The most recent releases of Blackboard’s course-management system promise an updated look, greater ease of use, and new features for social learning. So far some users are impressed, while others are disappointed in what they see.
Blackboard released viersion 9 last year (with version 9.1 out a few weeks ago), but some colleges are only now adopting the latest generation of the company’s product, waiting for the summer to make the switch. The company, which has faced complaints by critics for poor service and aggressiveness toward its competitors, has said that the product line is part of its “next generation” approach.
“It looks so different, it’s startling,” said Erica Schurter, a software-support analyst at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, which adopted Blackboard 9 for this year’s summer courses.
But as faculty members adjusted to the change, she said, they appreciated the cleaner look and feel.
The latest versions also were designed to make using Blackboard easier, said Ramsey Chambers, the company’s director of product strategy, an improvement that several users commended.
Blackboard also hoped to show clients that the tools for social learning, like blogging, can enhance students’ experiences, said Craig Chanoff, senior vice president for client success.
Matthew Palladinetti, assistant director of instructional technology at Temple University, said instructors appreciated the new, streamlined process for editing their course’s pages.
“It’s a lot more modern than it used to be,” said Palladinetti, whose university switched from Blackboard 8 to 9.1 last month. “It’s a lot easier to navigate.”
But many users said they are unimpressed by the additions in Blackboard 9 and disappointed that the company failed to address many of their frustrations with previous versions.
Instructors use Blackboard mainly for grading, testing, and uploading course notes, said Susan Metros, deputy chief information officer and associate vice provost for technology-enhanced learning at the University of Southern California, which switched to Blackboard 9 ilast fall. Many of the new features for social learning were “competent,” she said, but not as useful as some existing alternatives.
“I would prefer them concentrating on making the core functionality of their system better,” said Kelly Sutton, a recent graduate of Loyola Marymount University, in California, who used Blackboard 9 in several courses in the past year. He runs the hackcollege blog.
Claire Lauer, an assistant professor of multimedia writing and technical communication at Arizona State University Polytechnic, said she was struggling with basic tasks that she had found straightforward before the upgrade.
“Some of the things that seemed intuitive before are absolutely not intuitive now,” said Ms. Lauer, who said she had trouble uploading course readings and finding the list of students enrolled in her course.
A Blackboard spokesman said that the company has already addressed some flaws in version 9 in the 9.1 release. “Yes, we’ve had some mixed reviews on 9.0, but the reviews on 9.1 have been nothing short of stellar,” he said. “We’ve got upwards of 100 clients that have already moved there.”
19 Responses to Blackboard’s ‘Next Generation’ Software Gets Mixed Reviews
zeitlerdw - June 4, 2010 at 7:00 pm
I haven’t heard anyone that thought version 9 was anything but a disaster, far worse than past versions. We switched to it last summer and after fighting with it for 3 months, it convinced me to switch to Moodle. Blackboard picks their customer feedback very carefully. When I tried to submit problem reports to them, they clearly stated they weren’t interested in problem reports from users (only positive feedback). I was directed to send problems to my IT department. Our IT department told me that they effectively had to debug Blackboards problems and then submit all of their work to Blackboard. Experience through the summer made it clear that Blackboad then simply ignored the problems. Working with an unsupported Moodle server (I’m my own sys admin for Moodle) has been far easier than dealing with Blackboard has ever been over the past few years I’d been using it, especially version 9 where both myself and my students were constantly frustrated with the user interface, uncountable bugs and slow operation. My students now express appreciation for using the alternative. Not likely I’ll even try going back. Any company that would release what Blackboard did for version 9 doesn’t deserve a second chance.
agusti - June 4, 2010 at 7:19 pm
I personally have nothing but animosity for Blackboard. I think it’s one of the least intuitive pieces of software I’ve ever seen, especially when you compare it to other websites that our students are used to navigating on the internet. I wish my college would switch to Moodle, as that way at least we wouldn’t be shelling out a fortune for a glorified gradebook. Dump it, I say!
mackessy - June 4, 2010 at 7:41 pm
HI Cheri and Margy, Here are some review for the new version of BB.
samplej - June 4, 2010 at 8:07 pm
I like release 9.1
jimatpagenotes - June 4, 2010 at 9:24 pm
I tried Blackboard Vista a couple of years ago: When I uploaded my HTML lecture notes, it edited my hyperlinks! Normally, I’m pretty mild mannered, but that’s behavior I can’t afford to put up with; haven’t gone anywhere near the thing since. This summer I’m looking into Moodle.
jillferrie - June 5, 2010 at 11:19 pm
Our college switched from the Blackboard nightmare to CampusCruiser’s intuitive LMS two years ago and currently have four times the number of faculty teaching online…happily! CampusCruiser is super easy to navigate, includes all the fun bells and whistles, and doesn’t cost one of these and one of these (an arm and a leg).
professorfandel - June 6, 2010 at 8:54 am
I am being forced by one of my schools to switch to BB9 and I can’t believe it. I totally agree about how counter-intuitive it is. I also have had the same trouble as some others mentioned with regard to html being changed after I set it. Or if I’m in design mode, sometimes fonts come out the way they are supposed to, other times they don’t. For a faculty member who designs all of her courses from scratch, and who knows html, how to embed, and more, this BB9 is a nightmare.But I think for me the biggest problem is that they are trying to squeeze us all into this box of the way THEY (BB) think things are easier for students, when, in fact, it appears to be quite the opposite.I also teach on WebCT…no problem…Angel…no problem…eCollege (with CampusCruiser, too)…no problem; in fact eCollege moved us to a smoother version called .NExT with great ease, keeping what worked well, and improving on what did not. In a nutshell, they listened to the practitioners, those of us in the trenches taking the grenades every day.BB…listen to the people who do the work, not your bottom line alone.
chroniclebarnacle - June 6, 2010 at 12:44 pm
Here we go- yet ANOTHER upgrade. Why can’t they just leave it alone? Faculty are the real customers and if I had my say, I would cancel the contract we have with BB. My IT rep is in denial I think. We have problems like error messages, slow lagging systems and when I report it all I get is excuses. Even get responses like “I can’t duplicate that error and neither can BB.” Makes one feel like they are going crazy. I spend a great deal of time learning the new changes, upgrades and additional software and systems put in place to “make my job easier and enhance our technologivcal platform/offerings to our students.” REALLY? The students probably do not struggle like we profs do but change for the sake of change is getting old. And by the way in case you are thinking I am just a lazy prof blowing hot air, I design my own courses, upload my own content, and help others to do so as well.
fisler - June 7, 2010 at 1:06 am
If you are fedup with Blackboard, there are may open source (=free) alternatives out there. We (University of Zurich) use OLAT and we just helped the University of Hamburg switch from Blackboard to OLAT creating some nice migration tools. Still a lot of work but after that your FREE to do what you want :-)
kmurphy12 - June 7, 2010 at 9:22 am
We haven’t switched to Blackboard 9 yet, but I am dreading it. We currently use Blackboard Vista, and one of the best tools in that LMS is Grading Forms (rubrics). From what I’ve heard, Bb9 does not have Grading Forms. I dread going back to grading assignments and discussions without the Grading Form tool!
uidaho1 - June 7, 2010 at 3:32 pm
And then there is the solution I use for everything except online quizes and online grades. I create a private yahoo group. There is a place to upload files, links, etc. There is a group e-mail list… A lot less frustrating.
garay - June 7, 2010 at 10:54 pm
The key to introducing a new significantly-different LMS release, be it Blackboard Learn 9, Moodle or something new is to properly prepare our backend server/hardware and instructional support staff to properly run and support the new software *and* to concurrently run it for at least a complete Fall or Spring semester, that is, giving faculty and teaching staff the opportunity to play with it, attend faculty intro sessions, and get themselves ready for it.That’s what we did at our school :: we ran a small Blackboard 9 co-production pilot during Fall 2009 and Spring 2010, and we switched our main production system a few days after Spring grades were in. Our instructors were ready for the new modern look-and-feel, the new features, etc. All they had to do was to spend from two to four hours familiarizing themselves with the User Interface. Few found the need to attend any of our many 50-minute long Blackboard 9 Faculty Intro sessions. Everyone was ready, prepared and door the most part, very happy with the new Blackboard next-generation system.Our upgrade was not smooth, however; we had to endure almost two weeks from he’ll, fine-tuning our backend infrastructure, our hardware, the Oracle database, our SAN and NFS file service to Blackboard, etc. Blackboard Inc. (the company) was very responsive and extremely helpful in getting us back on track, even when some of the problems had nothing to do with the Blackboard software at all.Are we ready for the Fall rush? Absolutely, had our faculty will be happy to continue using then familiar and easy-to-use learning management system they have been using since 1999.
ekunnen - June 8, 2010 at 12:54 pm
Managing change can be a challenge with any software! As garay mentioned above, it usually works very well to run a live pilot of the new system before upgrading the entire campus. We have used this model for several releases and have found it very valuable!Overall the core functionality is easier in Bb 9.1 and more efficient with less clicks. Drag and drop simplicity and quick access to instructor tools makes using Bb more effective. A recent comment by one of our faculty members who was working on helping an instructor not curently involved in our 9.1 summer pilot was: “Darn, now I have to go back and login to Bb 8, and I don’t really want to do that.” Once you have used 9.1 for any length of time, you don’t really want to go back!We have been impressed with Bb 9.1 as there is an updated look that goes beyond aesthetics to offering a more dynamic an “edit in place” web 2.0 user interface. So intead of changing a setting by clicking through 3 screens, you can click the edit button and make the change inline. In addition, most of the tools are 1 click away.There is also a complete set of new features that provide mashups for content from Flickr, Slideshare, and YouTube. These can be added not only into content areas, but also into Discussion Board posts and even assessment questions without leaving the Bb interface. If you license Wimba Voice Tools or NBC Learn video content, the mashup tools provide easily embedded content as well.Our faculty are also appreciating the built-in wiki, blog, and journal tools that include grading integration. This provides greater ease of use and as more faculty begin using these new features, grading is also far easier.Getting content into Bb is now an easy drag-and-drop into the browser. With the new Course Files feature, faculty can navigate to their course files directory and drag-and-drop folders or items from their desktop into the browser. It couldn’t be simpler to add a large amount of content into Bb.The process of grading is also enhanced, allowing for annonymous grading if the instructor chooses, and also you can quickly sort your assignments to view the ungraded attempts. If you have notifications turned on, as an instructor you will receive an email when a student submits an assignment or a test, and you can simply click the link in the email to grade the student’s attempt for even faster and more timely student feedback. In addition, smart views can be set up to quickly display or sort large gradebooks.Finally, the context sensitive on screen help is convenient for faculty who do not normally need a formal training session to learn the new system.With the realization that no software product is perfect, we are finding that faculty and students are benefitting from the most recent release from Blackboard. I have also appreciated the extensive resources from Blackboard such as talktobb.com / ondemand.blackboard.com / and the Bb upgrade center. All of these additional resources have been beneficial to help us prepare our campus for the upgrade. I have also found Blackboard to be more responsive for this release with the announcement of 2 upcoming service packs this summer which will resolve most of the issues (before our Fall go live) we have found during our pilot.
chroniclebarnacle - June 10, 2010 at 12:07 am
Garay & Ekunnen- are you full time faculty or I.T.? We have used the pilot model in the past. I was one of a handful of faculty who actually tried it during the pilot period. A mjaority of faculty (sadly) did not even try but waited until they were forced to use the new upgrade. I finally got there myself and I was always an early adopter on anything that came out. I guess I finally grew tired when in one semester we had a new version of BlackBoard, Tegrity, a new and different email system, and Livetext. We lost our minds! Way too much change for one semester- I don’t care WHO you are-
garay - June 10, 2010 at 8:03 am
I actually do co-teach a graduate class, Barnacle, and I eat my own dog food, but yes, I primarily direct Teaching & Learning Technology on campus. It is as an IT administrator that I commented and suggested what has worked well at our campus and at many other colleges and universities where change is managed appropriately. I would never ever recommend that our school (any school) would dare to change their learning management system, their lecture capture system, email system and portfolio system, or a similar combination thereof, all at once. That would be indeed suicidal. Change is, unfortunately (actually fortunately) needed, from time to time, but change is indeed best instituted in small dosages, especially, at institutions of higher learning.Your mileage, of course, may vary.
ekunnen - June 10, 2010 at 10:33 am
Hi chroniclebarnacle,I report through the academic branch and through our Provost office, while central IT supports the core infrastructure of Blackboard. Our core upgrade team is positioned from the academic side and includes myself, an IT admin, and 4 full time faculty. Using faculty feedback throughout the pilot and our own testing and evaluation, we provide the due diligence and upgrade planning. Our pilot included over 10 faculty and 380 students. Our pilot includes each faculty member teaching their live courses throughout the entire 7 week semester, which helps to identify issues and also benefits of upgrading during the entire life cycle of teaching and learning. In addition, all of our training this summer has been on the new Bb system. Finally, the new Bb 9.1 system is available earlier than normal so faculty can prepare and be accustomed to the changes.I can totally appreciate how drastic changing a multitude of systems all at once can be. Especially with the understanding that faculty are busy and are charged with focusing on their teaching and discipline – and not the technology!
chroniclebarnacle - June 10, 2010 at 11:51 pm
Garay & Ekunnen- thanks for the reply. I hope your faculty appreciates you both. I appreciate your perspective. Well we made it through the tough part- I guess I am worn thin. Also I care- really care about my institution. I think it could be the number one place to work in the country if a little more common sense was used and people were held accountable. Have a great weekend-
rkdrury - June 18, 2010 at 4:47 pm
When I tried to enter links on Blackboard 9, it randomly changed various parts of the html code to the character entity reference (i.e., “” became >, etc), breaking the link. When I would fix one link and change it, another randomly changed. I then went into the html code window in an effort to hand code it, but the code appears in a continuous line with no line breaks. If they can’t get that right, I’m afraid to use the other new features and will continue to link through Blackboard to my own sites.
kbetts - June 23, 2010 at 10:18 pm
Our college just switched to the BlackBoard 8.0. I like it a lot more than the older version of BB 4.0. I am not sure whenh we will go to BB 9.0, but it sounds like I may not want to.