Blackboard Learn Reviews

Blackboard is a great tool for communicating with students, distributing course materials, and recording student grades. The "one-stop shopping" approach makes it easy for professors to stay organized in each class, and it also makes it easy for students to stay organized. When used well, Blackboard allows you to do everything from communicating with students to uploading assignment sheets to sending class announcements.

As a writing professor, I especially appreciate the SafeAssign feature that checks student assignments for plagiarism. Once I started requiring my students to use SafeAssign, I found that plagiarism attempts dropped off significantly. (So did attempts to recycle papers from one course to another.) In addition, SafeAssign saves me a lot of leg work when students DO plagiarize -- it flags the suspect text as well as the source, so I don't have to hunt it down myself.

For me, Blackboard wasn't intuitive to learn. Even after 7 years of using it nearly ever day during the semester, I had some challenges making it do what I wanted it to do. I often spent far more time than I should have trying to customize things for my courses. But, as long as I stuck to the basic features -- which are also the ones I personally found most useful/beneficial -- Blackboard was a great tool for organizing my courses and keeping students on track.

The big scale design of the platform is ideal to have all your academic needs in one. Access to a combine calendar allowing for easy visualization of homeworks, projects and tasks. Easy view of currents classes and course materials. With the years of experience this platform is reliable and complete.

Even though the complexity is robust, sometimes it can be overwhelming for students and ease of access across the platform is not the best compared to other market competitors.

What I like most about the software is what is is *supposed* to do: serve as a total course management system.

Everything about Blackboard is clunky — at least as it is set up in our university. Operations that should be drag and drop require multiple clicks. Nearly every function in Blackboard is present in other generic software and works more efficiently. In addition, Blackboard (as set up in our school) forces templates onto teachers, Redoing the templates into usable form takes lots of clicks.

Here are two examples of the most egregious design errors.

1. The Bb gradebook. It vaguely resembles like Excel or Google sheets in how functions. But unlike spreadsheets where one can easily duplicate columns and reassign formulas, the Gradebook requires separate multiple-menu-click operations for every column creation, every grade entry and every grade change. We find little flexibility in creating grading formulas, compared to off-the-shelf spreadsheet programs. And the import-export functions of Bb gradesheets to generic spreadsheets is so clunky that it is unusable.

2. Course duplication. Bb allows the teacher to duplicate a course. Except it doesn't really work. If you try and duplicate the course you taught in the year 2020 for use in 2021, you find that Blackboard will duplicate the general template for all university courses without importing all of the eaacher's innovations.

Navigating between courses and links was easy and intuitive.

The interface was clunky and a little old school. It was jarring switching from a tab with very streamlined mechanics to Blackboard.

The softwares capacity to synchronize contacts and users information.

Near to perfect but it has little hitch when it comes to support.

Being still a student, I love the ease with which I can move within the interface and change courses because if you have several subjects, you can easily locate them and see the content very easily. Inside the software, you can see practically everything as if it were a classroom since you can hold virtual meetings, see your content/tasks to do, see your final grades, take your final exams, etc. It is a platform that stands out for its excellence in education since the page rarely crashes or presents some difficulties.

It may be difficult at first to navigate through the different menus/pages/courses because the platform does not give us that simply look the first time we see it, as unlike its competitors in the market, this one has a slightly less friendly view. But it is rescued if for example our school/university gives us within Blackboard a small tutorial on the essentials you should know about this software.
But honestly, I do not see many cons to Blackboard because it is a platform that gives us what we are looking for and that is why it is one of the top e-learning software.

I like the powerful features and security of the program

BB is the most frustrating program I have ever used. It was one of the 1st LMS programs-I have heard. Its design is clunky and seems to be created by someone with little UXUI experience, I mean UXUI was a field that was known only by the people in the top of their field 20+ years ago so that would make sense! The lack of logical design for buttons and search areas is aggravating. The lack of them going back and changing things for the better and getting a visual designer and UXUI person involved NOW to fix the program-is again aggravating. An example to add a user, you click on a menu item-it goes to a window on the right and there is a search field there which one is supposed to ignore and know somehow to click on a button that does not look like a button called "Find Users To Enroll". WHY, is the search field even showing? Do you know how many times if I get away form using BB for a few weeks or months I end up typing in that filed instead of a button that does not look like a button? Explaining to faculty to NOT type in the field is a constant, because your intuition thinks the design makes sense-it does not.

Blackboard Learn is a great tool to manage your academic career and it has helped me a great deal especially during the pandemic because I could attend my lessons online. You can literally access everything on your portal with features such as communication and notification features. It is easy to use and provides you with everything you need.

In the beginning the software would kick me out as I was attending classes and it happened a few times. Otherwise I don't have any problems with the software.

Very good organisation, great for teaching higher Ed or adults. Also for passing and storing general information about courses. Ncie that it can be completely customised.

Clunky, dense, hard to inegreate activities that are automatically marked and generate progress statistics. This needs to be improved.

Easy to set upNot a steep learning curve

For those not too familiar with it, may find getting set up and accessing archival slides/training presentations a bit difficult

I like that if you're a power user and your students get into it, this is probably the only eLearning tool you will ever need. It has everything from homework assignments to actual video-conference; besides of the usual tools like forums and work groups. The online exams are very useful, specially if you don't want to manually grade tons and tons of tests.

I don't like the user interface. Most of the tools are one more click away than I think they should. Very useful things like the exams are really powerful, but creating them is so awkward that sometimes you prefer to just handle a document.

This software allowed me to view my assignments for college and check my grades as well. Instructors used Blackboard to post important announcements and assignments. Overall, the software was easy to navigate and easy to understand. I liked the "Announcements" board of this software as it allowed professors to post important messages that could be found in a single place. The "Alert" feature was also very useful when there was a grade or assignment update.

Blackboard has many features, but I was not able to take full advantage of them because of how the platform itself looked. The Blackboard platform, especially the black bar on the left hand side, was always confusing and the site itself looked pretty old. When my university actually switched over to Canvas, students missed the layout of Blackboard, but not the actual software, which looked like it was several years old. If the actual interface looked better, I think it would be easier to navigate.

I like that I can create quizzes, embed media, create a gradebook, select the language, etc.

BlackBoard learn can be limited in many ways. For example, you are very limited with modifying the look of the course sites. Also, with assessments, you can give partial credit is a students gets the answer partially correct on a fill-in-the-blank assessment. I also don't like how it organizes the grades the students can see.

A feature that I love the most about this software is it allows teachers to upload assignments online to eliminate the use of paper. This software is such an easy to use software and really simple to change any settings for the liking of your choice. What I also love about this is that it is a good platform to take tests and quizzes, which is super amazing because it is not confusing at all. I absolutely love this and it has helped be more organized!

A feature that I would like to see in the future is the mobile app, it could use a little improvement and it is a bit slow, but the desktop version is amazing so it does not really bother me because I usually check and do everything through my desktop. I still absolutely love this software.

it is easy to post all assignments, class materials, notes and grades using blackboard. Especially for larger classes I don't have to print the paper copy, posting the class material on blackboard will help students to print and refer to the material easily. Gradebook is one of the best features of blackboard, I have quizzes almost everyday for my students, posting these quizzes grades were very straightforward using blackboard. I have also used blackboard for online quizzes and exams, and for lab exams.

Blackboard gets slower when many people are using at the same time and some times it becomes unavailable due to maintenance(but we do get notice prior to it). other than that I had no issue with it.

It's nice to have all the assignments, documents, and grades in one place. This helps to avoid professors handing out tons of papers or sending emails all the time. The mobile app sends push notifications about grades or upcoming assignment deadlines which is nice.

I have noticed some glitches using Blackboard (didn't get notifications, etc). The UI on the computer is outdated and counterintuitive in some ways for both students and instructors. The online service is completely different from the app version which can also be a problem. The online UI needs to be updated to look more like the app.

The greatest feature of this product is the ease of use with regards to its navigation. When we started using Blackboard LMS, I literally trained a large portion of our staff on the ins and outs of the software in less than 2 hours. This has made classroom organization the easiest it has been in decade. Our instructors can distribute class materials, assignments, and grades with a few clicks. It is absolutely amazing!

Installation can be both lengthy and problematic if you are moving from an incompatible LMS. While we were lucky, we still ran into bugs while making our transition. This was frustrating, but was luckily done during the summer, when attendance was at its lowest.

This software has little details on the student side that is missing from other learning platforms, like specialized involvement for presenting or using collaborative videos/meetings. It gives the students more freedoms and ways to ask questions without leaving the teacher unable to see or change needed items.

It was difficult to learn once you open the program, and there is not a tutorial or walkthrough for the overall site. You have to explore on your own, and it can be tough.

Blackboard is reliable and easy to use LMS, requiring little to no direction or training for new users. Communication and notifications are great, found all in one place for easy access and viewing. Gradebook is another fantastic feature. All the information about your assessments can be found in one place, including submission dates, marking criteria and overall grades. Submission process is great, allowing users to thoroughly review their documents and their similarity report before submission.

UI could be updated to be more user-friendly, e.g., minimise clicks, add more shortcuts for site navigation. Features to allow for collaboration in group projects/tasks would be useful as many users prefer external software for collaboration, communication between students and instructors and productivity. However, it is perfectly adequate for users familiar with the LMS.

I found this advantageous when I was in college as an undergraduate. It was great to track my course work and online assignments through this LMS. For its time it was adequate with the UI layout but to modern look and feel of websites and web application software in 2020 it would be outdated unless they revamped the display of everything.

It was just a bit clunky at times and occasionally a pain in the @$$ but it still got the job done. It might have been that my student user rights weren't fully configured and there was a lack of training from the university for students to use the tool and not on the fault of Blackboard Learn.

Simple in use, easy to explore. It didn't take too much time to get used to this product

Not enough functionality - no options for embedded videos, you can not insert links or audio files in the body of the learning module, only below.

Blackboard is easy to learn and usually intuitively easy for any goal you have. It helps coordinate large teams or classes, and with creative use can be set up to use most styles of teaching (group discussions, online learning, video/attachments, etc).

My concerns with Blackboard are at the philosophical level. From the way it is systematically set up, you can tell that it uses some outdated methods of teaching. Use as a student can feel oppressive, with students too easily shut down and overruled and the general aesthetic vibe being a bit darker and more confined than examples such as Canvas.

I utilized this software on a user-end point while in college in the mid 2010s. My wife is using it now as a student in the late 2010s. Blackboard Learn opens a doorway into the world of academia like no other platform I have ever experienced. With it, you can enter a virtual learning center with as robust a set of resources as any prestigious university in the country. Blackboard Learn is an essential tool for creating an online environment where students can really learn akin to the classroom. I highly recommend it - both for professionals looking to impart their knowledge to a wider, more varied audience, and for scholars looking to broaden their horizons with academic leaders across all fields.

Very few cons about this platform except that, akin to Microsoft Excel, a lot of the features seem both difficult to find or too complex to effectively utilize. The user manual will likely be your closest ally with this software.

An excellent platform to conduct courses for students , uploading relevant course work, setting assessments and also promoting discourse on a course forum.The product is simple to use and is extremely user friendly. With a short course, students are able to effectively utilise the system and with many online options for assistance, it really helps those learners who are unsure.

Support could be better at times and a complicated process to register users.

I like the communication format on this software the most. I like how it is easy to see the announcements that professors send out weekly regarding course material.

The format of the app is kind of confusing. It is hard to access material because there are different tabs and not just one dashboard overall.