Moodle is the wsy to go. I refuse to use Blackboard.
No doubt BlackBoard is dreadful. I would recommend Canvas by Instructure any day. Luckily that is what my place witched over to after spending years on WebCT. The cool thing about Canvas that it has iPad apps and is built around making it very easy to grade. Donāt get me wrong it has its moments, but much better than nearly anything I have used.
Taught in it full-time for nearly three years. For 18 months of that, we kept being promised an upgrade to a newer version at some ever-moving date in the future.
I once counted how many clicks it took me to set up my courseroom including āprivate feedback areasā for each of my 25 students. The number was well over 1000. I had RSI within a few months of starting that job, and all the physical therapy and adaptive technology in the world couldnāt really mitigate the effects of the horrible design, impossibly kludgy UI, and shitty Java implementations.
Has anyone checked out hub.edu?
Java is an affront to humanity and should be destroyed. It has literally no place on the desktop and only serves as a vector for malware infections. Only the laziest, most unsympathetic coders would insist on using it. Itās easily replaced with a number of other, better implemented frameworks, for instance .NET, which itself isnāt wonderful, but is certainly better than Java.
Every time I see an unnecessary java applet I die a little inside.
Fortunately, Iāve never had to use Blackboard. The two schools Iāve taught at moved on from Blackboard before I started. One moved to Moodle, which Iāve had great experiences with.
The other moved to Sakai. Which I really donāt like. Moodle seems very dynamic and flexible. Very user friendly. Sakai is frame-based and really clunky for creating an integrated course with easy to follow flow.
Iām told Sakai has fans and was told by the university tech people itās better. But I donāt know anyone, teacher or students, who like it.
part of me feels bad for agreeing with you, since my dad worked for Sun before the Oracle buyout (he was part of the team that made Java 3D) but yeah, modern java is a bloated, insecure, overused crapheap.
I actually attended a Blackboard meeting on Thursday. The sound crashed through the whole session. It was a trainwreck.
Not a fan.
Have you seen the percentage of campus laptops with a distinctive glowing fruit adornment? Desktop java is, indeed, a pox on mankind (and really has no place in a āweb interfaceā); but it does have the advantage that there is a JVM for approximately every turing-complete thing with sufficent RAM. Other options, less so.
I am oblivious regarding Blackboard, but I canāt read āLovecraftian rantā without thinking about that lovely StackOverflow bit on parsing HTML with regex (previously on BoingBoing).
And thereās that old Penny Arcade comic; Iām still waiting for the day someone causes a sh*tstorm by trying to inflict that on an oblivious member of the public.
Fine then. Most of this stuff could be coded in python easily enough. And pythonās fairly portable. Use that instead.
Anyway blackboard is a webapp. Whenever I used it, it was just a java plugin in a browserframe that went back to some server on campus. It should have been written in HTML, Javascript, CSS, some kind of database (take your pick) and perl/python/php/ruby/asp/coldfusion.
Thereās no reason to use Java for anything really anymore. There are tons of solutions to replace it, and a number of apps I support at work crash every time a Java update rolls out. Also any time IE gets updated. Also anytime chrome gets updated. Also anytime a new version of the corporate VPN client is pushed out. Itās a godawful mess right now. Our time-keeping system has been broken for a week because of a non-optional java update we canāt block unless we block Java from even using HTTP ports. Which would break the timekeeping applet all over again.
This is why I just build Wordpress-based sites for every class I teach now.
Oh, donāt get me wrong. I completely agree that they should quit pretending and build their āwebappā using actual web technologies. Wrapping a big chunk of java in a thin HTML shell is about as āweb basedā as putting a win32 executable on your server and claiming that itās āweb basedā because users can download it over HTTP.
My point was just that, if somebody is depraved and/or forced enough to use java applets on the desktop, javaās ability to be equally frustrating across all major platforms and some minor ones is a fairly major advantage. Even Flash doesnāt have quite the same breadth, and sucks at least as much if not substantially more.
Using a JVM on the server is substantially more defensible; but is also largely invisible to the poor users.
(At work over here, we have some very expensive-and-fancy-when-they-were-new heating/cooling control systems with java based interfaces. For the moment, carefully maintaining IE6/Java 1.4 is more attractive than shelling out ~30k per unit to have the vendor swap the boards, no software update here, everything burned into hardware; but it hasnāt created warm feelings about java.)
Yeah. Cross-platform frameworks are very important. Iād be delighted if one actually existed and it wasnāt shite. The closest Iāve seen is Python, but thatās really not saying much. Thereās so much variation in the executable libraries of the numerous spinoffs of Python that it seems thereās a lot of room for improvement.
As it is, Iām simply astounded that every minor Java patch and update manages to almost completely break backward compatibility with my companyās timekeeping software. Itās a common software too, Iāve used it at every job Iāve worked.
Either Java is just garbage, or the timekeeping software is terribly designed, or both. And Iām pretty sure itās both.
That reminds me of a discussion I once had with a developer about an āimprovedā interface for my main work program. I pointed out that functions that had once been activated with a single click now required a minimum of three. He replied that three clicks wasnāt āa big dealā.
I said, āIt is if itās something youāre doing a hundred times a day.ā
That led to the inevitable reply of, āWell you just need to change what youāre doing.ā
Iāve never heard of Blackboard so I googled it and all I got was instances of Blackboard at various education establishments. Seems like a bit of an SEO fuck up there.
Well, for a Lovecraftian bit, there is Charlie Strossās bit on Perl: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/old/attic/perl/lurker.html
We use Canvas now at the community college network in my city. I quite like it. Or at least what little Iāve used of it thus far.
Oof, yeah. I take classes in Blackboard now (including web development classes) and it is the worst.
