Ay ay ay!
In the category of “news that is only interesting to me and anyone else who works in the higher ed IT field”:
Blackboard and WebCT are merging.
Holy crap!
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Blackboard is large pile of steaming fecal matter passing itself off as software. The UI is atrocious, it’s plagued by constant system errors and solves problems where problems didn’t exist in the first place. I hope it gets replaced by an open-source product that someone wrote in between games of Worlds of Warcraft.
I hate Blackboard too. The thing that annoys me most about this merger, though, is that my department recently finished a 1.5-year-long e-learning assessment with the goal of supporting a single course management system on campus, since we currently support both WebCT Campus Edition and Blackboard.
We could have saved ourselves a hell of a lot of work if we’d known that Bb and WebCT were going to become one product eventually anyway.
It’s neither here nor there, because we went with Desire 2 Learn. D2L has its own problems, not the least of which is a stupid name, but it has advantages too. It’s nice to be separated from the Bb/WebCT conglomerate in the likely event that it turns out to be a giant mess.
Consolidation like this often runs in streaks, so don’t get too comfy with D2L.
Blackboard was founded by my HS classmates. I don’t know a whole hell of a lot about it, one of them was a great guy, the other was a pompous ass.
That’s the lifecycle of most technology products. They start out as a great guy idea and then end up as a pompous ass implementation mess.