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Blackboard and WebCT merge
Acidangl writes "Blackboard and WebCT, leading providers of enterprise software and services to the education industry have announced plans to merge." From the article: "Under terms of the agreement, Blackboard will acquire WebCT in a cash transaction for $180 million, which values the offer at approximately $154 million, net of WebCT's August 31, 2005 cash balance of $26 million. The ultimate value of the offer will vary depending on WebCT's cash balance at closing."
No, wait, the other thing - tedious.
Hopefully someone can provide some sort of competition to this company.
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
IS this the big break for Moodle?
Seriously, it's often so hard to find where a professor has put the file you're tyring to find. With so many different places to put things, it just gets students confused. Not to mention all the trouble one has to go to in order to find a specific post, send an e-mail, etc..
I don't mean to troll, but both systems could stand to see quite a bit of tweaking.
Having web sites for each class using Blackboard(tm) or WebCT(tm) which are now one and the same thanks to this merger means that students are always able to check out their course website multiple times a day while they're procrasting by browsing websites such as this one (Slashdot) or Fark.
I have used this software for 5 courses online and it was great for getting the most recent problem sets and scanned in PDFs etc.
It's just so much easier to have professors use a simple web form to post things rather than worry about building an entirely different course web page for each class they teach.
Also, it's hush-hush in academia, but professors just aren't good with computers aside from those with MS.
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
Moodle
The school I'm at made the shift and hasn't looked back(well, aside from the technophobe teachers who grumble about learning something new a few years after they started to grasp the old system).
What's more interesting is that WebCT's Vista was out pacing Blackboard's product in terms of features (at least when I left in October 2003). Blackboard was, I believe, an ASP.NET product, WebCT's Vista is J2EE (and written in Struts and JSP, not Tapestry, alas).
My guess is that one of the two product lines will be phased out. This could become an interesting competative case for .Net and J2EE.
Sorry, JEE. Cause Sun can't stand to stick with just one name for anything.
Howard M. Lewis Ship -- Independent J2EE / Open-Source Java Consultant -- Creator, Apache Tapestry and HiveMind
Given how few schools are privately owned, I can see why consolidation might be necessary in the "enterprise software for the education industry" market.
Or did I miss something?
What this will ensure is less innovation in the online schooling front; competition generally drives innovation. Unfortunately, these two packages are so very cumbersome that innovation is unlikely; the pedagogical framework that once strengthened the software(s) is kaput.
It will be a challenge, but Moodle stands a great chance to out-think the combined WebCT/Blackboard group. What they MUST do effectively is reach out to districts - THIS is where the combined merger will find its force, in its broad reach.
~d
So when does either company provide technology which can actually scale to user load, is actually powered by modern technology, and generally isn't a Piece of Shit (tm)?
I've used my fair share of Blackboard, and I've had some great experiences:
1) The ability to embed Flash and JavaScript into free response questions. 2) The time Blackboard's database started crashing, which caused it to take at least 5 tries to login. 3) And better yet, the 1 in 2 odds that when you finally logged it, it would be as someone else as the database switched your tokens. 4) Best of all, the 1 in 20 odds that person would be a teacher or professor.
And I've heard WebCT isn't much better...
WASTE - The Secure P2P
Until just a few months ago when an upgrade was rolled out at my university, the only web browsers officially supported on OS X were Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Tiger, which had been out for a few months at the time, was not officially supported.
Blackboard is also a fan of frames, ugliness, and odd behaviors. It's impossible to enroll a system administrator in a course, no matter what. They can only self-enroll.
By "OS" I mean simply file/directory permissions.
In college I was looking through shared files/directories of a computer science professor because he had code snippets from lab and problem sets etc. shared for us to access.
Unfortunately I was able to get into a directory that students should not have and suddenly I saw files that looked like solutions to the current programming project.
I didn't look but I think 80% of other students would have.
I phoned him immediately at his home number, and he was annoyed at the dinnertime call and I think wondering how/why I found it, but was glad in the end because he could appropriately "chmod 600" the directory instead of "666" or "777" like it was set.
My whole point is that security holes and such can often just be human error and not the actual software.
This nothing new; don't take it out on Blackboard.
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
I've been thinking of getting into this market, given that everyone seems to hate all of the incumbents. I created a portal system for use at Harvard, but the administatraion there did all they could to shut it down, even though students seemed to like it.
If anyone has any ideas for how I can convert these 10,000 lines of code into something that a school might actually want to buy, let me know! I have not been able to figure it out so far, though given the competition, you'd think it wouldn't be that hard...
Then I realized that if software this bad is the state of the art in the field, it probably means that there's no real money to be made in the field, so no one will bother. *sigh*
Open Source Opportunity, I suppose.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Moodle, far better than either of the above, is still free. As someone whose university uses Blackboard, I can honestly say it is the worst piece of commercial software I have ever used. Worse than Windows XP. Worse than windows ME. Worse than realplayer. Worse than CometCursor.
that inspired my comment. The usability of both of these products is quite poor. It just happens that I find Blackboard slightly less annoying to use than WebCT.
Charge 10 times more for it than it's worth and force them to buy a new copy once a year ;-)
With the importance of education that is relevant to the real world I wish there was software which would integrate outside resources (google, wikipedia, etc.) and provide students with easily accessible information via a search engine as well as relevant to the classroom. I can't remember how many times in my CS classes the professor would post an assignment up with little or no instruction "Create a database program in C that stores and retrieves values with a non-graphical user interface", would have been awesome to have access to some helpfull functions, code snippets etc. Perhaps with this merger they can toss more resources towards R&D and focus on what students need and not just create a way for college prof's to be lazy....
WebCT is an interface abomination. Yet, as I type this, I have it bookmarked next to Blackboard in my browser toolbar, as my engineering classes all use blackboard and the humanities classes use WebCT for some godforsaken reason. Probably because they're humanities classes -- at least the engineers have the good sense to use blackboard. So yeah, here's to hoping this wipes WebCT off the map.
I'd say that this merger is directly in response to an LMS market that is increasingly becoming dominated by excellent Open Source offerings, ie. Moodle and Sakai. There's becoming fewer and fewer reasons to pay the high prices for licensing either of these products, especially as the Open Source ones are so good and getting better and better. The developers community for Moodle for example is phenomenal.
Usability on the products are horrible. We use WebCT where I work and we can't even get the professors to use it for the most basic tasks. The UI is horrible, and even after teachers are trained and start using it, they end up going back to a simple web page. We can't even get 15% of classes to use the system. I know CS professors who hate it and personally I do too. It is good for giving quizzes and posting things on the calendar, but beyond that NO ONE USES IT. I agree that the concept could be extremely powerful, but the implementation is just bad. And please don't tell me how professors are just too lazy to learn the system, they just don't have the time to waste troubleshooting a confusing system. In the end, it's usually easier to break out frontpage and post assignments and test dates on a simple website. IMHO, these products have a long ways to go before the time they are supposed to save is realized.
I have some insight on this topic as a university professor. I've used both systems, and I was on the Academic Technology Committee when it was advising the CTO and CIO on purchasing decisions for such systems. We wound up paying for both. As you say, they both suck, and I'm sure whatever unholy combination is produced will suck even worse. At the time - 1999 or 2000 I believe - "open source" was something my colleagues on the committee had heard of but didn't know anything about, and the CTO and CIO were computer-savvy but looked on open source with disdain (this made sense as they were constantly wined and dined by folks who represent closed source companies looking for big deals). I was teaching summers at UCLA at the time and had the opportunity to use ClassWeb, an open source alternative to such tools. My experience with the tool was exemplary; I thought it was easy to use, it fulfilled the necessary functions and was not needlessly confusing for students. It was also free. Best of all, the developer worked at UCLA so when there were features I wanted I was able to ask him for them and they were available in days. It was truly a classic case of the superiority of the open source model working well. For much less the price we paid for Blackboard and CT, which all the students complain about, we could have hired programmers to handle coding issues on classweb and had an open source solution that we could fine tune at will. But when I made the suggestion, the feeling around the table (particularly from the CTO and CIO) was, shut up hippie.... Today I don't use any such tools -- I still code my course web pages by hand using html and have some very primitive open source discussion board technology for discussions. I think it's necessary to have courses online these days for various reasons, but the tools offered by these companies are needlessly ornate and confusing. The open source model makes sense in general but especially in public university settings where costs are a relevant factor and where the freedom to tinker with code brings with it additional educational benefits.
WebCT is an utterly horrible piece of crap.
My school uses WebCT for all classes, so I have to deal with it daily (coincidentally, I'm posting this while sitting in one of my more WebCT-intensive classes). WebCT has the single worst interface of anything I have ever used in my life.
I really, really hope that this results in WebCT getting replaced globally.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
I've never had a problem with WebCT crashing and the one time I accidently closed my browser during a test, I logged back in and continued the test.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
In related news, shares of WebCT were down $5 after news of the merger, although this is expected to rise by 20% at the end of the semester after the curve is applied.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
maybe they will merge with phpbb too.. the message board function on webct (at least the version my school, UCF, uses) is worthless and unintuative.
most of the features on webct are excellent.
-- lol pwned
My engineering class uses WebCT, unfortunately. It's bad. Really bad. Slow, ugly, and not nearly as easy to use as it should be. Then again, it's better than just sticking with paper, like all my other classes do.
Moodle is only one of many!
I am required to pimp the Sakai project, an open source collaboration between a bunch of schools, including UMich, Indiana, MIT, Stanford and Berkeley. The biggest production install is UMich, with around 100,000 students using it.
-EvilMagnus
i spent a semester at the university of auckland in new zealand, and their in house IT services included a web-based classroom management system called Cecil in the exact niche filled by Blackboard and webCT commercially here in the states. it was enormously popular at the UofA, and it seems to have been developed, managed, and serviced almost entirely in-house by the University. i used it myself for classes that semester, and have used Blackboard at my home university, and i thought Cecil was remarkably reliable in comparison, if a tad less intuitive.
/.--open-source or proprietary non-commercial development looks like the way to go.
point is, while most schools are not likely to have the resources to do something like this so completely in house, many do have at least some in-house IT staff who would be able to administer a project like this. not only is in-house development a good alternative for schools that have the means, but it also might be a way for entrepeneurs (like the parent) to approach universities with their own systems. a system developed partially in-house is by default custom-built, and probably most useful and intuitive for users in that environment.
business as usual on
/. is what happens when geeks talk. get used to it.
My principle problem with blackboard isn't usability or UI issues (I agree it stinks but I can tolerate lousy UI). What grinds my gears is that Blackboard is used to EXCLUDE students from online course content! Maybe I'm old fashioned but I thought that the purpose of schools were to educate fools like me. Unless I'm registered for a class, I can't take a look at handouts or problem sets! How are we supposed to "try out" classes at the beginning of the quarter/semester/term? Not all of us can afford to register for 10-15 classes at the beginning of the term.
As a result, some of us have resorted to posting course materials on "p2p" networks and we are aware that members of the administration are actively looking for us (with the goal of expelling/arresting the perpetrators). Ironic that we have to do this stuff to try to learn.
Better known than Dokeos and Moodle in the US is the Sakai project This is a big collaboration between a bunch of research-1 schools (MIT, Stanford, Michigan, Indiana) with about $6 million in backing from the Mellon foundation. I might have used this in place of Dokeos if it existed when I installed it, but then again maybe not. It's a much more top-down piece of design as opposed to the very bottom up Dokeos and Moodle.
I gave a talk at a conference over the summer about Open Source CMSs and the trends. BB/WebCT/Angel and the like should be very, very scared, at least for their core CMS products. There's been little real innovation in them in the past few years so the OS ones have a static target to shoot for and lots of schools are really, really sick of the companies backing them. Blackboard contacted the Sakai project heads about a collaboration- the response was "We've not interested in working with you." BB will survive by diversifying and moving to financial services- they sell a one-card system (doors, meals, vending machine, bookstore, etc) that is also a credit card, and they get a cut of every purchase. That's what is going to keep them alive, since BB the product itself is in trouble.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
My university uses WebCT. It is a flaming piece of shit. I'm not sure if it's WebCT or just the entry/login portal, but I can't access webCT in anyhting other than IE because somehow cookies fail to set otherwise. It slows to a CRAWL under any kind of load. It's difficult to use, both for students and professors. The senior admin for my campus' network has basically admitted that the only reason we use it is because we're locked in for a time, and yes it does suck.
Blackboard wasn't quite as bad (used it at a community colleg) The UI was sketchy but at least i can use it under firefox.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Several people have mentioned Moodle, a PHP-scripted system, but there is also Boddington, which is Java (no, I don't know whether it's J2EE). Oxford University has a Boddington instance that allows guest access. It's a totally different paradigm to the WebCT / Blackboard 'corse' one. Let's hope that both of these open source options grow and provide real competition for the single commercial product.
Wait - they were seperate companies in the first place? My school uses a crazy combination of Blackboard and WebCT, which it just switched to. It doesnt work AT ALL... the interface is ridiculous, tedious, buggy, slow, completely backwards, and theres no help options. It took me 4 hours to figure out how to sign up for courses, and even then i "made a mistake" that required days worth of administrative stuff, and then had to wait 3 weeks to "gain access" enough to fix the problem.
It seems as though the registrars have lost too much control over "registering" because of this program. Also, this thing seems to be imposing other unfair restrictions on students, such as insanely restricted registration periods, enorcing max class sizes (previously you could sign a form to get in anyway but this web system doesnt allow that), enforcing NO tolerance on overlapping classes (again, the previously used forms which required Prof signatures dont work), not allowing you to switch sections on core courses, not allowing "probationary" students to sign up for anything at all... etc. Blackboard and WebCT havent allowed enough control for ANYONE to do ANYTHING, and everything is STILL royally messed up after a month of classes. Those at the bottom of the administration scheme (who actually do the work) dont have access enough to make the system fit with our schools policies.
Apart from that, none of the teachers even use the programs "advanced" features, such as mail, test dates, assignment categories, etc. They all have their own websites, which they like because they can actually format them however they like.
I seriously hope theyre working hard on improving it.
We have been dealing with WebCT (the company) for quite some time now from the application and system administration standpoint. Our experience with the company is that the very few technical people they have are decent people who are pretty knowledgable. However, it is just about impossible to interface with them directly because nearly everything needs to pass through a minimum of one layer of management.
Dealing with WebCT's management, unlike their technical folks, is an exercise in frustration. The dominant behaviors I have noted from their management are:
- they are nothing but apologists (mouthpieces) for their company,
- they spend a great deal of their time protecting their technical people from customers (arguably, this is normally a good function but not when you have an LMS that is non-functional and campus is screaming at you), and
- they spend a great deal of time in CYA-based activities, i.e., they continually blame the customer for problems with the application in order to shirk responsibility for the poor performance of the product.
I'd like to hear from people who have dealt with the Blackboard management team. What is their corporate culture like? Do you think they will be more responsive to their customers than WebCT is?
I'm hoping that most of WebCT's current management team gets pink slips once the merger is complete.
I work for Cisco Learning Institute (the company that handles the Cisco Networking Academy online stuff) and they have a pretty decent suite of software. They're just not very well known. If you're looking to move away from blackboard / webct because of this or for whatever reason, checkout www.ciscolearning.org
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
both products are pretty bad compared to applications available in other fields. There was a time when Blackboard e.g. didn't support the moving of files, and I think WebCT did neither. That was way back then...in 2003. Maybe this will lead to better software from a new competitor...
There are heaps of open source LMS projects. Some like Moodle seem to have legs. Others are in various stages of development. There is a list on the LMS talk site.
This is a wide tangent, but...
I am SO sick of professors who use Blackboard/WebCT as a way to get around ordering textbooks or reading packets. I've had professors scan in hundreds of pages from a book, put them on a web in PDF form (two pages to a screen, so you had to read sideways), and expect us to print them out and bring them to class as though they were textbooks. This was done in the name of "saving us money," but really it was just a cop-out for professors who were too lazy to plan their courses ahead of time, or didn't want to get caught in the act of mass copyright infringement. Most of the students spent far more on printer ink than they would have at the copy shop or the bookstore, not to mention the wonderful feeling you get when your ink runs out in the middle of printing your term paper.
If anyone reading this is teaching a class next semester and is even remotely thinking about digitizing their textbook, DON'T DO IT. It only stretches the students' time and resources thinner, and wastes reams of paper - info packets printed at home are lucky to survive an entire semester without getting water damaged, torn apart, or lost in a pile of identical papers from other classes. A good rule of thumb is, if it's more than ten pages, put it in the reading packet. If you absolutely have to put something big online, make sure the PDF is readable on the screen, and don't expect the students to lug stacks of printer paper to class with them. The Blackboard/WebCT isn't there to make the students do your work for you.
A strain of paranoid prevention can be worse than the disease, whate'er the intention.
When did UMich go to 100k users?
Last I heard they had about 27,000 on 27 servers(!) and UI was going to be the scalability test with 90k.
Are you from an institution considering Blackboad or WebCT? Don't. It is the worst software that students and faculty can use. Don't believe me? Read all the other comments on /. and do a Google search.
I am a university student and several professors have been dilligently trying to upload files using WebCT for the better part of a week and its technical glitch after glitch and the stuff is not being posted up. This is a campus-wide issue. Shame to have wasted our tuition $$$'s on something I and a whole bunch of students rarely use.
I'm hopeful this with this merger, they decide to use an OSS management system. I could see a problem if the system was just a group of programmers getting together to make one. Since some systems have backing from Berkley and MIT, I would think that the university I attend would have used it.
I would be more in favor of separate systems. One to run quizzes, one for file transfers (hell there's something called FTP for that), another more secure one for grades (no grades are not on the WebCT thankfully). I can access most course-ountlines from other institutions from the WWW and using google searches and they're not on password protected servers. I don't see why institutions feel they should hide everything from others. A classroom discussion board would have been nice too.
There are several open source efforts with different degrees of maturity.
I have been looking into Claroline http://www.claroline.net/ and it seems to be fairly good for my requirements.
A couple of my professors started using it last year. I don't know if it's the professors or the software, but I don't like it. It is ugly, non-intuitive, and I hear the university has to pay an arm and a leg for it. Seems like the CS dept should be able to come up with something better...
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
There's been little real innovation in them in the past few years so the OS ones have a static target to shoot for and lots of schools are really, really sick of the companies backing them.
Geez, isn't that the truth? I've been using WebCT at Portland Community College for over four years. It's not a bad application, but is in dire need of some enhancements. For instance, whilst registering for classes, there isn't a way to look up the classes you're interested in, and selecting it to register. I need to open up another web session, go to the PCC.edu website, find the CRN, copy it, paste it into WebCT, and then see whether or not there's room. This is far, far too many steps.
BB will survive by diversifying and moving to financial services- they sell a one-card system (doors, meals, vending machine, bookstore, etc) that is also a credit card, and they get a cut of every purchase.
Geez, I hope this isn't related to the PortlandState OneCard (from the creepily named Higher One company):
http://www.psuone.pdx.edu/onecardinfo.html
I, for one, really really do not like the idea of this card. It's a debit MasterCard that's also used to provide access to campus facilities. Sorry, but that just seems like too valuable of a number to just be swiping through your random card reader around campus. I could see a "man-in-the-middle" style of compromise on this system (passively recording the debit card numbers for later use).
All financial aid disbursements are put into this card as well. Ergo, the fine folks at HigherOne, who I'm pretty sure are being paid by PSU, are making both fees for providing this 'service' to PSU, as well as money off of the interest on this card. Boo!
Oh, and that's $20 to you if you're not interested in having this card:
http://www.psuone.pdx.edu/faq01.html#4
Way back in 98, we were evaluating platforms for online learning. WebCt was still fairly small and Murray was the presenter to demo the product to us. Anyway, there were about 20 schools looking and we all met at a cabin to eat & drink. We invited Murray along and he came over, drank several beers with us and talked about how WebCt was started. As I remember it, he developed it for his classes to use then got a grant to develop it for the whole university (Canada somewhere). That lead to other universities using it and they spun WebCt of into a standalone corporation. Back then support was outstanding but as things grow and money gets involved, people figure out that having a tech answer the phone probably is not a good use of his/her time. Fast forward a few years and buy outs later, we dropped WebCt and developed our own in-house and have not looked back since then. At times I wish we still had a commercially supported product so I would not have to be the ass that says no to a feature request but announcements like this make me glad we developed our own. Wish everyone that uses WebCt or Blackboard well.
It's like where they put chocolate and peanut butter together. Only evil.
The university I went to decided to use blackboard as part of there student-teacher interactions. They (being the university administration) decided however that whatever material was put onto blackboard became property of the university, not the lecturers. Needless to say the adoption and use of blackboard by the faculty is almost zero.
GCS/S d-x s+(+): a C++++$ UL+$ P+ L++$ !E--- W++@ N++>$ !o !K-- w++$ !O !M !V PS++>$ PE !Y PGP+ t+ 5++ X++ R tv b
Too late, already been done. Note BB's response to the security issues- this is one of the major problems I have with them.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I will first mention I have never used Blackboard. However, I have used WebCT (currently do use it for 4 different classes actually) and I honestly don't like it. The interface is not easy to use, the pages tend to load wrong, or just not load, the chat and message boards remind me of the internet circa 1997, and there is no real flow. That, and IT at my school can't seem to figure out how to work it, I haven't been able to see one of my classes and they (school? WebCT? not sure which) haven't been able to fix it, and it's been 4 weeks now. Hopefully this merger will be a good thing and get rid of most, or all, of these shortcomings. The other online system I have used is uCompass and that is by far superior to WebCT, hands down. Much better flow, better layout, pages always load right, content is easier to find, message boards and chat look and work as they should, and the prof. has the ability to edit the course colors, which is actually a good thing when you have 4 online classes.
My school has been using BB for several years now, and we are actually considering paying the money to upgrade to the Enterprise version. I think I need to forward this /. story on to those that pay the bills.
My experiences:
My high school assigns dell latitudes to their students to take home, and we have to get all of our info from blackboard (please /. effect it!!! I need an excuse for not doing my homework)... I bet not a single one of you had to put up with this in high school!
Rirelobql xabjf gung EBG-13 vf gur yrnfg frpher rapelcgvba rire, ohg jbhyq lbh jnfgr lbhe gvzr npghnyyl qrpelcgvat vg???
IntraLearn, the LMS written in Cold Fusion that doesn't scale past 500 logins a day.
Well, not without a LOT of custom code by yours truly.
In 2004,they were STILL shipping a SQL Server based product without database indexes! Their lead developer had never HEARD of indexes!
Blind SQL writes, so if you try to add an identity column to the database, the program breaks. I never even knew you COULD write to a SQL table without specifying the columns, since it's such an incredibly bad idea to do so, but they did it in 90% of the queries.
Raw SQL errors sent to the users, NO error trapping.
No version control. Want to release a new version of a course? You can't fork off the old one, make the changes, and then replace the old one, you have to do it all manually.
Let's not forget the bug that would cause an 80% score on an exam to be randomly recorded as an 8%. Never happened to any other scores, but 80% passing grades routinely became 8% failing grades. I had to write custom code to get around this absurd bug. Mind you, this is a bug that was around for four years at least, and as far as I know, unpatched to this very day.
And forget having the system just GIVE you a list of all the studnets assigned to a course, you have to go into SQL for that.
The LMS market is full of scam artists who have a few years of teaching if that. Programmers are hired based on who will work for less and no other factors, and the "design" decisions of a man with no actual programming experience are considered gospel because "he used to work in corporate education."
And these guys are considered to be a GOOD LMS.
Make no mistake, this is a market ripe for the OSS picking, if the programmers can just get past the contacts that keep IntraLearn and their ilk in business.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
It'll come from an open source equivalent. It'll take a while, but I guarantee if their product isn't very good, someone (or a group of someones) will come up with a better OSS equivalent.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I am a CIS instructor that uses WebCT for online courses and find the interface clunky and non-intuitive. To me the problem lies in the fact that WebCT is trying to put together a fairly complex site for a course but has to present tools that the typical liberal arts instructor ( non tech ) can use. It is similar to the problem I have with Access as a database - databases are complicated but Access wants to make a comfy interface for the casual user, and the resulting product really is not good for any kind of user. I suppose at the same time while I am not very happy with WebCT, it is easier than building a site from scratch.
Dear Users,
WebCT and Blackboard merging? This is very good news. The resulting future product will be world-class, stable, and very usable. Consolidation can be a good thing when more effort can be put into fewer parts.
Sincerely,
Oracle and Peoplesoft
Blackboard is one of the most hated companies in higher ed. Nobody likes doing business with them. That's why so many large institutions are standing behind open source projects. The support sucks, too - they're really unwilling to try to duplicate problems on their systems, and upgrade procedures often go badly. They do things like release big updates just before the academic year starts, and then not support the previous version until you upgrade and risk breaking your system. Big database schema changes in minor point releases aren't unknown, either.
There are quite a few small companies that provide online course management solutions. However, I don't know of any as big as Blackboard or WebCT.
A lot of high schools in my area are starting to use a site called GradeConnect which seems to be mostly free to use.
I have serious doubts about online class managment systems saving paper. From what I have seen, most students print anything posted to Blackboard or WebCT. Then they loose it, and print it again. I hear from computer lab assistants that many students leave printed syllabi and assignments sitting on the printer. They print it, then they leave and don't even bother to pick it up, because they know they can always get it again online.
AccountKiller
I teach at a large university and have been using Blackboard for a while. It has dramatically improved within the past couple years. I've never used WebCT but I hope this merger does not decrease the quality of Blackboard. It certainly isn't perfect, but I've found it very useful for posting my PowerPoints after class and for posting general announcements. It also makes keping track of students' grades simple (they can then see their grades in "real time" and let me know if they are missing or have too many points - yes some students do occasionally say I gave them too many points). While I don't use them for my classes, the online quizzes you can set up in Blackboard can work very well (especially is you don't care if they are open book or not). It seems that most people here have had problems with WebCT and not Blackboard. There may be better products out there, but I've never had any problems with Blackboard.
Had to use it for a course one year....nothing is properly linked to each other, each "module" is so completely separate I might as well be looking at a different website. The profs don't know how to use it effectively either, and it seems to just be used as an excuse for the bad profs to avoid seeing students face to face. Haven't seen a SINGLE effective use of WebCT in my entire time at school. And this is the leading university in Canada. Bleh.
Moodle and Sakai simply don't do the same things on the same scale as WebCT and presumably Blackboard. It's like comparing Dia to Visio, of course we'd all rather use Dia, but we go with the more functional product.
WebCT "Campus Edition" vs WebCT "Vista"
Campus Edition was this hacked together organically grown POS. I worked a little with the web services functionality of Vista and I must say that it's well-done. All of Vista's functionality is accessible through an Apache Axis layer. Admittedly it's complicated, but that because it's designed for VL educational institutions.
WebCT Vista is a thoroughly engineered modern product. Those of you complaining about the UI aren't treating it fairly. One could literally write their own web UI by hooking into Vista without editing product code at all.
It's even pluggable. It's relatively easy to write multiple authentication/session modules. Does Sakai even have LDAP integration possibilities?
The last thing that I want to do is to disparage the f/oss efforts, but from reading the current posts one would question why anyone uses these real, enterprise-capable course management systems instead of these less functional, less capable and less proven f/oss packages.
...of fucking college students out of even more money.
I had a class that used a webct "book" once, the book was a technicolor rag, nearly useless. About 180 out of its 250 pages were colorful pointless or redundant diagrams or borders, or "real life examples" that perfectly mirrored what was being explained in the paragraph--two inches away. The insructor rarely even opened it, but we had to "turn in" quizzes through the webCT online bulletin board. And the password each student used was shrink-wrapped inside each book, with a useless-CD as well. The bookstore would not accept any opened software for return or resale, and the webCT cancelled each year's passwords every year--forcing all students to always buy a new copy, just to get a new password, so they could turn in classroom assignments online, through the webCT website.
...-Which if I am remembering right, was basically just a few short online quizzes and an email/bulletin board service. Whoopee.
That was a couple years back, but at that point webCT simply couldn't make a decent book.
And the way the system is working, they will never need to--because the people who choose to use it are not the same people who pay $65 for it and then throw it away five months later.
~
I've had some experience with both WebCT and Blackboard. WebCT was in use at my previous school, Blackboard at my current one. I have to wonder what Blackboard is thinking. I haven't run into any huge, glaring problems with Blackboard yet (although apparently many people here have); WebCT is just garbage.
After using WebCT for a few weeks I concluded that they're one of those companies that just doesn't understand the web. WebCT had an aneurism when it detected that I wasn't using the One True Browser. They eventually updated the list of allowed browsers to include newer versions of Netscape but the "DANGER! DANGER!" message never went away on Firefox.
From what I saw, WebCT allows professors to choose any format they'd like for course web pages which, in my case, meant that you had to learn how to navigate a badly written Frontpage site for each course in which you were enrolled.
At least with Blackboard there seems to be a modicum of standardization. Hopefully they won't take the "flexibility" of WebCT and try to add it to Blackboard. The last thing I need is helpful improvements to a system that sortof, mostly works.
My username does not make me Apathetic. It's irony, get it?
Not to mention that the cheapest way to is still to photocopy. Laser printers cost a bit more per page, and inkjet printers cost a lot more per page. Whenever they say they post things online to save paper, they really mean they are just shifting costs over to students (though this is really only the case in universities that charge per page printed in the labs like mine did).
I'm just someone who uses BB for teaching but trialed Moodle last year unofficially. Hopefully there will be better answers to your queries:
... NOT better
What's the migration path to the new OSS product?
BB migration to Moodle - sucks (as far as I could figure). But apparently is getting better
Will it integrate with the library software, the student portal, the student system and all the other disparate systems on campus?
Probably - but it will be bespoke (so will integrating the proprietry one). At least you can code it to integrate with your student managment system and anything else. Just try doing that with BB without breaching license.
How many staff do I need to hire that can provide the love and hugs that an OSS enterprise LMS needs?
That depends on whether you want them to run the LMS or extend it. The Sys-admin I worked with, who currently maintains the (hugly expensive to licence) Blackboard reckond that the maintenance and running costs of Moodle would be no more than Blackboard. But - if you want to extend the modules to do funky things then yes you will have to pay developers
Say I need three programmers and a sys-admin, that's ~$400K (cost to employ after super contributions and payroll tax etc.) to install run and keep the software current. Or I can spend ~$150K to pay the license and the sys-admin and stay with WebCT.
well if you want to pluck numbers out of the air to make sure that the migration won't work - then yeah. Why do you need 3 programmers? I was able to take the course material from BB and put it into Moodle without anyone changing one line of code. I'm not talking import - that's crap - but I was able to do the same or more with Moodle straight out of the box than I was able to do with BB.
I will have to retrain all the academics and staff that put courses online = 6 months of labor = 6 months opportunity cost. TCO is cheaper with WebCT and I get ~$12million in R&D and access to a vibrant powerlink developer community. I just don't think I can afford free software and if I can I'm not getting the same ROI I get from WebCT.
yeah yeah more fictitious $. Why did you say 6 months rather than 2 or 18?. Yes training is a very real and expensive issue. But you are talking $150k each and every year to licence Web-CT - isn't it worth figuring out just what the cost really is?
The LMS is as important as the bricks and mortar buildings.
Absolutly
I can't futz about with trying to get some OSS product to work, scale and migrate thousands of courses in an environment that is used 24/7.
sigh - isn't it sad that we are still hearing "no one got fired for buying IBM" rather than actually being interested in doing a solid investigation of the real issues. If you think that non-OSS is even slightly more workable, scalable and migratable then you have either been lucky or never tried to scale, work with or migrate proprietary systems. Those issues tend to become worse the more they cost
For my money - Moodle is becoming a pretty decent product - and I do not care that it's OSS. Let me say that again I do not care that it is open source. I want a good LMS that is NOT going to cost my students the earth each and every year.
However - the issues raised are very very large stumbling blocks. I was able to manually load all of my course material into Moodle which is currently on BB. A migration for an institution cannot be manual. I am also not happy about Moodle's quizes or ability to use resources that are supplied by publishers.
I'm not using Moodle now solely because of those last two issues. But most of the features that I use daily in Blackboard are available in Moodle. And usually those features are more advanced in Moodle (the discussion board stuff is light years ahead of BB). Our sys-admin also doesn't care whether the stuff he looks after is OSS or not - he just wants it to work without headaches or faculty yelling at him. He much prefered Moodle and was dissapointed that he couldn't migrate the institution
For my online correspondance, I used to use WebCT. It was ugly and a real pain in the ass to use. Some examples.
Each course had its own email account. This meant that if I wanted to read an email from Course A and I was working on Course B, I had to open another window, log into Course A, then open the email. On Insight2Learn (my school just switched to it, it is a competitor to WebCT....or else custom built by the school, not sure which), it is one email account, so I could just click email in Course B and read email from Course A.
No Paging Feature. Email is sometimes overkill. If I want to send a quick "Will do" to my teacher, I don't want to have to open another window, sign into webct, and then email the teacher. In Insight2Learn, I click the pager icon, type the message in the new window that automatically pops up, and click send, to any teacher or student in any course.
STUPID LINKS!!! The way the javascript is set up on this stupid thing, if I want to middle click Email in Firefox to open it up in a new tab, I get a blank window. I have to either manually open a new window and sign in, or else click on email and leave the page i am on.
Missing Emails. Assignments got lost all of the time. Don't even get me started on this.
Flash. I am retaking a course that I originally took in WebCT, and am now taking in Insight2Learn. Flash content only occasionally loaded in WebCT, it always loads in Insight2Learn.
Shitty Compatability. If I want to use Opera for homework, I get a stupid message every time I open a new page about how I'm using an incompatable browser. Literally. A little box comes up EVERY TIME. This is despite the fact that all of WebCT's features work with no problem in Opera. I mean, seriously, pop the box up once when you first log in saying it might not work, and then leave me the fuck alone.
All in all, I hope WebCT dies a horrible death. Maybe students all over the world will luck out and blackboard will kill their products. Even my teachers hated it, they are the ones who recommended changing the system.
>:-(
You think Blackboard is bad? Yikes.
::bangs head on desk::
...
Blackboard, for all intents and purposes, gets the job done for the teachers that use it. Yoou should see some of the alternatives.
One teacher (Ms. Cheung, a PhD candiate at Cal), has created a Yahoo! *e-mail* account for the purpose of sending files to it. She then gave every student in the class the login and password, so we can retreive files from it.
Another teacher (Human Sexualities prof., Sociology department) required that students buy a $16 remote (requiring a $12.50/semester subscription) to track our comings and goings, take our asinine multiple choice tests on, etc. Said remote works with einstruction.com to allow us to check our grade and such. It's got perhaps the most craptastic interface I've ever seen. It fucking WISHES it was as good as WebCT or Blackboard (and yes, I've used both).
Now, said teacher (*cough*Carrington*cough*) could have used Blackboard to distribute course materials, like most of the other Uni professors I have do. He could use the craptastic eInstruction interface. No, he wants to be different. He sends out e-mails to the 450+ students in the class.
That wouldn't be so evil (nah.. it would.. who fucking uses e-mail to distribute files to a large audience!?), if it worked reliably. Instead he wasted a good 5 minutes of each class for the first month of instruction dealing with administrivia. He sunk so far as to announce that GMail was blackholing his e-mail. His solution? Encourage students to pay for a Hotmail or Yahoo! account. Hell, even the school's e-mail server is flagging his messages as "possibly spam".
Blackboard, I can live with that.
--
alex
The revolution will be mocked
I work on CS on University of Lleida (SPAIN), we're part of sakaiproject and we use it for our
virtual campus, and it's the second year we're using it: without any problem. This year we'll finish moving our webct courses to sakai. Believe me, it's ready for prime time!
-b0fh of apostols.org-
It works great!
It's already in 2.0 release, and in our university it's used by all our students (9000+)
DAILY!
-b0fh of apostols.org-
My undergraduate university's Aerospace department has a product that competes directly with Blackboard, called HTMLeZ. The main college has Blackboard, while the Aerospace college (which includes the Computer Science department I graduated from) uses HTMLeZ. Students who have to use both (most anyone at some point) vastly prefer HTMLeZ. There are other competing products out there, so this doesn't give Blackboard a monopoly on the market - it just gives them a better cornering of the market for crap.
Look at systems like Moodle, the guy who once was a Web CT system Admin and got nuts and started writing up this program which is widely used in high Schools all aorund the world.
I had a communication with the Chief Architect of the Sakai Project as he conducted an interview with the guy and the guy's apparently in for the money now. Well who isn't? This darn socienty is based on money and trade. I think Sakai too when it's mature will generate *some* revenue as well. And that I think is OK, *making money* mindset will have sales force on an overdrive and developers disgruntled(look at MS lately). I think the whole idea of developing software is to actually NOT be able to reach a consensus. Because it never can be like that.
Maybe Google might wanna consider getting into the Education business, you never know. But seriously the Sakai initiative has a lot of potential!
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
did Blackboard merge? Will it help them get any better?
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
I can't talk from experience as we never used Blackboard, but at least California State University Humboldt and San Francisco State University have done the migration. There was quite a bit of discussion of their plans and experiences at Moodle.org. I would think it has gotten better than sucky. (Naturally, any migration would still be a large project, with considerable risks involved.)
It can integrate as well as anything. Moodle is basically "just a LAMP application". The state of whole service is contained in the database, so it can integrate with anything that can integrate with a relational database (MySQL or Postgres usually).
Willingness to integrate, if by that we mean the ease of integration and/or readily available tools for integration, is a bit more complicated question. I would say Moodle has good set of tools for integration with Student Information Systems. Student Portals is much too wide field to say anything very definite
Moodle needs very little love and hugs. In the two years (pilots+production) we have used Moodle there has been only one occasion of loss of the whole service due to an error in Moodle code. (There have been network and power outtages and a admin brain freeze or two). Moodle does depend of several other services to function, database being the most important and probably even most error prone, at least in the sense that DB management is more difficult to than managing a web server. Also, Internet Explorer causes some problems.
In normal operations, a competent admin should be able to handle sizable Moodle installation singlehandedly with plenty of time to do the small/incremental improvements that such a setup will need. Implementing new features into Moodle code base would require additional resources.
In terms of "how many users can it handle" Moodle does scale. New Zealand Open Polytechnic with 30000+ users is the largest Moodle installation that I know of. In the nest class (over 20k users) there are 10 or so installations. Much of the work enabling Moodle to handle such demands was done by the NZ Open Poly and they continue to be very active in making Moodle scale better, latest burp was that they expect to eventually be able to handle 100k+ users.
To me Moodle's biggest strength is its development community, which is quite unique mix high work ethic, technical competence and deep understanding of the application domain. Moodle isn't the technically best open source project I have been part of, but it is the best tool by a development community I have been part of.
--Flam
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
It's called Moodle. Check it out. I use it in my classes for content delivery and testing. Cheers!
> It's impossible to enroll a system administrator in a course, no matter what. They can only self-enroll. This is not true. You can use Batch Enroll Users, from the System Admin panel, to enroll system admin users in any course. You can also enter the Properties area for any course, from List/Modify Courses, and enroll any user at all, including system admin users.
As a student I prefer blackboard. WebCT has the interface of some websites I made in middle school. It's user options are useless. BB is not much better but is nicer. Sighhh now I must log on to Webct for my class.
Blackboard's BB One is unrelated to this. Blackboard's Commerce System is a suite of applications that revolve around hardware for a swipe or proximity card that lets you do door access, vending, laundry accounts, library, meal services, etc. They also offer services that allow local merchants to accept student ID debit accounts as payment. That's what BB One is. It's really quite cool and convenient.
-- The Sage does nothing, and nothing is left undone. --Lao Tzu
I don't have much experience except for some light usage of WebCT back then, but the user interface was poor, it's complicated and not initiative.
Personally I think it would be a better act for the educational sector to come up with an open source alternative themselves. They can even make it student projects to expand on modules.
Or they can just expand on a CRM system like Drupal.
At my institution we've been using a home grown system called SPIDER since 1998, built using PHP & mySQL. Its easily customisable, so we can add whatever features we want to it, when we want, and can tailor the system to meet the needs of our staff and students. It provides all the usual stuff (file, class, user mangement) as well as providing multi-tiered administrative control of classes, degrees and "clusters" [groups of related degrees]. It links in to our Oracle based MIS to get access to relevant student and class data, and uses LDAP to authenticate with our DS. Its user-centric, allowing users to customise the site to their needs (rather than course designers forcing their course/class design on the user) and classes are 'open access' - any registered user can access any class material on the system they want. We currently have over 10,000 users, and it runs on a £3000 worth of hardware with plenty of resource to spare. Guest logins are available on the SPIDER development system.
Microsoft and Blackboard created an "alliance" back in 2001 and now Microsoft is naming their new OS Vista, the name that WebCT's more recent CMS goes by.
Where do we draw the line on what is a coincidence and what is Microsoft tossing out chump change to protect their choice of name for the new OS?
No, it's directly in response to Microsoft wanting to name their new OS Vista. Microsoft's been in alliance with Blackboard since 2001 *hint hint*. The OS alternatives have nothing to do with this because they don't even compare at this point in time. Moodle's developer community may be "phenomenal" but developers are not support and developers are not QA. The last thing on a University's mind should be jumping on board an OS alternative that has no support past what their adminstrators can google.
I love these questions that presume PHP/MySQL won't scale as well as a Win or Java based architectures. The answer is... on the same hardware yes it will scale and it perform as well if not much better due to the 'no-frills' 'no nonsense' nature of the beast.
You think those web hosts out there who offer php/mysql accounts for $9.95 a month are doing so because it doesn't scale well? Most of them are running hundreds of databases and websites on each server with millions of hits per day under managable loads.
GUESS WHAT? MOODLE PROBABLY SCALES THE PISS OUT OF BLACKBOARD OR WEBCT. AND IF IT DOESN'T SCALE FOR SOME REASON YOU CAN TUNE IT OR FIX IT BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE SOURCE CODE. IF THAT DOESN'T WORK YOU CAN GET YOUR MONEY BACK.
If you ask Blackboard or WebCT if they scale they will send over two grinning salesmen to scream "SURE!" and then send you a bill for $50,000 to buy more server licenses. Want your money back if it doesn't work? Tough luck.
They also offer services that allow local merchants to accept student ID debit accounts as payment.
Yes, but what happens if someone is able to obtain these numbers in the aforementioned "man-in-the-middle"-type attack, and uses easily obtained mag strip encoders to encode someone else's number onto their card? Sounds like one could go on a fine shopping spree with that at the bookstore, local merchants, etc.
If you want to extend a module, the smart way is to talk to the module maintainer abput your plans first so that your changes will be easily integratable into the planned direction for the code.
I would call that the path of a professional programmer, myself, rather than hacking away incommunicado and then complaining b/c you took a direction that was not the best path for the project as a whole.
http://byewebct.com/
;-) /nt
now, Moodle is:-).
For just running Moodle, you should be fine with the same hardware and number of sys admins/trainers/support folks you use for WebCT.
Custom development is optional, but a nice feature to improve the overall experience. I've an article on Moodle scalability with links to information about the NZVLE cluster and PHP scalability here
NZVLE
IMO, the main downside is retraining on a new system, however, I think you are going to have to do that anyway soon, I can't see it making good business sense for BB to keep supporting CE or Vista much longer.
It's actually Sakai that has yet to prove it's scalability, 27k users on 27 servers as at UMich is not exactly 'scalable'.
Moodle is also much closer in features to WebCT/BB and goes well beyond them in several areas (such as the advanced eLearning development tool Lesson (demo at World Conservation Learning Network), soon to come Gallery2 integration, easy to set up LDAP integration (well it's beyond BB Enterprise here, you have to hire a BB programmer to help you set up LDAP, not sure about how easy it is with Vista).
Sakai 2, well it's back around Blackboard 5/Moodle 1.2 feature set, it requires a pretty bit step back to switch to it from Blackboard 6 or even 5.5, while Moodle 1.5.2 is much more comparable, in both features and scalability, to the commercial systems.
What features are available in Samigo that are not in the Moodle 1.5.2 quis and/orlesson modules?