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Essay examining Blackboard

Posted by Zak Mensah on Wednesday 03 June 2009 at 10:58am
Tags: e-learning | vle | web services |

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I just came across a peer review essay critically examining Blackboard which may be of interest to the community.

It is worth a read for some of the observations of key Blackboard features and how this alters the traditional relationship between teachers and learners. It is interesting how at one point it states that feature-wise Blackboard does not really have any innovative tools. I am surprised that Blackboard hasn't simplified its support for audio and video. Having used WebCT as a student and Blackboard in a supporting role I do find others observations intriguing.

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Comment posted by Leo Havemann on 03 June 2009 at 12:02pm

Thanks for this link Zak - an interesting article as you say. As far as the innovation question, I note the author mentions that she authored a course site in HTML and put together a similar collection of tools drawn from around the web, so in this sense Blackboard doesn’t innovate beyond what you could do with other tools. But I wonder how many lecturers have the time and skills to invest in a project like that?

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Comment posted by Zak Mensah on 03 June 2009 at 1:37pm

Leo,

The essay later goes on to state as you do that VLEs at present work for institutions as the tools are all under one roof. If VLEs could better cope with the pushing/pulling of 3rd party content then they will potentially have a long term future.

Cheers

Zak

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