spectacularly well:
1. An online testing engine supporting both automated grading and human grading with a wide variety of question types and an easy to use test builder.
2. A gradebook tool that's easy to set up, can import and export spreadsheets, and can support any wild scoring system a faculty member can devise (and they can come up with some doozies). It also needs to integrate with any and every other tool in the system, as some faculty somewhere will want to grade every single type of activity students can perform in the system.
In addition to those two baseline elements it needs a world-class collaboration system for file-sharing, plus messaging and forum tools and online chat. It needs to support multiple class sections with unified resources, ad-hoc class groups, and student-initiated study groups. It needs to support fine-grained permission schemes based on classes, instructors, grad assistants, sections, individual students, and groups.
Every file, test, assignment, forum, and chat room all need to be able to be gated access based on student activity so that, for example, a quiz must be passed before getting access to a document which leads into an assignment followed by a forum-based discussion.
Research is also critical to support, and your system will need to be accessible in a secure way to collaborators, guest instructors, and remotely-enrolled students around the globe, in a way that doesn't make the faculty wait more than a few minutes to grant those people access.
All of this will need to be provided in a fully responsive user interface that scales well from 4k screens down to tablets and smartphones, including the testing and gradebook engines. You'll also need a free mobile app that provides all the same funcionality in a reliable native interface on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry OS, and more.
You also need to integrate with the University's student information system, and update enrollments in courses and sections on the fly as students add/drop and courses change, and send grades to the SIS in return. You need to integrate with external tools at the university such as wikis, message boards, and eTextbooks; and outside including cloud-based calendars and document sharing tools including Google Apps for Education and Office365.
You'll also want a instructor evaluation system, electronic portfolio functionality, program-level assurance of learning awareness, institutional assessment reporting, user activity monitoring.
Oh and all of this needs to be customizable to match the traditional way of doing business at each of thousands of different universities. Business processes are not up for compromise.
Notice I've left out concerns of usability, security, performance, stability, ease of deployment and upgrading, etc. That's because those are at the bottom of the list of priorities for the people with the money.
Should point out (since it's not 100% clear in your post) that they -tried- to patent-troll D2L but in the end dropped the case. D2L is still kicking and is in use in a significant chunk of major Canadian universities (including mine).
I've never used Blackboard but I wouldn't ever recommend Moodle as an alternative for anything (and neither would my Java professor to judge by his rants about it...)
I've used Sakai in the past, and Moodle for years now. (I think I used Blackboard once, years ago.) They're all a pain, but it would be hard to hand-code something that has even just the features that I use regularly myself.
That being said, Moodle has some serious issues with dataloss if a user's session times out (and for a long time, the default timeout delay was just 24 minutes). If someone hasn't specifically clicked "Save" or "Submit" before time runs out (even if they were typing constantly the whole time), then those buttons invisibly turn into "Throw away all my work and make me log back in and start from scratch". It's horrific. https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-11972
My institution uses Moodle, and it mostly works. Except for the first week of term. Except if you pick up a course mid-term. Except if your course uses online quizzes.
As a student, I have no idea how Moodle is from a professor's standpoint, but from a student's it's infinitely preferable to D2L, at least. I've never used Blackboard either, but nobody seems to think that it's appreciably better than D2L, so I doubt Moodle is really that bad in comparison.
Piazza is great at what it does: enabling discussion and making have a rolling wiki where they can talk to course staff about issues with the homework. However, they're alienating me with the career-recruitment spam - especially because it's not optional. Plus, isn't this all the more alienating for humanities courses? If it bothers me, and I'm enrolled in/TA'ing cs classes, it must bother the hell out of humanities majors with classes on piazza.
From a student's perspective, Piazza is really nice for communicating. I have never seen any of the professors at my university use it for anything else. They mostly use Sakai, and I don't really have any complaints about it. (and on an unrelated note, they have complained about getting spammed by Piazza)
Not quite. Piazza allows instructors to post resources as well. I've taken a few courses that centered themselves around Piazza and the Piazza course page.
Not really an answer to your question anymore, but this is perhaps a little-known anecdote.
The group within Microsoft that produced Encarta had a lot of teachers in it. After Encarta was retired, that group took it on themselves to create a lean competitor to Blackboard. The effort lasted about 2.5 years. It suffered from a lot of internal political resistance, because at the executive level, competing with Blackboard was viewed as being neither a smart battle, nor 'synergizing' enough with the Windows/Office prime directive. However, what eventually killed the project was the recognition/fear of how much bureaucratic resistance there would be from schools themselves, and perhaps to a lesser degree the tangle of privacy laws. That is, overall it was decided the risk/reward didn't make sense.
Blackboard isn't all bad—fixing many of its inadequacies was one of my first big side projects in high school.
There was one Blackboard dashboard unit that allowed you to embed arbitrary HTML, and I injected some JS onto the page that allowed you to set a background image, made clicking on links pop open new tabs (instead of whatever abomination of javascript they had), and all kinds of other little tweaks. I even got most of the way through writing a drag-and-drop module rearranger before I graduated. Maybe 60% of what I knew about JS and CSS at the time I learned through trying to add features to Blackboard through script injection.
Naturally, I wasn't the only one frustrated at Blackboard, and the script travelled by word-of-mouth to a pretty sizable chunk of the school. At that point, it was probably the most widely-used thing I'd ever built.
Any JS-injection-based software that's actually good enough for people to use is probably going to be impressive -- and horrifying. If you try writing some, you will know my words to be true.
Such a rant, I think it comes close to conveying the author's distaste for the product. The Google link is pretty informative as well. I wonder how some product that is so loathed by clearly a number of people, manages to stay in the market. Understanding that question might actually shed some insight on what it would take to create a successful education targeted company.
On a quick glance claim 1 appears to be anticipated by any networked file sharing system that includes user permissions you'd possibly need to have 3 users with differing credentials for a novelty citation but there certainly doesn't appear to be an inventive step beyond mere citation of, say, a unix box with files with read/write flags and user:group credentials.
Claims 2-7 are just messages sent to a particular group.
Claim 8 refers to a "dropbox" file which, certainly in the UK, as a trademark wouldn't be allowed as it's inherently unclear.
Many of the claims are distinct only in non-technical details, eg the name attached to a specific role or the textual contents of a file. Such claims don't define the invention.
This strikes me as a very poor quality set of claims.
The clumsy wording of claim 39 "An method for providing online education method for a community of users in a network based system comprising the steps of:" suggests that no one at the USPTO read it.
As a B1 this is supposedly the patent "as granted".
That is in every quality typical of the patents granted and enforced in court every day in the USA. Pointing out that the claims were anticipated and are incoherent doesn't help much in front of a jury of laypeople.
"against the development, use or distribution of Open Source Software or Home-Grown Systems to the extent that such Open Source Software and Home-Grown Systems are not Bundled with proprietary software"
As far as I know there was one main patent -- 6,988,138 -- which was utter garbage and was invalidated in 2009.
It was this patent which BlackBoard used to try to shut down a competitor named Desire2Learn in 2006. The invalidation forced Blackboard to retreat, and they've since been much quieter on the legal front.
I think it has more to do with the structure (procurement) and culture (ivory tower thinking doesn't believe in efficiency) of academia than fear of patents.
> I wonder how some product that is so loathed by clearly
> a number of people, manages to stay in the market.
To paraphrase Milton Friedman [1], when you spend someone else's money on someone else you don't care about how much it costs and you don't care about whether the product works well.
Academic software is notoriously hard to get right. Every school does things slightly differently and has a slightly different culture from other schools. Sadly, the people who are in the best position to design good course management software -- the students themselves -- are also the least trusted for the task (and also tend to be less reliable as workers, given the realities of being a student).
What really saddens me is when a school does design its software in house, then throws that away and buys Blackboard or whatever else.
As a current student user of Blackboard, the main problem lies within the professors. The professors either struggle to grasp the Blackboard system, or are technically sound to hate it enough to want it to change. The learning curve is unfortunately very high for most professors, which happen to be of an age greater than 40. I think the system could be more user friendly to the professors and students, but convincing a university to make a large scale upgrade will not be easy.
This is not a problem with the professors. It's not about their age either. It's a problem with Blackboard.
Blackboard creates a lot of potential work for professors which often has unclear educational value (or is expected in addition to their regular work). It's not evident that it's a good investment of their time.
i started writing a serious replacement for what i considered was a completely broken, dis-engaging format for online course delivery.
then i discovered Canvas was already a product that was 90% what i was developing/imagining and got discouraged from writing more code :(
i think the most difficult part isn't the software dev, it's getting past all the entrenched educational bureaucracy and unfortunately huge existing ecosystems. if you get a foothold as Instructure has, you're already waaaaay ahead of the competition.
UK: Split between Blackboard (which swallowed WebCT) and Moodle.
Moodle is GPLed of course and free to download, but you administer it yourself. The Open University decided to hack on Moodle rather than invent their own system some years ago and the code was released back into Moodle[1] (I recollect the 'roles' system and an add on e-portfolio).
"it's getting past all the entrenched educational bureaucracy and unfortunately huge existing ecosystems"
Teachers often work around the structures. Use email/FB/Whatsap/BBM/Other free things to reach students on an ad hoc basis. Who actually needs course management other than the bureaucrats? Its a dialogue![2]
Idea: GitHub for e-learning. Most lesson content is public and can be taken, forked and pull requested. Lessons can submodule/include content from other lessons.
Businesses/schools can pay for hosting private lessons (that can include public submodules) and for tracking employee/student progress.
This article's substance is 100% covered by the title. I'd be much more inclined to upvote an article that actually discussed the technical reasons why BlackBoard is bad, as opposed to a long-winded and flowery hyperbole that can be summarized in a single phrase.
FenixEdu was designed for a single school for the past 10 years and now we are trying to refactor it to be installed anywhere. We want to create that can tackle the needs for the next decade of teaching. If people are interested in this kind of thing please talk with us, we are most welcome to receive any kind of suggestion or feedback.
Honestly, I had the same feelings about BB until the beginning of last semester. What happened?
My university switch from doing all blackboard support (updates, helping teachers, etc) to contracting it out to blackboard, suddenly, the entire interface was modernized, and continues to get better every couple weeks, teachers got better at doing what they wanted, and it just felt like a huge breath of fresh air.
There are still things that need to be fixed (the Discussion Thread format is one) but overall the experience is getting better.
I have fortunately not had to deal with Blackboard in my role as a software developer at a university, who -- despite their otherwise questionable choices -- have fortunately migrated to Moodle. I've used Moodle as a student and it seems pretty good.
Anyway, my hands are still dirtied by plenty of other similar systems. They are almost all terrible: expensive, badly designed and even more poorly implemented. It's endemic in the sector to be sold snake oil. I had a thought why this might be the case, which I wrote about [1] In summary, despite the seemingly low-hanging fruit -- i.e. the problems these packages solve aren't difficult -- there's no technical incentive to disrupt such a closed market.
However, I cannot fathom how this happened in the first place. Presumably, 20-years-ago, when these types of packages were first on the market, they wouldn't have been much better than using bits of paper (their modern descendants aren't, so it stands to reason). Thus the only conclusion I'm able to reach is that it's a "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" situation that has persisted and grown out of control.
We started work on a Blackboard Alternative last year[1] (using Django), for a 2nd year Group Project module at University. Not mature enough to replace Blackboard yet, but we tried to address some of the issues that lecturers and students had with it, and received some good feedback. We open-sourced it at the end of the module.
I made something similar a few months ago, also using Django: https://github.com/equirio/movide . It's really hard to get teachers on board in a bottom-up way. There are a couple of classes using it, but it took a lot of work to get there. I am interested in talking more if you are still working on your project.
"It's really hard to get teachers on board in a bottom-up way."
Try getting them to 'score' their idea of what online course elements might provide using the scheme in [1]
Do they want a filing cabinet, an online classroom, or some kind of student led Reddit/HN thing around their course materials? Gets a discussion going.
I agree, it can be tricky - I imagine it's especially true for non CS-ish subjects, where the lecturers may be a little less open to trying out new technologies.
I make plugins that works with Blackboard as part of my undergraduate research, specifically making SCORM modules. The only thing that Blackboard is useful is that it does the authentication and authorization bit for us. We could easily roll out our own Django service and have students run code instad of having to log in BB and click on assignment to start coding.
The other thing is BB does have tincan API but only newer version does. I think the BB we use now has been upgraded and does have TINCAN API so I am going play with it.
BB is horrible in terms of support and user interface. It has so many functionality but hardly anyone use most of them and that's where I think BB engineers need to re think. They should slim BB. And there is a BB mobile app? Fuck that shit (excuse my Chinese). Useless piece of shit.
There is an open source version called Moodle but the interface is even worse. It tries to solve all the problems BB is solving... I have played with it for a few years and the interface just hasn't improved.
"If it is a bad piece of software we can build a business by selling a better one" does not apply here. Many have tried and failed. The reason being the users are not the buyer here. And the buyers will always lean towards the decision that will preserve their job. After all no one got fired for picking IBM.
Our uni has been working with a new startup based in the UK working on a completely new LMS kind of system. It's really cool and well designed and takes on features from popular internet services and builds them into education (ala. Facebook, it's also really well designed, I think there are some ex-Apple/Google people working for them). The company though has also been working with Students / Lecturers and Administrators so they've done a good job of integrating with our systems (disclosure: I'm the LMS Technical Manager). But it's also built from a learner and teacher perspective and they guys we've given it do really like it.
If anyone wants to talk about it you can email me at rusdyas {at} gmail.com (kind of non-disclosure, over at least the details anyway)
Please, you can make your point without profaning the name of Jesus Christ, a man whom many of us worship and who is dear to our hearts. To use the name of any sacred personage in this manner, as an expletive, conveys a lack of understanding and respect for other people.
Yes and no. When I was in college, Blackboard once lost all my previous grades in a calculus class, when we were close to the end. I was averaging maybe a B. No other records existed.
It was awesome! The only grade that counted, as a result, was the final - an A.
I hear Bb has been adding some talented people and taking a hard look at their product. Turnarounds can be difficult, but at least they are cognizant of needing to take serious stab at the problem.
Well I know they fired their CEO or he "found something better and pivoted" not so long ago. I find this ironic because he started the product after graduating from our alma mater, who is terribly locked into this garbage.
Whenever I read about Blackboard and the universities that use it, I can't help but consider that these are the institutions which are supposed to be capable of teaching software engineering.
College instructor here, yup that sounds like a Blackboard user. Fortunately I have the ability to choose not to have any online classes[1] but I have heard similar tales from my colleagues. Our aging IT decision makers aren't spared the vitriol, but their leather ears are deaf to the pleas of the faculty and of the students. This torture shall continue until morale improves, or until the gutless boomers in charge, aren't.
[1] And I have chosen not to, mainly to avoid having anything to do with BB.
Piazza, a class discussion app, seems to have good adoption even at schools that use Blackboard. I'm hoping to do similar for homework collection with Classhand.
I expect a switch to a basic platform with apps like Piazza that offer tailored features/user experiences. Not unlike the Salesforce ecosystem. That may be Blackboard's future role.
In any case, I cant help notice a ton of the features people desperately want from a LMS system seem better developed and added onto something like (brace yourselves): sharepoint. It has all the group/collab stuff you could want. Am I crazy? Plus given how pervasive it is in the enterprise space, seems like plenty of development talent to extend and customize per school as needed.
tl;dr: The author passionately hates Blackboard but never once tells us why (just links to a Google search: Blackboard sucks).
This piece has zero information content. Very colorful language and prose are used, but there's no meat in the essay, just filler. I'm not familiar with Blackboard or this space in general, and I'm none the better after reading this. Not sure why it got so upvoted.
Given that this is a link to a personal blog, you've got to get your expectations set correctly leading up to reading a post titled "Christ, I hate Blackboard". You have to go into it knowing that you are about to read a rant, and that it's going to be pretty colorful.
It's possible that the rant was more meant for his cohorts or his social circle, which may already know why Blackboard sucks. I doubt he wrote it specifically for the HN audience.
If you don't care to do the research as to why Blackboard sucks, just enjoy the amusing rant and move on. Don't worry about why it sucks, you wouldn't appreciate how bad it sucks unless you've had to use it.
Blackboard is a piece of software - although calling it that discredits all real software - used by universities and colleges to manage student marks and assignments in a way that's supposed to be easily accessible to students. Speaking as a first year who's had to endure it for only a semester so far - it's a complete mess. In addition to the above two features, it attempts to do lab group management and acts as a dropbox-like file sharing platform between profs and students.
It is good at neither of these. File sharing is inconsistent. Rather than having a single, designated file area for each class and each prof, every prof can customize where it's located in what can loosely be called a directory hierarchy within the webapp. Additionally, they can even link to their own sites (and the linking is a calamity too - but that's another story).
Group management is tolerable when it works. More than once has there been a missing asset issue, or a permissions issue, or a straight up JSP error that prevented my peers and myself from joining appropriate lab groups and uploading assignments on time.
All of this is worsened by the scores of profs who haven't a clue how to use this.
Lightly put, this is one of the worst user experiences one can have, and rivals Windows 8 on desktops in terms of user unfriendliness (read: user hostility).
My school (University of Texas at Austin) is currently in the process of switching to Canvas (http://www.instructure.com/) and plans to completely drop Blackboard by next Fall.
digedu (www.digedu.com) provides an alternative for K-12. Much more comprehensive -- not just software, for instance-- but our Learning Engine is a sort-of next generation LMS. (disclosure - I work for digedu.)
It's funny to me because there's so much low hanging fruit in the business training industry but the clients tend to be absolutely fearful to make decisions beyond the norm.
The hardest part of convincing businesses that they don't need Blackboard or Moodle is reminding them all the features they don't use. Last year I featured our application to a client. I have a pretty scripted event that starts with creating a course with content in a few minutes and had people clapping because of the simplicity.
Despite that the first questions are always going over the "Feature Checkboxes" (Oh, you don't have wikis? What about a ticket system?)... it can be a very long sales cycle.
That and SCORM, oh man do I loathe SCORM