Blackboard versus Moodle or Maybe a Kick in the Head

I use Blackboard (formerly WebCT) for managing my courses, especially the online ones. I’m getting really sick of ongoing issues with it, though. It’s the only choice we have for a course management system at UTPA, currently. Here we see how Bb (like many other kinds of products) maintains its little local monopolies: if I switch, then students taking my class will have to learn a system that’s different from every other class they take, and I’ll have to go through the obnoxious process of importing or rebuilding all my content.  But I’m tellin’ ya, it’s gettin’ on my noives. I might just do it anyway, and here’s why. Some of the following issues have been going on for years (I’ve been using WebCT or Bb since about 2001):

• Things just friggin’ don’t stay put. In the gradebook, I can add columns, rearrange columns, etc., save the changes, and then come back a minute or day later and find that my changes weren’t saved. Same thing with the order of quizzes or assignments. In other cases, it’s simply not possible to rearrange things. Like the order of your quizzes. Students have to look through multiple pages of randomly-numbered items before they find #2. Grrr.
• Small but REALLY annoying: when typing dates (e.g., deadlines for quizzes), if you type “6/25/09″ the system automatically converts the year into  a four-digit number. Fine. But the assumption it makes is that for some insane monkey-brained reason you really wanted your deadline to be 6/25/0009. That’s right: the year 9. The roman Empire was in full swing, Christianity didn’t really exist yet, and some kind of dynasty was being dynastic or something in China. Perfectly logical assumption. That’s exactly when I’d like my students to do their quiz.
• No text editing of formulas in the gradebook (have you ever tried to edit Excel-like formulas, using only point-click buttons for everything, including simple digits? Sheesh)
• No way to reference out-of-row data (e.g., a “perfect student”) in gradebook formulas (e.g., to show ongoing student percentages)
• The chat application is apparently incapable of alerting you to someone’s comments if you don’t have it front-and-center with no windows obscuring it. Not even a little task bar icon that blinks. So, if a student is taking a really loooong time between comments in a chat session… you just have to wait. You can’t do anything else in the meantime.
• You often can’t do anything else in the meantime. Starting a grade editing session often kills chat. Starting chat kills open discussion threads, etc.
• The Blackboard email system… where do I start? You can’t even do a simple autorespond message. You most certainly can’t do fancy things like enable student-to-student email while taking yourself out of the loop, e.g., if you want students to use your university email address. That’s strange, you say; why would you want students to do this? Because Bb email is apparently incapable of letting you know you have an email message unless you’re logged in, and you can’t stay logged in, and so you never know whether you have email or not.
• The interface bears almost no relationship to any interface the students (or instructors) have ever used. Yay, originality! Or not.
• The calendar (among other applications) is highly user-unfriendly
• The system goes offline after half an hour or so, but it doesn’t log you out. Instead, it defaults to an error page that requires a browser restart (and purging of any saved information) before you can log back in. You had tabs you didn’t want to lose in that browser session? Oooh, too bad. Shoulda thought of that before you went using Blackboard.
• The entire thing is becoming ergonomically contradictory in its very existence: The collection of course management applications (some of which, despite this review, are quite useful) keeps growing, but you have to log in, interact via sometimes-clunky java interfaces, etc. No notifications on your desktop. No “always-on”  sessions. No one-click (or two or even ten) access. So, I guess you have full functionality of all the little micro-tasks you need a hundred times a day, as long as you’re willing to jump through the multiple hoops required to get to them about fifty times a day.
• No peer-review system (like, for instance, CPR)
• Importing previous semesters’ classes loses all discussion board content, including FAQs (maybe this is just a UTPA implementation issue)
• No connection between Bb enrollment and University registration records (almost certainly a UTPA implementation issue)… this results in many “phantom” students in each course (the IT people have told me it’s impossible to remove students from Bb course shells after they’ve dropped the class) and a 3-day wait to enroll new students.

Would Moodle be an improvement? I dunno. But I’d be much more willing to support lackluster software development in an open source package than in one the University pays muchísimos bucks to license every year. Basically, I’m opposed to reinforcing corporations that have cornered little mini-monopolies for the inevitable decline in value that often results from these arrangements. It feels to me like Bb is resting on its laurels.