Tidbits, Resources, and Discussion for ELI Faculty

Friday, September 26, 2008

Alternatives to Blackboard?

There has been increasing talk in the instructional technology world about moving away from market giant Blackboard to alternative course management platforms. Here's a recent article from the Chronicle of Higher Education about the issue.

Do any of you have experience using alternatives like Moodle, Angel, or Desire2Learn? What do you think of them in comparison to Blackboard?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just as a matter of interest, last week Mary and I were talking with a friend who designs online courses for PBS. She said that they recently switched from Blackboard to Desire2Learn because of support issues with Blackboard.

Anonymous said...

I'm interested in Moodle because free and open source are two terms that definitely appeal to me. However, I haven't played with it (or the others you mention) enough yet to make a fair assessment.

It's something I'd certainly be interested in learning more about, however.

Anonymous said...

I have no love of Blackboard, although it is less bad than it used to be. I am most concerned with the incompatiblity of any current Blackboard with the students' more advanced word processors and browsers AND the lack of private areas for instructor comments unless we use the exam option. Diane Thompson

Anonymous said...

Jennifer, I would appreciate a copy of the article--your link asks for $$. Diane Thompson

Jennifer Lerner said...

Diane and any others having this problem--

The college subscribes to the Chronicle online. Just ask your campus librarian for the login and password and you can access this article as well as the whole site!

Professor Charles Evans said...

Someone responded to my series of posts about Blackboard's badness on my blog with a suggestion to look at
www.scholar360.com/. I thought that it looked like an very interesting CMS and worth a shot and suggested it to Bob, but had heard nothing back. If we are going to do any testing of any alternatives--if there is any point in that--I think that it might be better to let some of us who don't depend too heavily on BB in our courses give an alternative a try. I'd be willing to volunteer. Charlie

Jennifer Lerner said...

Thanks for volunteering, Charlie. I don't know that it's worth our time at this point to actually systematically test anything--the VCCS does not show any indication of changing to another source. (Although I supposed that in today's budget climate, you never know what might happen!) Of course, if there's a free product you want to try, I am sure folks would be interested to hear what you think of it!