Learning/Course Management Systems

[polly_mer]

Complaints?  Questions?  Concerns?

I know I hated Blackboard until I tried Moodle and Desire2Learn.  What have been other people's experiences?

I also know I was much more gung-ho to heavily use the LMS as a complement to the in-class work until I was forced to teach without it and then wondered why I was putting so much effort into materials that students informed me they didn't use unless I had a graded activity attached in the LMS.

[marshwiggle]

Complaints?  Questions?  Concerns?

I know I hated Blackboard until I tried Moodle and Desire2Learn.  What have been other people's experiences?

I also know I was much more gung-ho to heavily use the LMS as a complement to the in-class work until I was forced to teach without it and then wondered why I was putting so much effort into materials that students informed me they didn't use unless I had a graded activity attached in the LMS.

I use D2L basically for online quizzes. They're autograded, and are reusable, so it's an easy extra way to engage students. I don't use any other parts though. For instance, the gradebook is WAY more frustrating than a simple spreadsheet.

[darkstarrynight]

I am a big fan of Canvas.  I have used Blackboard/Web CT, Angel, and a homegrown system.  Canvas is superior to all of these, but I have not ever tried D2L or Moodle.

[aside]

I have used Blackboard and now Canvas.  I can't say I would champion one over the other, but then, I've never had a choice, either. 

[Hibush]

My school ran an exhaustive comparison of Blackboard and Canvas recently. The conclusion was that faculty with a range of teaching styles found Canvas easier to use and to have some features that innovative instructors liked. As a result, we recently made the switch from Blackboard, and the feedback I have heard from faculty is positive.

[Parasaurolophus]

I last used Blackboard about thirteen years ago, so my opinion is out of date, but at the time it was a right pain.

My postdoc university switched to Canvas last year. It's intuitive and fairly easy to use, but very limited in what it can do, and it had several weird errors and bugs that IT wasn't able to figure out. Its limitations mean that faculty have less control over what they can do with the platform.

My new university uses Moodle, and I'm still getting used to it and its capabilities. It's not at all intuitive, but I'm reliably informed that it gives one quite a bit of control, and that we can do some pretty cool stuff with it. Including programming neato mods.

[Hegemony]

We had Blackboard, which infuriated everyone.  Then they invited people in to do a trial of about five systems, while they watched and took notes.  I was one of the volunteers.  Boy, some of those systems are so bad and confusing.  I can't remember their names now, but I remember some of the infuriations.  Actions that changed names depending on which page you were on, so that "Grading" on one page would be "Assessments" on another page, both links leading to the same destination.  That kind of thing.  And really non-intuitive maneuvering.  The one I liked best in the trials was Canvas, and I guess that was other people's finding as well, because that's where we ended up.  It's certainly not perfect, but it's better than the alternatives.

[turing_complete]

We used to use a different system (I don't even remember its name), which was then bought/subsumed by Blackboard, so we switched to D2L.  I like D2L's auto-grading quizzes, and hate its discussion fora (most faculty here use Piazza for the latter).  D2L's grading spreadsheets don't quite do what I want (or at least, maybe they do, but I haven't figured out the advanced feature to do it?), but I have a workaround that makes it close enough (even though D2L complains that my grading sheet is set up "wrong" every time I open the grading page).  Hopefully they don't "fix" something that breaks my workaround...

[downer]

I will have to check out Piazza.

I use both Blackboard and D2L/Brightspace. Blackboard is so clunky and dated in its format. Their wiki function is horrendous. D2L is even more confusing to set up, although after 3 years I'm starting to get used to it. I'm always having to confirm that I want to do what I just said I wanted to do. Very annoying. It's especially bad with grading student work -- pop up windows and pages that get refreshed every time you submit a grade.

I'm struck that improvements are so slow with these systems. Why don't they sort out the many problems?

[Parasaurolophus]

We used to use a different system (I don't even remember its name), which was then bought/subsumed by Blackboard, so we switched to D2L.

WebCT, maybe?

[RatGuy]

All of my various institutions have used some form  of Blackboard or WebCT. As a PhD student, I was confounded and defeated by WebCT. Part of the problem was that the University Libraries division eliminated their PDF-hosting / e-reserve system because WebCT could do it (and was password protected). But that meant the onus of scanning and posting material was placed on the faculty member and not the librarian, and that was beyond my meager capabilities.

My current university requires us to use Blackboard to post grades, at minimum. Some luddites get away with avoiding that ("students should be able to calculate their grades!") but I find it easy. I have content folders for readings and handouts and essays are synced with Turnitin.  I find the gradebook's functions, like dropping a quiz grade, more than adequate for my material. I've even uploaded a video lecture during weather-related school closing. So Canvas might be better, but I can do everything I want to do with BB.

[backatit]

I have used just about everything, including Sakai, Blackboard, Angel, and WebCT (I've been teaching fully online at a large university for about 10 years) and after a pretty exhaustive trial of a few systems, we've finally settled on Canvas. I do a LOT with my online courses, including weekly meetings, assignments, discussions, peer reviews, and group projects, and I like the interface. I've gotten good student feedback about the course interface and the conferencing system, although of course it's not perfect. So I do like that about the LMS.

We do a lot of peer review at our institution, and that's the one weak area I've found (there are some other, smaller ones, but this is a really big issue). I'm one of the only people at my institution who uses the built-in peer review features and I've found that I have to provide a LOT of tech support to students to guide them through successfully. Right now I'm doing this as part of a guided research opportunity, and I'm finding that simplifying the peer review process (by using discussion boards) is a bit easier for students, although there are some pedagogical issues like a lack of anonymity and the structure of the feedback area itself that seems to affect the review process.  I think those are fair tradeoffs, though. I'm not personally a big fan of peer reviews (except as informal, organic low-stakes activities where appropriate) but a lot of people here use them and because I have a lot of experience with the system and with the process, I kind of got roped into this. It seems to be going pretty well, but if you're going to use the peer review feature of Canvas, there are some bugs that we've discovered - if you're interested in discussing them further, let me know (they have been submitted for fixes, so it may be that they are fixed by the time we get around to discussing them - who knows?).

[turing_complete]

We used to use a different system (I don't even remember its name), which was then bought/subsumed by Blackboard, so we switched to D2L.

WebCT, maybe?

backatit's post jogged my memory.  It was Angel.

[backatit]

We used to use a different system (I don't even remember its name), which was then bought/subsumed by Blackboard, so we switched to D2L.

WebCT, maybe?

backatit's post jogged my memory.  It was Angel.

I remember loving Angel. It was pretty intuitive. Of course Blackboard fixed that...

[turing_complete]

backatit's post jogged my memory.  It was Angel.

I remember loving Angel. It was pretty intuitive. Of course Blackboard fixed that...

Indeed, which is why we switched.  Unfortunately, the replacement of D2L was way worse than Angel, though better than Blackboard's absorption of Angel.