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.
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.