I hate Blackboard

I’m an academic. Our university uses Blackboard to manage its courses. Using Blackboard is compulsory. Like everything that humans have to be made to use, it sucks. You have to be made to use it, because it sucks; it sucks, because you’re made to use it.

Here, then, is a little trip into Academic Software Hell.

Update: 18 December 2020. This seems to be popular, but I was not the first. If you really want to feel the hate, nothing beats this epic Blackboard rant. Merry Christmas!

Issue 1: User Interface

Here’s the first page I see when I login to my course. It’s for a common enough task. The most important thing on this page is the button that lets you make announcements to students. Can you see it? Look harder. Hint: it’s the greyed out text that gives no indication it is even clickable.

If you mouse over one of the announcements, on the other hand, it looks like the below. That enormous purple bar must be pretty vital, right? It’s for… I have no clue. It seems to be for reordering announcements on the page. What does that do? Does it reach back in time and change the order in which I sent the announcements out?

Let’s create an announcement:

As you can see, this is basically an email composer. It has three rows of 1990s-style icons. Some of them I can guess, like bold and italic. Then there’s an anchor thing. And there’s something called Mashups. I bet the marketing guys in Blackboard are super proud of the Mashups concept, which was named in a late night jam session. What is it? Who knows? Who cares? There seem to be two video buttons, too. And an emoticon button.

And a button to insert a non-breaking space.

And the little i is a help button, which is weird because on the page there is also a ? for help.

On the bottom left corner it says “Path: p”, which presumably means something to someone.

The brightest icon on the whole page is this little gem. Can you guess what it does?

Of course you can’t. But I found out:

Yup, that’s key. I long to customize the colour scheme with which I interact with your flaming turdpile of software.

Bet the poor webmonkey who wrote this code was so proud of his theming module. He had to make a pretty icon for it!

By the way, observe that the tooltip which pops up has its own tooltip.

Issue 2: jargon

Here is part of the main menu on the left:

This is just the “course tools” sub menu. There’s also “evaluation”, “grade centre”, “users and groups”, “customisation”, “packages and utilities”, plus a third place to get help.

I can guess what some of these things are (“course calendar”, “tests, surveys and pools” — NB can anyone get this to work? I made a survey but fuck knows how you tell your students about it. I gave up and used Surveymonkey, illegally of course). But what the fuck is Echo 360? Mobile Compatible Test List? Pearson’s Mylab? What is Mobius Instructor? For that matter, what are “Tasks”? Have these people reimplemented the whole of Outlook? What is “batch allocate groups”? Groups of what to what?

Issue 3: user experience

Recently I had to make some files available to my students. I thought I had been making them available, but it turns out not. Or maybe yes — I can’t tell. You can login as a student, but as the interface is still the same cavern of wonders, it’s possible that somewhere, somehow, they can access the files I want them to access.

Never mind. Let’s see how we make files accessible to students. Here is how I did it. Maybe there are other ways. This is the best I could do. Pity me.

Step 1: go to “Course Content” and click Upload. You then get a relatively nice file uploader.

Step 2: you’ve uploaded your files. Here they are.

Now you have to make them available to students. To do that, you click on the little hand icon, which represents me putting my palms up and going “I have no idea why you used this icon to represent that” 🤷‍♂. You’ll need to do this one by one because even though there is a fucking checkbox right there to select multiple files, there’s no way to change the permissions on the multiple files you’ve selected.

(It is a key warning sign of software bloat when a system includes its own, shitty, file manager. Hello, Dropbox.)

Luckily I figured out an alternative mechanism. If you create a folder with permissions for your students to access it, and move the files into that, then they get those permissions automatically. I think. It worked for me! Don’t blame me!

Now I had my folder. I just needed to make it available to students. Should be one click, right? Ha ha, no.

Step 3: click on the tiny + on the left hand menu and click “Content area”.

Step 4: give the content area a name.

Step 5: click on the new content area in your left menu. You will get a new blank area with an invitation to add some content.

Step 6: click build content, and…

Jesus Christ.

OK, it can’t be NBC Content — seriously, do these bestial perverts have some kind of satanic partnership agreement with a TV channel?

Maybe it’s Content Folder? I’ve got a folder, right?

Oops:

OK, maybe on the next page I can add some files?

Step 7: maybe?

Nope. I tried edit and it just took me back to the name/text page.

So you can create a folder, but apparently a folder doesn’t have any files in it — it’s just a text and description. Or maybe one of the other 20 meaningless, word salad options would let me add files to the folder… but I gave up at this point.

Step 8: I went back to Build Content and tried File. I have some Files, right? I’ll probably be able to link to them. And indeed I got back to a File Uploader thingy. I clicked Browse Content Collection and there was my folder! Ready for me to select!

Now, how do I select it? I’ll just click on it.

Check out the awesomely abstract tooltip

OK, now I see all my files. So if I click submit, that’ll select this folder?

Nope.

There’s no way to select a folder. Nor can you select multiple files.

Step 9: I went back and tried Item. It gave me yet another chance to write a name and description, but I discovered it also had an Attach files option. At last, that let me select multiple files. I had to give the attachment a name, though:

Finally, my students could get the files I’d uploaded. It only took an hour or so. Now I know what to do, it’s probably not more than 10 minutes. If I remember.

Or:

• I could just email them the files, in 1 minute. But that’s not allowed, because using Blackboard is compulsory.
• I could share a Dropbox folder with them and share files in like, 10 seconds. But that’s not allowed because GDPR blah blah blah, and using Blackboard is compulsory.

What’s going on here? Why is my university providing me with, and forcing me to use, software that is literally worse than what I get for free as a private citizen?

I assume the answer is that Blackboard ticks lots of Very Important Compliance Checklists. (It has an option to “check accessibility” for those files you upload, for example. I’ve never used it; I don’t know anyone who has ever used it; but I bet it sounded great to some dweeb in admin.) And the Blackboard sales people come round to the University admin and tell them how important Compliance With Fatuous Regulation XYZ is, and the University Fatuous Regulation Compliance Department nods sagely and agrees. And there we are. Everyone’s happy.

Except me because I can’t do research, and my students because I can’t do teaching, because I’m wasting my time on this crap. Fuck you, Blackboard.