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Vista Failing "Blackboard" College Courses
writertype writes "Although Blackboard is used to communicate between students and professors at virtually all of PC Magazine/Princeton Review's top 20 wired colleges, when run under a Vista environment users can see glitches. Moreover, IT departments told PC Mag that if Blackboard is used with Vista plus IE7, students can't communicate via the software. When asked why, Microsoft ... waffled. Blackboard says they'll have a fix in place by summer. Meanwhile, are there any other common college apps that Vista fails to work with?"
When asked why, Microsoft ... waffled.
They shouldn't have waffled. They should have given the answer this deserves...how the hell is this Microsoft's problem to correct?
Vista was in beta forever and a day. Beta 3 was out and the API was locked down for at least several months before RTM. In cases where any third party software does not now work under Vista, it is *entirely* the fault of that software company. Holding Microsoft responsible to any degree here is just plain stupid.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Blackboard is awful, terrible software. Microsoft have simply filtered it out as part of their quality assurance program.
MySpace is next.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
I've been in the business since before the first Windows versions. Usually I make sure to do software so it works with any Windows version. That should be pretty easy as long as you use standard API.
Over the years I've noticed a trend: If you use Microsoft development tools, you end up having problems with backwards compatibility. Either their compilers so a lot of weird things or MS makes sure to break them so even the programmers have to upgrade.
Hopefully this encourages universities to move away from Blackboard if anything.. it's a steaming pile of crap, really.
Doesn't affect me anyway, as any school of comp sci should be, all our labs are thin x-servers.
The rest of the uni can suffer in Novell hell for all I care, stupid ITS.
but I'm somehow not shedding many tears over this issue.
It's really a mess in educational software land. About 2/3rds of the web based edu apps we support on campus work in one browser, and one browser only. Sometimes it's Firefox, sometimes it's IE. Some apps are even pegged to a specific version for no apparent reason. We have to fake different UA strings in different labs just to get this stuff to run.
Don't get me started with the Adobe DRM crap that every edu app has fallen in love with. It's really easy on the users when they need to use two different browsers to get to different parts of the same frickin' website. Ugh.
...is that a few months ago in anticipation for the new version of Windows, Blackboard named a new piece of software in its honor: "WebCT Vista." Fast forward a few months, and I get the funniest e-mail from the dept. that handles Blackboard:
"WebCT Vista is not supported on the Windows Vista platform."
*facepalm*
Meanwhile, are there any other common college apps that Vista fails to work with?
;)
Yes, there are some problems with uTorrent
Here at the University of Arizona, Vista doesn't work with our encrypted Wireless APs because Vista's PEAP authentication... doesn't.
2 5&page=2 - one of a few threads in the Office of Student Computing Resources forums following broken wifi and vista
http://forum.oscr.arizona.edu/showthread.php?t=29
As of right now, Vista users wanting to surf encrypted have to google and find a copy of the Vista-compatible Cisco VPN Client 5.0 beta (the UA's sitelicense website still only has VPN Client 4.9, which is not Vista compatible) and connect to the UA's VPN over our unencrypted public wireless network.
We have to fake different UA strings in different labs just to get this stuff to run.
Wouldn't it be easier just to have a web proxy rewrite the UA string? I'm 95% sure squid can do that.
Back on the topic of educational software though... ughh. I worked in a school for just one year and it was enough to convince me that the way to sell software to schools is to send every school in the country a flyer proclaiming yourself to be "specialists in the education market" - that way you could make a bunch of sales without having to actually produce a half-decent product.
I was later told that there's a reason for this. Educational software - certainly in the UK - is generally split into two camps.
On the one hand, you've got stuff written by computer people. It's generally reasonably easy to manage, can be rolled out across a network and is not too much hassle. But it's also generally lousy at getting a point across, so it's not very popular with teachers. Bit of a problem when ultimately it's the teachers who are going to work with it.
On the other hand, you've got programs written by teachers who happen to have an interest in computing. It's generally quite good at getting a point across (and is thus popular with teachers) but it was usually written by someone who's never had to think beyond the PC on their desk. So the installation instructions say "Go to every PC, insert the CD and type D:\setup". In extreme cases, you find all sorts of annoyances: like parts of the setup program have been hardcoded to assume it's being installed from CD and the CD-ROM drive is drive D. Calling the software manufacturer and pointing out that this isn't terribly practical when the software is to be installed on a few hundred workstations generally results in an answer of "Oh. Never thought of that. Never mind, it only takes 5 minutes to install."
Multiplying that 5 minutes by the number of PCs which need the software installed is left as an exercise for the reader.
In the interests of fairness, I should point out that this was a few years ago - before XP was released and MSIs became as common as they are today. But I would be astonished if you were to tell me that things have changed that drastically.
It looks like many quantitative applications are currently not going to work on Vista, at least for now. Major statistical analysis, data mining and Geographic Information Systems tools that don't run on Vista include:
SPSS, SAS, MATLAB and SAP and ESRI ArcGIS
Eh, this is no big deal, right? I mean, who really wants to know about facts and numbers? Especially when you are using a *computer*.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. -Richard Feynman
How is this different from Blackboard on any other OS?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
My mother is a senior teacher at a British primary school, and my father is now a lab technician in a comprehensive secondary school (after a long career in electronics). Both of them experience the same things you describe, even now. However, rather than teachers battling with these things, many bigger schools have their own IT technicians and smaller schools buy in support - not cheap, but it is cheaper than the teachers time usually.
Many schools still rely on Windows 98 machines for some programs, especially primary schools, as the software will only run on old versions of Windows. Some schools still make use of Acorn Archimedes computers because the software was that good. New computers are expensive, and schools in the UK simply do not have the budget to spend on luxuries such as Vista or XP. Schools, certainly in my county, do not get the advantages of Microsoft discounts because the educational authority appears to be sleeping with computer giants such as RM Nimbus or Viglen. The school is only allowed to buy its computers through these suppliers, and do not get a very good deal. The same companies also provide (well, resell I guess) broadband internet access - at an extortionate rate.
There is a third case with software - some software is written by ex-teachers that are very good programmers. Sherston software (http://www.sherston.com/) is one example of quality educational software that does things this way.
Writing a Win32/64 app that only works in one OS/browser/java version/etc seems to me to be sloppy coding. Blackboard is a *WEB* app, is it not? Why does the client matter? Usually the answer is because the Devs were lazy and took shortcuts by using the client to do something that the server could just as easily do. (Not necessarily the case here)
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I predicted it before and it seems to be coming true. We get stories about how people, organizations and governments don't want to switch. We get stories about exceptionally poor performance. We get stories about compatibility problems. We get the occasional "DRM" interferes with normal/legal use stories too.
The big question is when Vista will be declared a flop?
Even though the parent is ranked funny, there is lots of truth to it.
I've worked with and had to support Blackboard before. There are few applications that I think are worse. (I recall a bug that we experienced, where if two people submitted an assessment at the same time, or very close to the same time, the software would lose one of them.)
Also, as crappy as Vista is, it was in beta and development for a long time. At the very least, Blackboard should have issued an advisory stating that under certain conditions their software breaks. (And no sensible IT department at any major educational facility should have upgraded already anyways.)
I guess I would say the root of the problem is the lack of responsibility in the software world. Unlike some professions (for example: Civil Engineering), there is no real regulation or prevailent society to make sure that people develop by a set of standards. Having something like that, would go a long ways toward fixing problems like this.
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
I'm a professional web developer. I've worked in the field for 5+ years and can tell a decent web application by just using it for a while. I have recently gone back to University and have gotten the chance to use Blackboard. My school uses it for everything from general announcements, to posting marks, posting of assignments, etc. While it does the minimum necessary job most of the time, it is a mediocre package IMO. The interface is very inconsistent, very confusing to navigate, glitches are experienced by students and teachers alike every term. I have yet to experience a single term in which profs do not have problems posting assignments, documents, etc. Somehow Blackboard always manages to leave half of the class out. The smarter profs make use of their own University web space to create a simple html page where they post their information. Whenever blackboard is involved, it is generally a messy experience.
That being said, why the hell does a web application break with an Operating System update? Is Microsoft at fault here? Did they mock around with how POST/GET variables get sent to the server or how the browser accepts server responses? Are cookies randomly getting erased from IE? CSS/HTML glitches in the new IE rendering the pages useless? Or is this Blackboard's own code depending on some obscure ActiveX/IE functionality that is no longer there in Vista and thus violating the #1 reason why web applications are so useful? - They are supposed to work everywhere, no matter what OS we use! I'm thinking it's the latter.
[alk]
I few days ago I had the mispleasure of running into something called sealed[media].
It insisted on Adobe Reader 7.0. Not Adobe Professional 7.0 which I had installed, not Adobe Reader 8, which Adobe had on their website, not Adobe 6 Reader on my laptop.
I hope sealed[media] gets eaten by a grue.