This is exactly right. We built our own app for our medical school. Still live, tmedweb.tulane.edu. The professional schools (law, medicine, business) are smaller, and generally have the money and flexibility to move on something like this. We were turning away schools before several of us graduated. Downside of developing in med school: instead of graduating into a self-made job, you go to an internship in a hospital and the whole world outside the hospital ceases to exist.
Tulane has doubled down on the project and hired a developer fulltime to run it. Who got which chunks of code, I still don't know. It could probably stand a complete rewrite though.
points that worked for us:
you (the professor) and your course coordinators, TAs, etc, don't realize how broken the BlackBoard paradigm is, how it clouds your thinking and slows you down, until you try something else. Lets do some click races...
Your students check out every time BlackBoard is involved. Anything would make them like you more.
You really can access usage statistics. Just not with BlackBoard. Hey, dean, you want to know which professor downloads correlate with improvement on board scores? We can ask questions like that.
Comments
> Convince some small school
This is exactly right. We built our own app for our medical school. Still live, tmedweb.tulane.edu. The professional schools (law, medicine, business) are smaller, and generally have the money and flexibility to move on something like this. We were turning away schools before several of us graduated. Downside of developing in med school: instead of graduating into a self-made job, you go to an internship in a hospital and the whole world outside the hospital ceases to exist.
Tulane has doubled down on the project and hired a developer fulltime to run it. Who got which chunks of code, I still don't know. It could probably stand a complete rewrite though.
points that worked for us:
you (the professor) and your course coordinators, TAs, etc, don't realize how broken the BlackBoard paradigm is, how it clouds your thinking and slows you down, until you try something else. Lets do some click races...
Your students check out every time BlackBoard is involved. Anything would make them like you more.
You really can access usage statistics. Just not with BlackBoard. Hey, dean, you want to know which professor downloads correlate with improvement on board scores? We can ask questions like that.