I use Basecamp from 37signals to manage all of my work-related projects, as well as some group projects for college, and I grew to love all of their products in one way or another. At our university, we use Blackboard as a Learning Management System, and I can’t say that it’s good at all. In this post, I outline the most important shortcomings of Blackboard, the benefits of Basecamp and Campfire, and why the latter would be a better fit for our classes.
Blackboard
Blackboard - Files
The first problem is that the same version has been around since the beginning of my freshman year 2 1/2 years ago, and the user interface looks like it was designed 10 years ago (it probably was). AJAX is not simply eye candy – it enhances usability, and some of that wouldn’t hurt.
Blackboard comes with a variety of features, but most of them are useless and unnecessary. Here are some functions that we have used in the past years:
File Sharing
Professors can upload files and make them available to students. This is a nice feature, but it does not have any default options, so unless the instructor groups files into folders, all of them are displayed on a single long page without any visual sorting, which makes it painful to find a particular file.
Gradebook
Allows instructors to enter grades for students, which is a simple and well done function, except that not all professors use it.
Announcements
Professors can post announcements on Blackboard, which somehow are not always forwarded to students via email. Thus, you have to check the site regularly, or you might miss something. Email notifications would be a very worthwhile feature.
Projects
Blackboard also has the feature of displaying assignments and letting students submit them online via file upload, however, you can often only upload one file at a time.
Emailing
As a student or professor, you can send emails to your fellow students or your instructor. However, the subject line always includes weird numbers such as “82452_84566_200903″, which presumably consist of the course ID and some other information. Honestly, these numbers are of no use to anyone, and the course name and number – such as “ACCY 110″ – would be much more useful. Another drawback is that the course name is never included in the subject line by default, so when the sender forgets to include it, you often don’t know what class that person is referring to.
These are some of the things that work, and don’t work. It has more features, such as group discussion boards, and chat rooms, but these either don’t run on my computer (which is very up to date) or are so cumbersome and ugly that nobody wants to use them. It is also important to know that the version of Blackboard we’re using is not the most up to date one, and I can only assume that our university has not upgraded yet because of the costs associated with it.
37signals does it better …
… without even trying. The thing is that their products are not designed for education, they are designed for business. Yet, Basecamp and Campfire would be a much better overall fit than the Blackboard we currently use.
First of all, their software is priced on subscription model, which means that you don’t have to worry about version numbers, upgrading, and having the most up-to-date version, because they continually integrate new features and make improvements.
Out of the five Blackboard features that we use most – File Sharing, Gradebook, Announcements, Projects, and Emailing – Basecamp is way better for three of them: file sharing, announcements, and emailing (messages). In addition to that, it has to-do lists and milestones, which could facilitate the organization of the course. You can find a tour of Basecamp here. It also integrates with Campfire, a real-time chat that could be used to improve in-class communication and collaboration.
However, Basecamp does not have a Gradebook, and it does not allow students to submit projects, which are two very important features, which might however be integrated through the API and 3rd Party applications.
What I don’t understand is how our university can continue to use inadequate software, while successful companies like 37signals have demonstrated that it is possible to make products that really make people’s lives easier and make money with these products as well. What I question most of all about Blackboard is not the software itself – they have a new version that looks much better than the one we are currently using – I question the business model, because it prevents our institution, and many others as well, from using the newest technology. And it illustrates that subscription-based online applications are better for your customers, and that’s why we’re in business, right? – To help our customers.
I think that we can help our customers most by making software modular. Applications should have APIs that allow 3rd party developers to integrate their stuff with yours. As a developer, you are not losing that way – you are winning, because you benefit from the value that other people are creating by extending your software. Everybody wins. That’s the way it should be in education.
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
One of the primary features of an LMS that is not duplicated with basecamp is if a student has accessed a specific piece of content. The dashboard shows me who has logged in recently but as far as I know I can’t generate a report of what they did while logged on.
Many LMSs are available as a web based subscription model. CentreLearn, http://centrelearn.com, is the one I am most familiar with.
Greg,
I am aware of that limitation, but I am wondering why you need to know what a student has done while logged in. How would that improve your performance as a professor? I think that if you care enough to raise that question, you don’t depend on that feature anyways.
In addition to email notifications it would be helpful if the Blackboard, or at my university WebCT software had RSS feeds for each class.
Another way that 37Signals or similar products could benefit the students would be by allowing them to export their accounts at the end of the semester. You could have a copy of all of your discussions, assignments, grades, etc. which you could then keep for future reference. It would be much easier than creating a cumbersome file system to store that data on a flash drive.
Alex,
Basecamp does allow you to export all your data if you are an account administrator, either in raw XML or in HTML format.
Anton… I definitely enjoyed the post. What you’re pondering, “LMSs outside of LMSs,” is something that we’re very aware of (at Rustici Software). Basically, we build an embedible SCORM player. (SCORM is a standard that allows for online courses to work in any LMS.)
We’re already playing with Wordpress as an LMS and others, and as big users of Basecamp, your idea is an intriguing one.
If you (or anyone) would like to chat on the subject or mess around with our SCORM Cloud API, we’re definitely open to it.
Tim
i don’t quite understand the comments about how the subscription model for 37 would fix things. BB is essentially an annual subscription full support and all upgrades are part of the package. it sounds like the school has choosen not to update in the 2.5 years. the current version (9) finally does start to address some really gaping issues that you and others point out. BB really does have to take in terms of groupware and make it usable to instuctors that don’t really want to spend much time to coordinate and communicate with their class, they have a load of material and skills to impart. I don’t know how differnt software would help when people don’t use the software consitently, but the variation in approaches and focus is one of the strongest and weakest elements of higher ed. and one of the hardest issues to work with.
I have to look at 37 well thought out software really can make things easier.
Dear Wayne,
You raise an important point – how a subscription model would fix things. In my opinion, the main benefit of subscription based software is that it provides the newest software. It allows the developer to continually make software improvements and introduce new features. And that’s the whole point. Only in rare cases can you reach a “finished” stage in an application where you don’t have to make changes anymore. Upgrades force the decision makers to make more decisions – whether to upgrade. People don’t like making decisions, because they are complex, and because they cost money, so they often resort to not make them at all, which in turn leads to the situation we’re in right now with Blackboard.
If my school has not chosen to upgrade in 2.5 years, and it’s not due to the licensing model, what could be the reason? I doubt they simply don’t care enough. And if upgrades are part of the package, as you say, I don’t see any reason not to upgrade.
My feeling is that we don’t upgrade because of bad reasons: an antiquated business model that focuses on exploiting the customer rather than providing the best possible product and a bureaucratic structure where the decision makers are not the users.
Anton,
I’m a professor of disaster management and I’ve been using Basecamp as a LMS for about 2 years now. I agree 100% that Blackboard (of which our university uses the Vista version) is both kludgy and unmanageable. The tradeoff between richness vs elegance tilts way too much toward richness in Vista, creating high barriers to entry, and there are not enough templates offered to professors to make putting up a course quick and painless. There is also NO iPhone app for Vista, which is a big deal.
With minimal tweaking, Basecamp could be re-purposed as an educational product, and it would merely require a new shell, and re-naming the core elements to make more sense from a classroom perspective. I was so into this concept, I even bought clsrm.com with the long-term thought of doing something exactly like this.
I’d love to talk more about this- I’m a professor, not a programmer, but I can clearly see that the university is like the music industry. Professors are the product and they are currently tied to the university, but higher education is moving to a model where courses will be untied from the university, professors will sell directly to students, and the university will merely serve as the aggregator. See http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/college_for_99_a_month.php for a glimpse of the future, Thomas Edison College and Empire State College are already state universities in this aggregate model.
If anybody is interested in talking more, my email is phelps.scot@gmail.com.
Scot
Wayne T. is right about other software models offering upgrades and support through annual contracts, but what is missing is that you may need newer hardware and/or operating system upgrades as well. Large organization that already have the staffing and server network in place, may find it less expensive to host their own applications. Smaller groups, startups or those considering expensive upgrades to their infrastructure may want to consider a SAAS model. One size rarely fits all.
Anton, I fully agree with your comments about BlackBoard. I go to school at the University of Texas at Austin, and we use the same here too. I can confidently say that BlackBoard is one of the worst pieces of software I have ever used in my life. Most of my classmates are of the same opinion too. The design probably has not been updated in a few years. Agree that the UI skin has probably been changed over the years, but the usability absolutely sucks.
More importantly, you raise a great point -”What I don’t understand is how our university can continue to use inadequate software”. The answer, in my opinion, lies not in the software design, or in the business model, but in the organizational structure of the universities themselves. In large organizations, our universities for example, software buying decisions are often made by the top level managers of the org hierarchy. These are people who do not interact with the final product on a daily basis. Most bureaucracies stabilize around the lowest common denominator – a safe solution where no body is gonna get fired because they took a risk by trying something others have not. They look at similar organizations around them and identify a set of “best practices” and adopt those practices to minimize the risk. It is not that they don’t realize that BlackBoard sucks, they are stuck with it because of the structure of the organization they are in.
This point is very well illustrated by the story highlighted by Dustin Curtis in his blog. http://dustincurtis.com/incompetence.html – The incompetence of American Airlines and the fate of Mr. X. To quote from the blog – “The problem with the design of AA.com, lies less in our competency (or lack thereof, as you pointed out in your post) and more with the culture and processes employed here at American Airlines…” Well worth a read.
A project called Euclid started this fall at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh that aims to solve these problems. It’s focus has started small: assignments, grades, e-Mail, and documents. It’s a configuration-free, subscription based Ruby application. It’s also built with design, art and architects in mind with built-in galleries and critiques. SCORM and (often unusable) prior art aside, people really want a simple way to work, and that’s what Euclid Project is about.
Professors can request more info at: http://euclid-project.org/beta
Austin,
Sounds intriguing. Is it going to be for individual courses/professors, or university-wide?
Have you seen moodle.org an open sourced LMS product?
I like your idea of using Basecamp, Campfire together to create an LMS. In fact, I might even think about trying to build a third party tool for it. Then again, maybe not, but good idea.
Besides bureaucracy, there is another reason Blackboard has the market. Blackboard has relationships with Book Publishers. Textbooks publishers create blackboard versions of their courses which makes it relatively easy for professors to customize Blackboard for their own course which may or may not be a good for the students depending upon the textbook author, publisher, and the the professor’s customizations. If a college/university were to move to Basecamp & Campfire or any other LMS, they would need to learn how to import the Blackboard course from the textbook publisher. I guess that many LMS developers often forget about course creation and development.
One aspect, I always liked about seeing when Students log into Blackboard, is I could use that as a grading aspect and as a matter of recourse for those students who claim to be doing work, but then not actually logging in and doing the work. Although, one could substitute that easily with some other form.
Good idea.
I am more than half-way done with my curriculum, but I have neither seen nor heard of Blackboard versions of any courses until now. Yet, this would not be an issue if the choice of the LMS would be up to professors and not the university. If professors have the power to choose between using Blackboard and not using Blackboard (many pretend to be using it without posting grades for example), why shouldn’t they be allowed to use an LMS of their own choice? Even though reimbursement could be problematic. That way, the decision maker would also be the user. Integration with university-wide systems shouldn’t be a problem, because the only data that is exchanged are the ‘subscribing’ students. The gradebook doesn’t even relate to the Registrar’s system as far as I know, it’s simply there to let the students know how they do.
Interesting post. I was unaware of the problems with BlackBoard you discussed (I’m new in this industry). We are a SaaS LMS geared to K12. I believe we solve all the problems you cite, except the grade book. I don’t see why we couldn’t be used by a university, given the chance.
I personally am amazed at how bad most learning management systems at schools are. The discussion on Blackboard is awful, and the rest of it isn’t too great either. I would think that if schools focused at least a little of our tuition costs on their web apps that it would pay off, or at least make students’ time more productive and effective.
In a similar light to your article, I recently wrote about my experiences using Backpack and Writeboard (also from 37signals) in a group project in my class. It worked so much better than anything else I’d ever used in a group project! I would love to see schools offer such tools directly to students! Anyhow, if you’re interested, you can find the article at http://techinch.com/2010/01/11/writeboard-class-projects-reinvented/