I know that Blackboard and NUIT have worked very hard to make it a centralized location for course content and provide the tools for productive online dialog among students. I think this is a great idea.
But I hate Blackboard.
More importantly my students hate Blackboard.
Why?
It’s ugly. Also it buggy. But for me, the visual design is key.
This is what students see when they access the automatically-generated Blackboard home page for the course I taught last fall:
And there isn’t even any actual content on this page!
This is what students see when they access the home page of the course website I created for Cross Gender Performance in Popular Culture, using a standard WordPress template:
The design is cleaner and much easier to navigate. (You can click on the link above and poke around the entire website to seem more.)
This is not a question of mere aesthetics (as if aesthetics were not always important!). It a question of visual communication. We recognize the pedagogical importance of presenting students with a clearly articulated paper prompt that does not make them work to figure out what is being asked of them. The visual presentation of a course website should be held to similar standards, even if the course content has nothing to do with visual communication. Even though science courses do not teach writing, we still expect a syllabus for a science course to be free of grammatical errors.
I created this site to replicate what I find to be Blackboard’s most useful aspect for my own teaching, the fact that it provides one centralized “place” for course content, assignments, and student work that my students and I can access 24/7. There is much more that one could do with a WordPress site, as Micheal Kramer‘s course demonstrates. And WordPress is not the only platform one can use. I like it because its supported by Weinberg.
I’d love to hear from others who have used other alternative to Blackboard, who can point towards other pedagogical uses for these tools, or who disagree with my ideas about the importance of the visual aspect of our communications with students.