Poet Ponders the Digital

Back to school means back to Blackboard. My frustration with most learning management system (LMS) platforms is well known. The administration of a class, depending on your institution, is often left to the instructor. This includes layout and design choices that I have long believed should be standardized, at least minimally, at the institution level. Because instructors can do everything from the "massive single page" dump of materials to atomized folders by week or topic, students end up trying to relearn navigation of the system with each new course. I'm now teaching at a top university with the best Blackboard install I've used. It still has problems, of course, but it is much better than any previous version and installation I've used. I theorize that part of this is streamlining the tool choices and layout options. Requiring few choices of the instructor lets me focus on the course, not the website. There might be a model shell at the university, b...

I spent most of today trying to get an online course ready to launch this weekend. I've never been a fan of Blackboard and the last 48 hours or so have been a reminder as to why. There are also some tool-related issues that are not purely "technical" (more on that later), but are leading to frustration. Uploading files into Blackboard, as with most online systems, is straightforward enough. But when you have dozens or even hundreds of files to import it can be a miserable experience. It is not all Blackboard issues, either, but these have been issues that didn't creep up in my life until this struggle. Issues of the last two days include: 1) Safari doesn't support the latest Adobe Acrobat plug-in. Neither did FireFox, Camino, or Chrome until I updated Chrome to the latest "beta" version. Safari does display PDFs with a built-in viewer, but PDFs within frames still require a plug-in to function. So, while I've been working with PDFs on dozens of...