Blackboard Sucks!

For those of you who do not know, I teach an online course at Florida Community College of Jacksonville (FCCJ) using Blackboard. I have used both WebCT and Blackboard for several years and find the former far superior. I have not seen the new version of Blackboard that is supposed to come out soon, but I will tell you that the current version presents some challenges for instructors that make the process of managing a course more difficult.

Today I was grading student home pages. In WebCT the process of grading is fairly simple. You go to the home page area and click on the link with the student's name. WebCT makes things even easier because you can limit the screen to only those students who posted a page. This are different with Blackboard. You need to go to the home page area. You then need to click several options to get to the student's name. For each student you need to repeat this process.

Then there is the challenge of entering information in the gradebook. Blackboard sets things up so that you the student name is one the far left of the screen and the item to be graded is on the right. Since the distance is so great, I literally need to trace with my mouse over to the right side of the screen in order to make sure that I give the score to the correct student.

These things might not seem like huge problems, but this has to be done for each student for the home page assignment and for each graded element.