Ffynnonweb

Dear Blackboard.

As you know, your Blackboard Learn has become quite popular in both Schools and Universities over here in the UK. We are able to use (and abuse) the system to make it easier for our students to access their learning materials on- and off-campus. The features you’ve been releasing in the various upgrades and version updates are making it a better one-stop-shop for the students (blog, wiki, discussion forum, tests, surveys, etc) and the ability to integrate it into our own infrastructure is invaluable.

So, without sounding really really negative … why is your product so clunky, unhelpful, user un-friendly, tired, and so utterly un-customisable? Are you aware of the revolution that is Web 2.0 and what it means for the students and educators or today and tomorrow?

Why are you still insisting we use frames, when the rest of the Internet gave up on these 10 years ago?

Please look around at our alternatives, at their business model, and see what you’re missing. Please don’t get sucked in by your developers in thinking you have to keep going down one route when another may make a better product. Don’t let the accountants tell you what kind of product you should sell; just look at what happened to the big car manufactures who let the accountants direct them – they made bland cars that didn’t sell.

Go back to the basic premise of what the students need, and what we (the educators and facilitators) need in order to truly engage and educate the students. Do you make money from the product, or from it’s support?

Please watch what we’re saying on Social Network sites like Twitter; see what your users are saying (students, sysadmin, educators, techies, etc) – these are the people who have the influence on people who might be deciding to buy your product (we might have been too late to influence the decision for our own institution, but we can still influence others). You might be interested in the following articles and online discussions, this is where the market is heading, and you are very far behind:

• Steve Wheeler: Another nail in the coffin?
• Steven Verjans: Is the VLE/LMS dead?
• James Clay: It’s not dead yet
• Paul Vaughan: Is your VLE really a virtual learning environment?
• Lyndsay Jordan: The VLE/PLE debate

… and all these were found via Twitter Search, and the people I follow, in about 3 minutes. It IS that easy.

We, the Institutions, are being ‘forced’ to adapt our learning and teaching needs to fit the environment we are given (within Blackboard). It should be the other way round; the environment we use should fit our learning and teaching needs.

Is this possible?

Don’t get me wrong; I like Blackboard, and I like what I can do with it. I just wish I didn’t have to constantly defend it against an overwhelming barrage of abuse which, for the most part, is justified and relevant; from students, from fellow Learning Technologists, from tutors, from my peers on social network websites, etc, etc. After reading tweet after tweet on this-and-that college dropping Blackboard in favour of Moodle (or some other VLE-like application suite), it is getting difficult to see the good for the bad.

Is the VLE dead, and is this the end for Blackboard?

Yours,

David, Don’t Waste Your Time

Related posts:

• Presentation: myBU (Blackboard VLE)
• A Critical Evaluation of Blackboard (by Stephanie Coopman)
• Blackboard 9

Controversial …. (as a certain Big Brother UK housemate once said!)

What do you think? Is the VLE dead? Have Blackboard failed to keep up with the rest of the online world? Do you use an alternative VLE or have you moved on to something else instead (that is perhaps a bit more Web 2.0)?