Blackboard LMS for Business

Commentaires: Overall it’s an improvement over just 20 years ago when a syllabus and careful listening were the only way to connect with students. Also, I’ve had great success sharing ideas with colleagues. Of course, faculty can be just irritating as the abovementioned students. I’d say an “ignore” buttons would make this score go from a 7 to a 9.

Avantages: I love the ability to reach all of my students or any subgroup in multiple ways. For example, personalized announcement, group emails, meeting and grading in realtime, scheduling office hours, and getting notifications are just a few of the native services, and each can be customized l.

Inconvénients: The law of unintended consequences applies directly to blackboard. The same convenient and varied options that make the product great also give students more access (and wildly unrealistic expectations) to their professors. This is great for the 5% of students who have helpful and legitimate questions, but obnoxious for those who expect instant responses, midnight submissions, and A grades for D papers because “they clearly are trying. Just look at their blackboard logs and see!”

Commentaires: I am consulting for two institutions - the one a large higher education institution - 45 000+ Blackboard users - self hosted and the other - smaller business school - 1000+ Blackboard users - hosted. I present training and support to the faculty on how to use the LMS. Although one can discover a lot for yourself using the Blackboard help site, there are a few tips and tricks that make life a lot easier which is not always that intuitive. Problems that we are trying to solve: changing the faculty's teaching philosophy from traditional lecture based teaching to a more active learning environment. Blackboard certainly address that well - as long as you plan your activities properly, you can get excellent feedback for example let the students read or view a video on a specific concept and then let them write a pre-test before they come to the lecture. This will help you to identify where the gaps still exist which you can address then in class. Also using a flipped class room approach - Blackboard can be used to assist you in flipping your class room where you can also monitor and track which of your students engaged beforehand. I have been using WebCT and then Blackboard.

Avantages: Everything is in one space - lots of tools - the sky is really the limit.
I also like the Best Practice parts of the help site - it helps you to get ideas of how you can use the tools.

Inconvénients: In terms of support from Blackboard, sometimes the person who receives the inquiry do not read properly or English is a second language because we often have to explain again and again before they understand - that is the only frustration I currently have with the support. It is unfortunately a very expensive product since the institutions are not based in the USA and therefore we are subjected to the exchange rate.