Blackboard Ughs...

A great number of years ago, I was part of an edtech team tasked with evaluating learning management systems to move to after WebCT was essentially EoL'd by Blackboard.  Long story short, despite our recommendations, management went with Blackboard, which I guess now is classed "Classic," and it too has been EoL'd.  I wasn't a big fan of Classic, but it worked fine for what we needed it to.  When the time came for the next LMS, my institution went to Canvas (finally...).  I've seen Ultra, the next incarnation of Blackboard, and all I could say was "me'h." I was just happy I didn't have to use it ;-)

Fast forward a year, and I am teaching for an institution that uses Bb Ultra. On the plus side, the course was already designed for me, so I didn't really have to figure out a ton of the nuts and bolts of Ultra ahead of the semester, and it seems pretty easy to pick up.  There are some big "ughs" when it comes to using this system, however. My three pet peeves here are read notifications that don't go away, a UI that seems to isn't great, and the kindergarten way of building content.

While building content wasn't on top of my list (the course was built already, after all), trying to put something in an announcement, in a way that didn't treat me as a child, was frustrating.  While the blocks of content that one can drop into a page (or page-type) is interesting, there is very little wiggle room for customizability. I can either have formatted text, or HTML, for example.  I can't just go into the HTML for a page I've formatted with Bb and then post a snippet of HTML embed code. This makes the page layout a bit long and scroll-y, IMO.

The UI I got used to, for the most part, over the course of the term, but the number of times I hit that stupid "X" button and expected to go back to my previous page/setting/location only to be dropped out of my course entirely was too high. I have yet to get used to the horizontal menu items on the top of the page, as if this is some kind of application in my computer. Granted, at least Blackboard is playing a bit with the UI, so I respect that to some extent, but I wish there were a different way to navigate that was more "classic."  The top-to-bottom accordion style for content is also not that great...

Finally, let's talk about there is a disturbing lack of ability to mark discussions as read/unread with ease.  If you hover over a discussion contribution long enough, it will be marked as read, but if you read quickly or skim, that won't happen.  Also, if you have unread posts (or Bb thinks you do...), you'll get the number of unread posts showing on your course homescreen next to discussions (cool, I think), however, when you click on that "discussions" component from the menu, you may end up seeing NO discussions as being unread.  My best guess is that some response to a response to a response in a discussion forum is marked unread, and the main thread is showing as all caught up, while the unread posts marker is still there 🤦‍♂️. When you are trying to determine if there are posts that need attention, this idiotic marker doesn't make things easy.

Overall, this isn't the worst LMS I've used in my 15 years (or more?) of teaching online, but I would have expected some better UX from such a big company with decades of experience supporting LMSs...


Screenshot of Blackboack Ultra (not mine)

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