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).
