If something is repeatedly happening (restaurants have bad sites, enterprise software is crap, education software is ugly..), it might be worth digging a little deeper and understanding why. If something is perplexingly broken, there is slightly harder to find reason why. That's why it's perplexing.
Very often people seem at grasp at a hand wavy, superficial explanation. For example, a few days ago there was a thread on restaurant sites. A lot of comenters seemed to conclude that this is because service providers to this market suck. While that's almost axiomatically true, it should just trigger another why.
If you are off to fix the restaurant site problem, you need to answer the second why. Conclude that service providers suck stopping there will lead you try fix the problem be starting a web site design business for restaurants that doesn't suck. But restaurants didn't just magically all end up with bad service providers. Surely some good ones tried and either failed or started to suck. There was a reason.
Same here. The "horrible mentality" of schools is s symptom, not a root cause.
From what I've seen, Blackboard (the company) spends a lot of effort suing competitors to kept them out of the market. They have a bucket load of patents they're quite happy to wield in order to protect their turf
A bigger issue is that Blackboard keeps buying competitors. Without competition, there's not a lot of incentive to keep your product cutting-edge.
Blackboard bought my startup in 2001, and I worked there for about a year after. After they bought our company, our product was discontinued and our unique perspective was lost. The remaining employees were integrated into Blackboard's existing teams. Some of them have become excellent leaders at Blackboard, but after the acquisition they were advancing Blackboard's vision, not our vision.
WebCT was the only other large competitor in this market, and Blackboard used its IPO cash to acquire them in early 2006. Together Blackboard and WebCT had over 80% of the market, maybe closer to 90%.
Plus there's the traditional enterprise software problem: when the buyer is not the end user, product skew happens. When IT staff evaluate software alternatives, they're looking for IT features, like LDAP support or integration with a student records system. They know the end users need certain features like "a homework dropbox," but they're not able to evaluate the subtleties of those features. The IT department can't be as familiar with those subtleties as the end users are. And it's rare that an IT department would study internal users in depth, like a product designer would.
Absolutely. It's extremely tough to build a customer base in education, but once you've signed them they're just as reluctant to move on to a competitor. Standard practice is for the larger companies like Blackboard and Pearson to gobble up the smaller fish and either shut down their products or milk them dry. There's very little incentive to invest in product development when no one in the ecosystem experiences much competitive pressure.
It's not really much more than the patents. People tell people that Blackboard will sue them because BB has patents and has sued others before.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of other companies that sue competitors instead of trying to compete with them. I mean, one such company is currently in the #1 spot on the front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2081938 Need I list more?
Can they still sue a company that is based outside of the USA? I always wondered this, but never found an answer.
Europe, for example, does not have software patents, but I think that is more complicated than this.
Groupon, can't get groupon.com.au because an Australian guy registered the domain and trademark. Not only can you compete with Blackboard, but if you registered blackboard.com.foo and sold competing software, they would have no recourse in certain jurisdictions.
Well, the domain actually had chalk in it. Anyway, being from Australia I actually just ignored it. If they wanted to bring a charge against me and my product they need to do it in my jurisdiction and, worse, the domain name was from the Italian registry, and they would have even more trouble with their claim there.
There claim was spurious anyway, just because they have trademarks on the 'Blackboard' (a generic term anyway) regarding education software, doesn't mean they have a claim to the word 'Chalk' for non-educational software. Blackboard just have over-active lawyers.
I recently started working in this sector, and I was shocked at the (poor) quality of its software.
I think I've identified a few causes:
1. Design by committee
2. Winners are determined by relationships and lock-in
3. Educators don't care about finding the best, just good enough
4. Great developers don't want to work in this sector
The first should be obvious. Anything run by government tends towards design by committee, and educational software almost tries to be bad in this way.
The second is true of other sectors, but it is especially true in education. Intermediate Units (I work in PA) and school districts don't try to work together by default. Even at the top, deals are done by who knows who or who hates who. And, the enormous cost of switching products for the large systems creates a lock-in environment. People will say/promise anything to get a sale, because they know they will really have to screw up to lose customers.
Third, educators as a rule are afraid of technology or are at least more unaware than anyone here on HN. They don't want to spend the time to learn; they want to spend whatever it takes to get the problem off their plate. Remember, there are a great deal of people who went into education because of the vacation time. Some people really care and work hard, but the percentage is lower than other industries, I think.
Finally, for all the reasons above, the greatest developers don't want to work in education. The bosses are almost never developers; winners aren't determined by quality; most code is CRUD type code with lots of rules and exceptions from state law/procedure.
I get excited at the thought of change, which is why I stay. I want to be part of that change. But, on the low days change seems impossible, and I start thinking about other jobs.
One side note: why isn't there more OS in education? This really bothers me, as it seems like a perfect scenario for it. I'm thinking it goes back to points #2 and #3. People want to pay for something now rather than funding something everyone shares. If I could be part of the change in one way, this would be it (I'm looking for ways now).
EDIT: One more: pay. Because most code is crud code, and because bosses aren't developers who can discern good from bad code, the perception is developers should be paid like teachers (or worse). Not going to attract the great developers that way. In the long run, all these software costs more to develop as a result of not hiring the best, but non-developer bosses can't understand that.
You're absolutely correct, and the answer to the second 'why' is that the sales process in education is unbelievably long and expensive relative to what the customers are willing to pay for software.
I worked for an education startup between 2003 and 2006 that made a learning management system similar to the OP. We also laughed at the terrible UI and outdated technology used by our competitors. Little did we know...
The problem is that you only have two choices in education. You can try marketing to individual teachers using Adwords or the like, but there aren't many teachers who want to spend their own money on classroom tools. Districts aren't keen on it, either. This is strictly microISV territory.
The other alternative is to market directly to school districts or universities. That means you need expensive sales reps and money to burn on travel budgets, trade shows, etc. The sales cycle takes about a year, even for the smallest customer. Your customers are the administrators on the purchasing committee, not teachers or students. The admins are far more concerned with back-office functionality like tracking attendance or whether teachers are following the curriculum than the quality of the UI. In fact, the UI was basically irrelevant so long as it was physically possible to do everything on their list of requirements.
Educators make it extremely expensive to provide them with software. But they don't have deep pockets either, so the margins for software developers are extremely tight. There are no competitive pressures in education. Districts are perfectly happy to use obsolete technology indefinitely. There are still thousands of schools using applications based on Access, Foxpro, and DBase IV. (seriously!) The only thing in your favor is that once you sign a customer, they are extremely reluctant to move to a competitor regardless of how outdated your product becomes.
Thus, the standard business model in education is for the large players like Pearson or Blackboard to gobble up small independent companies with locked-in customer bases built up over many years, cut investment in new development to a minimum, and milk the products until they're unviable.
TL;DR: The people buying educational software don't care and won't pay for good UI.
Sungard is another offender in this sphere. Huge company, crappy software (the Sony Root-kit) and incompetent, litigious management.
When I was an undergrad I found a CSRF vulnerability in their product Banner. I tried contacting SungardHE on my own, but couldn't contact a human being, so I brought it to the attention of the IT dept at my university. They asked me to prepare a demo against their dev server. After seeing the demo, IT brought this to the attention of Sungard.
A day or two later, someone at Sungard called the school's general counsel and demanded that they bring charges against me for some ambiguously defined computer crime. A professor I was working for went to bat for me and smoothed things over.
We reached an agreement where I wouldn't disclose until they had distributed a patch and they would acknowledge me for the fix. They reneged on their end of the deal, so I released to Bugtraq.
Not sure how true that really is in Blackboard's market, given their use of software patents to attack competition.
As far as getting good software into education, you're fighting both your competition and the establishment. Not an enviable position. Most of my experiences with how UK schools procure their IT equipment and software have reminded me of 'enterprisey' corporations and the disconnect between purchasers and buyers. (At least their excuse is they have neither enough time or money to do a good job.)
I feel a similar way. My other half is a teacher, and every time I've looked at the software systems she uses (in the UK) I'm appalled. I've identified a few software tools which would make teachers lives much better and easier, based on problems she actually has. Are they hard to build? Not that hard. Could I get them in to schools? Not a chance.
Approved bidders, closed lists, hugely expensive bidding processes, it's calculated to keep the market sewn up by the education IT vendors (usual suspects, Capita, Fujitsu, etc.)
At a time when the UK is looking to save money, the state of school software provisioning is shameful on multiple levels.
Also we have to keep in mind sometimes incompetent IT people are in charge. We had a grad who came back and designed a software for the entire school (potentially district) to use.
Although it's in place, it's been severely restricted due to irrational concerns over security and other illogical arguments. In order for the buying to even occur (keep in mind this was free for the school), there must be knowledgeable IT people in charge.
This is a much smaller scale here since it was for a high school instead of a college, but you'd be surprised at how incompetent people can be.
Right now in the IT people I work under at the university are smart, but lightyears behind when it comes to good user interfaces and the latest technologies.
This seems to be why people don't go into educational software. Educational software doesn't win because it's the best, it wins because a bureaucrat mandates it for use.
I am in education during the day and we write software for our campus using cutting edge tools and technology, but only for "non administrative" things.
It was decided well above my pay grade that grade checking, admissions, financial aid, registration, and online courses would use Oracle, PeopleSoft and Desire2Learn.
Wow. That patent that they use: 6,988,138 - "Internet Based Education Support System and Methods" reads like "If anyone uses a web app using industry standard design patterns in the sphere of education they owe us money."
It seems like you can use that patent as a template and just replace 'education' with the human interaction of your choice and have just as 'valid' a patent.
Ditto. Having been on a team that developed a CMS for a school (tmedweb.tulane.edu), I have never met a group so intrenched in the status quo as a curriculum committee.
> Current e-learning platforms ... are riddled with unattractive and unusable interfaces that are counterintuitive. This presents a problem to the teachers who are less likely to create content for students, but also for the students themselves.
Yes, yes, yes. Somebody, please weather the Blackboard onslaught and fix this.
But who would do that? The risk is too high. People with the right approach lack the money and lawyers to weather the storm. For example, I really doubt that you and I, working together, could get investors to back a project to rival BB because of the risk involved.
That's why I don't bother with my idea. Nobody would be dumb enough to fund it and I can't scrounge up the cash I'd need to fortify the defenses.
I recently graduated from undergrad. While I was there, my alma mater switched from Blackboard to Moodle. A few of the 'bleeding edge' professors started experimenting with Moodle's features, but most used it exactly the same as Blackboard (post the syllabus, post weekly assignments if they weren't already on the syllabus).
Moodle was prettier. That's all most of the student's noticed. I'm reminded of the chapter in ReWork 'Tools Don't Matter'.
With either system, the great teachers were still insightful, engaging, and likable. Two years of Moodle didn't change that.
An HNer, kylemathews, has a nice Drupal-based package, eduglu (http://eduglu.com/). It's both an opensource project and start-up.
Having followed him on Twitter for a while now, I know his interest and passion for improving/hacking education long precedes his financial interest in it. Really rooting for his project and anything else that moves the edu situation forward.
I'm currently a student and my university uses BlackBoard. The software is simply awful. Every professor chooses a different ugly template for their own course, so there is no consistency. In my university, the more able professors have started making their own websites to put up lecture notes, tutorials and grades.
Even the new updates are just a skin of their poorly designed product. No new functionality is added(or even improved), but instead it's just a 'prettier version' of the older system. And the amounts they charge universities for such tools is crazy.
But as someone already mentioned, they have a monopoly in the education sector, and they make it really difficult for universities to switch to an alternative tool [1].
Universities should stop using Blackboard. They tried to use a software patent to prevent competitors from implementing "roles" (otherwise known as user groups).
Having only Blackboard as a delivery mechanism in South Africa (TUT) was really detrimental. Everything is a service call or a call out. I eventually (after 2 semesters) just used my own Moodle setups.
Most faculty just want a simple place to put course documents and announcements and Blackboard (and Moodle for that matter) are just overkill for most of them. The main reason it seems is that they're purchased by committees who make decisions by checking off boxes on a large feature list, where it doesn't seem to matter if anyone actually uses those features. You can tell how bad it's gotten since many faculty are already doing their own thing, i.e. using Google groups, pbwiki or making their own simple websites.
Due to my frustration using WebCT for classes I TA'd as a graduate student, I recently partnered with another student to build a simple alternative in Django. Check it out at http://thiscourse.com It's designed to provide access to the crucial features as quickly as possible. We're always interested in getting feedback and have had a few classes use it successfully so far.
I have just visited the Blackboard web site. After following many links and viewing about 20 pages there, I have no idea what it actually does, what is required to run it, and what it costs.
I don't understand why companies make such useless web sites.
Because their products are in the dark ages. And semi-monopolistic. The requirements are incomprehensible, the pricing is highly variable. The combination of needless complexity and high cost means the easiest way to find this stuff out is having a team of sales reps fly out to confuse you further.
One of the Bb products we use (transact/envision/cash registers), they basically ship you the server with the software, and updates are handled by their techs. We actually resorted to disk-to-disk type cloning of that server to give ourselves a backout plan for when their engineers break stuff.
The more cognitive energy students spend on figuring out how to use systems stops them from focusing the course content. The bigger barrier to participation the less participation there will be. Course management systems like blackboard, desire2learn, etc are rarely if evaluated on user-centered principals of design and usability. Decisions are made based on business factors like cost, licensing, etc. Features are only evaluated in an abstract sense. I guess it is this way with many large organizations.
Horrible software, us UofToronto students have to use this despite having had our own univ server CCNet in the past that worked flawlessly and blazingly fast.
As a student still in college, I cannot stand blackboard. I cringe every time I need to use it because it is ugly, slow, confusing and often does not work correctly.
Most professors prefer not to use it but are forced to by the College since they are paying for BB services.
I personally feel the education sector is a wide open game, create something that will increase learning potential and bring more value to a students degree and you will have success.
I thought I was done with Peoplesoft after I graduated (it was many times worse than the downloadable software that came before it, and that looked over a decade old), but now my work uses it for some things :(
Don't think so. None of the founders of the two original companies that merged to form blackboard.com list Cal in their background. 2 from Cornell and 2 from American University
Blackboard (the webapp) itself isn't that bad, and the iPad app is really nice. It's just any site that tells you that you just failed a quiz is bad by association.
I can name a few problems with Blackboard (the webapp). I've seen both sides of it; I've suffered through 7 semesters with BB as a student, and 2 as a teaching assistant.
It uses frames. When you open a link in a new tab, you get the bare page without the top/left nav bars. Really? They couldn't even use a little 1998 Javascript to get the page to reload inside the frameset?
Too many modules are enabled by default, which causes confusion when profs use things differently. Does the syllabus go in "Course Information" or "Course Documents"? Or, since it contains the prof's email, "Staff Information"? Do homework assignments go under "Assignments" or "Course Documents"?
There are two ways to upload files. One is convenient for both students and teachers, one is not. Guess which one is more obvious? The nonintuitive one, Digital Dropbox, is buried two pages deep. It has two choices: "Add File" and "Send File". If you add a file, but don't send it, the teacher never sees it. From the teacher's end, Digital Dropbox renames files, for your convenience. Yes, BB, thanks so much for renaming my students' Java files so that I can't compile them. Also, for your convenience, any .html files that are uploaded get their extension changed to .rtf, prompting more shell scripts just to de-BlackBoard your students' files.
The better upload option is for teachers to allow submissions in the Assignments tab. This makes way more sense, since you can view and complete the assignment all on one page. To enable this, the teacher has to select an assignment type of "Assignment", instead of the default "Content Unit". As a TA, I only knew this existed because one semester, one of my profs used this. (Once, out of all the classes I took that had digital submission.)
The grading page is horrible. It has a table for the grades, like you would expect, with one column per assignment, and one row per student. If you have more than 5ish assignments or 15 students, it overflows the page. This would be fine, except the table doesn't respond to the scroll wheel. It has a scrollbar on the right, and a scrollbar on the bottom, and watches their position with Javascript. When you scroll one of these, the table contents are updated to reflect that position of the table. This makes scrolling awkward every time - the screen flashes a bit, and you have no idea how many columns Blackboard decided you wanted to scroll until you look at the header row. Oh, and every time you resize the page, the table is reset to the top-left.
TL;DR These people need some serious UX help, fast.
The better upload option is for teachers to allow submissions in the Assignments tab.
Is there a way to quickly download all submissions for an assignment at once? So far, I've been stuck with going into each submission's sub-page and clicking the download link.
The grading page is horrible. …
Also, columns you tell it not to use in grade calculation may simply not appear anywhere.
In my school district, we have been using Blackboard Learn for as long as I can remember. According to Wikpedia, it's the "next generation learning management system". In essence, it provides a way for teachers to interact with students, as well as for students to interact among themselves. Posting grades, class announcements, and homework assignments are only a few of the things teachers can do through the site. Students can view all of this information, as well as form groups, run blogs, use calendars, and create discussion boards.
My point is that Blackboard is not a piece of ugly software. It is fully functional and has a nice and intuitive design to it. The article says that:
Badly designed software with poor usability goes hand in hand with general appeal
However, this software is not badly designed as it does what it is supposed to do (and more), and the usability is perfectly fine. Ironically, our district has switched to another piece of software to replace Blackboard's, but only because of the teacher's belief that it offered too many features.
I think that the author of this post should rethink Blackboard.
My experiences with Blackboard paint a far less flattering picture. An "intuitive" interface is entirely subjective, but I've hardly ever tried to do something new without wandering through confusing, cryptic and downright hidden menus for half an hour. Computed columns in the gradebook are crippled for no reason (formulas cannot be nested) and use an obscene[1] "keyboardless" entry form with pointless user-side validation. If you ever want to give yourself a migraine, crack open the source to any nontrivial page and try to tease apart the miles of needlessly complicated and frequently broken Javascript.
Granted, my university does not use the latest-and-greatest version (yet) of Blackboard Learn, but for someone with your history of using the application these should not be totally alien points.
Very often people seem at grasp at a hand wavy, superficial explanation. For example, a few days ago there was a thread on restaurant sites. A lot of comenters seemed to conclude that this is because service providers to this market suck. While that's almost axiomatically true, it should just trigger another why.
If you are off to fix the restaurant site problem, you need to answer the second why. Conclude that service providers suck stopping there will lead you try fix the problem be starting a web site design business for restaurants that doesn't suck. But restaurants didn't just magically all end up with bad service providers. Surely some good ones tried and either failed or started to suck. There was a reason.
Same here. The "horrible mentality" of schools is s symptom, not a root cause.