I’ve been using Blackboard for many years now, and every time I get fed up with it, they update it and make it a little more accessible or easy to use, or add a new feature, keeping me barely hooked. Well, I really am tired of it now. It is too clunky. You have to press too many buttons to get simple tasks done. I like that students are automatically signed up for the course at WSU, but otherwise I find it cumbersome. One of the things I do with it is have students use the discussion board to extend in-class discussion, usually by responding to a prompt. This works pretty well, as students come in having already thought about the film or reading, but I find it in some respects to be less a discussion than a quick answering of the prompt, without looking at other responses. Luckily, I have a lot of smart, engaging students, so their replies are worth reading, but the interation with each other isn’t as high as I might like. Some of this is me failing to set up that expectation, but some of it I think is blackboard setup. The discussion board is cumbersome and non-intuitive in many respects, and it is pure hell on a dial-up connection. I am thinking about using blogs next semester (I will post another entry on that), and/or moving to Moodle, which is open-source, but which I have never used. I need a discussion board, a gradebook, and maybe an integrated blog and/or wiki, depending on how daring I want to be, or how far out of my comfort zone I want to stray. Any thoughts?
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