Today I received an email from the university about a survey on e-learning being conducted by Massey University. I am not very keen on surveys, except when the topic touches me, either on the positive or negative side. Now, when I say e-learning here at the university it means blackboard.
I just fired my browser and started answering the survey. Now, why don’t I use blackboard? Let’s see, because it sucks. There are two main areas of annoyance:
- Software quality, which is blackboard specific, and
- Philosophy, which applies to most — if not all — e-learning systems.
On terms of quality, if one does not have the ‘proper’ java version the system floods the user with error messages, even if it keeps working (some times). Uploaded documents get their icons changed: all formats get the same generic icon. So, do I have a PDF, Spreadsheet, Word document? Who knows? The system is slow and makes doing batch jobs difficult. Typical anouncements in the system: ‘system slow downs, do not reload pages’, ‘microsoft office 2007 files not supported’, ‘java update may cause problems’.
From a more philosophical viewpoint, these systems assume that the students and lecturers are going to centre their activities around a web page for every single course that is part of e-learning. I personally find highly distracting to keep track of yet another resource, in addition to my main focus point (email) and a small set of sites that I find to be a compelling reading (there is an option to forward emails, but is not granular enough). I do not like to be shoehorned in a one size fits all model, so I tend to avoid monolithic systems.
I still prefer to have a mailing list for the class (which is provided by the university) and to host files in my own server. It sounds a bit primitive, but I find it much more liveable.
Keywords: Web, Communication.