--- Forwarded Message from Paul Chapin <[log in to unmask]> --- >From: Paul Chapin <[log in to unmask]> >To: "'Language Learning and Technology International Information Forum'" <[log in to unmask]> >Subject: RE: #6117.4 Course Management Software (!) >Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 09:22:42 -0400 ------------------ We went with Blackboard over WebCT largely because we believe it is easier for the faculty to use and understand. The only major problems we've seen is the process by which a faculty member can add a student to a course - it's awkward and confusing and can result in a student being in the student data base multiple times - and a tendency to release upgrades too often and too early - we found major problems with 5.0 and are waiting for 5.5. We've taken some actions to simplify the administrative part of the using Blackboard. Course sites are created for all courses, but marked as "unavailable", i.e., nobody sees them, until requested by a faculty member. All courses have the preregistered students preloaded and the load is repeated several times during drop and add period. Adding students between or after these loads must be done by the faculty member (or us if they ask). Due to issues on our side, the faculty must manually remove any student who drops. Support has been an issue. The sales people need help, to be polite. Operational support is uneven. The company has grown enormously and it shows in inadequately trained personal and often simply inadequate numbers of people. There's got to be some good job opportunities with them if anybody is interested. Bottom line is that a lot of our faculty use and like Blackboard. Most are not doing anything very exciting; mostly they are posting documents, using the mail lists and perhaps the discussion boards. Only a few are really trying to do anything very original. Student reactions have, oddly, been all over the map ranging from this is the end of civilization as we know it to this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. The most amusing student comment was a complaint that with the BlackBoard mailing list, they couldn't get away from the instructors. The student would log on in the evening and find the instructor has emailed everybody in the class additional clarifying comments of the previous class. I've actually taken a course using Promethesus. As a student it didnt' strike me much one way or the other except that I liked the look of Blackboard better and I didn't like how it presented threaded discussions. In essence, you either had to see every message every time or you could restrict what you see to unread messages but the messages weren't organized very well. I kept switching back and forth, a disruptive task when you're trying to work, depending on what I needed from the list at the moment. There was a new version of Prometheus coming out even as I took the class, but I didn't see any great advantage and decided to stick with what I knew rather than change in mid-semester. I don't know what the current version is like. Also, Prometheus was quite a bit more expensive that BlackBoard and WebCT. In the case of BlackBoard, they are clearly trying to sell you some of their higher levels - it comes in three different levels - and may be low-balling the basic price to get you to sign on to their product line. We were told that there was very little profit in the basic level. Prometheus may only have one level making such pricing tactics unavailable.