Great posts…
do u guys have any suggestions for alternatives to BlackBoard??? What exactly is the difference with moodle or WebCT?

– Also, does Blackboard integrate with the university databases or is it completely independent?

Thanks!

As a former student I share the mentioned feelings on BlackBoard. Currently I’m involved in a young company called TeacherSeat that wants to come up with an alternative to BlackBoard. Objective is to release a lightweight learning management system that doesn’t require hours of training and isn’t equipped with an excessive set of features. Please join our mission by filling out a simple 1minute survey, which can be found here: http://teacherseat.com/survey.html

[…] And this is just one of the few of my gripes about blackboard. There are many more. Don’t get me started on the easy to apply, exploits that are never patched or the stupidity of their unstructured Digital Dropbox concept. What’s wrong with having every single homework assignment going into a single chronological, unstructured list – right? […]

The ENTIRE Education Department of South Australia (obviously, tahts in Australia) is using the Blackboard Learning System. I think it is crude and inefficient. Now I have another reason to despise it: It’s insecure.

But then again, the only things it’s used for in this school are checking one’s quota, checking one’s email, sending one’s email, setting up message forwarding to someone who has set up message forwarding to you so you create an endless loop and, well, that’s pretty much it. I miss teh old myInternet system, but I don’t miss Dingo Mail (which was pure rubbish)

i know he tried on several occasions to contact them. then he just became apathetic and gave up.

here’s a thought, would they sue an open source project if it violated the patent. if not, i say loophole.

hmm. how would we go about publishing flaw. that’d get our names out there.

(side note, my new place has blackboard)

Well, don’t want to feel responsible if someone does this thing and fucks up their school, and gets in massive trouble because of it. But if they sit down, figure out the xploit and run it – oh well. Bad publicity for Blackboard would not be a bad thing. Maybe they would finally patch it then. :P

I think Robila tried to get in touch with them too, and they keept sending him to different departements untill he gave up…

Heheh. So you me and a select 20 other people know of this flaw. I even tried myself informing a blackboard person who had come to campus for a career fair. didn’t like it when i told him that his company made incompanent flawed software that they refuse to allow people to inform them of the bugs.

but hey, they have a monoply now. meaning that like windows, when a flaw is discovered and published, it could have wide spread problems.

i also want to point out that even though you haven’t said how the flaw can be exploited, the fact you made reference to the point it exists, means that someone out there will sit down and attempt to find it.

And to think… these are the people trying to TEACH todays youth.