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/

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.

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.

Basecamp does allow you to export all your data if you are an account administrator, either in raw XML or in HTML format.

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.

Sounds intriguing. Is it going to be for individual courses/professors, or university-wide?

Professors can request more info at: http://euclid-project.org/beta

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.