introduction
Blackboard Software Review
Blackboard is the big dog in the course management space. Founded in 1997, Blackboard began as a consulting firm contracting to the non-profit IMS Global Learning Consortium. In 1998, Blackboard LLC merged with CourseInfo LLC, a small course management software provider that originated at Cornell University. Over the years, Blackboard has grown exponentially and has acquired numerous several other companies, most notably, WebCT in 2006. Blackboard offers numerous products, but their flagship one is the Blackboard Academic Suite, containing the content management system known as the Blackboard Learning System. Confused yet?Blackboard is a great course management system. In general students learn, instructors instruct and the software has everything you need. Each iteration of blackboard gets slightly easier to maintain and easier to upgrade. Not unlike, Windows, features that were previously just add-ons are merged into the program giving more options than one school could ever use. Blackboard manages courses very well.
Blackboard is big and expensive. It generally takes at least .5 FTE to "keep the lights on" so to speak, and for large implementations can take more. There are are many smaller, open source course management systems and if your needs are basic, you should really consider one of those. That said, if you think your needs may be complex, at the very least call a Blackboard sales rep and have them evaluate what you need. They will always tell you that they have the perfect product for you, but you'll learn a lot from their proposal. Also, I feel it is worth mentioning that if Blackboard is close but not perfect, or if you need a feature that isn't offered in Blackboard, the company provides an open architecture, called Building Blocks, that can be used to extend the functionality of Blackboard products. The WebCT products are extensible through a technology called PowerLinks. You can extend Blackboard to meet your needs. If you need to extend very far, however, you'd be wise to consider Sakai.
Blackboard Words of Caution
Blackboard has numerous critics and about half of what they gripe about is entirely true (the other half is just grumbling and negativity from an anti-corporate University IT culture). First, Blackboard has acquired near monopoly status and it's so much trouble to switch to another system that once you're on it they can raise rates like a bandit and not lose many customers. Also, with the WebCT acquisition, there isn't a viable commercial competator to flee to. In the 5 years that I have administered blackboard, prices have more than tripled and the shark sales reps (that change ever 6 months) always are trying to upsell. They anabashadly manipulate licensing to prevent multiple departments from sharing the same server (double billing essentially). They are often very slow to respond to support requests and when they do the response often skirts responsibility and blames the users and admins.
From an admin perspective, until their most recent release neither Blackboard nor WebCT even supported Firefox, and they don't work with Konqueror. The systems themselves are terribly complex and non-intuitive to install and keep patched and they can frustrate novice administrators. A Blackboard cluster doesn't share session data across servers - each server maintains session data locally, which means you can't use HTML links to point to resources within Blackboard, from within Blackboard; and you can't hardlink to a Blackboard resource, period.
The discussion board software is designed to be reset after every semester, which means you have to delete and recreate a Blackboard module each time, which leads to more work for instructors. The semester-centric view also makes the discussion software clunky for non-typical use such as for student organizations, which only reset once per year, if at all. Admins have to sift through comments dating back to September of last year to get to recent material. Plus, there's no way to archive and search the comments. As of early 2007, the announcement mechanism doesn't support RSS, or even - as far as I can find - a way to send out emails automatically when announcements are created.
Privately, Blackboard sales reps more or less admit that the company's long term future isn't their course management system... rather it is the OneCard system (a campus debit card system). Blackboard gets a cut out of every purchase made with it.