Likelihood to Recommend A school with a well-established technology imprint with their students (for example, ours is a BYOB school where every student has their own laptop and must bring it to school every day and where over 99% of our families have reliable broadband at home) is a reasonable scenario for using The arrogance and intransigence of the sales force is quite disconcerting… They are no longer the only game in town and don't yet realize it. Less well-off schools/families may find it a challenge if students must be on campus or at a public library in order to use the technology. Obviously, during the pandemic, this became problematic for some districts.
Read full review I think it is well suited for K-12 schools, especially for tracking student growth over time. The ability to easily upload state assessment results and produce pre-built reports provides teachers actionable data. The online assessment system is more appropriate for secondary (grades 6-12) students in our district due to the types of assessments our elementary (K-5) students complete. I have some experience with other systems and think that the illuminate software offers more flexibility in the types of data that can be stored.
Read full review Pros Blackboard Learn makes submitting assignments electronically simple and provides a variety of built-in Web-based tools like e-portfolios, wikis, and blogs that our students use to create their own content. Blackboard Learn is intuitive and easy to navigate from a students perspective Blackboard Learn has many integrations available for connecting this LMS to other tools we use at our institution. Read full review Easy to use Item banks Outstanding customer service. Reasonable pricing models. Integrates well with student info systems. Read full review Cons Blackboard Learn has some limitations when it comes to submissions It is not that user friendly, I had to spend some time to get a hang of it in the beginning I have been struggling a bit with deletion of manually added courses Meena B Information Technology Project Manager
Read full review Tech support seemed good but our main issue was never resolved. We received attention and someone was working on our issue, but they could never figure out why our student count was off for 1 grade level even though they said our data looked great. The customized reports were powerful, but there was so much to learn for the average administrative user, like a principal, to get the detailed data they need. You would have to have a dedicated person to create customized reports. At some point, our representative just stopped calling and there was no further contact. Then our rep left the company and the new rep only sent one email notifying us of the change. That was almost a year ago. Read full review Likelihood to Renew There are several aspects of
Desire2Learn that outweigh the benefits of using Blackboard. I find that the
Desire2Learn system is a bit more user friendly and looks more up-to-date. However, the decision to renew systems is not up to me because the entire University uses the same system. Regardless, I think I would choose
Desire2Learn over Blackboard because of its improved user interface.
Read full review Usability It is very usable for both faculty and students. The interface is pretty intuitive and most students can use it without a lot of additional training. Faculty do need some training to effectively use the interface, but they usually get it pretty quickly. We have had to create some additional programming to give faculty a way to delve deeper into the content.
Read full review Illuminate DnA is a very usable system. A few items to learn and set up can be a bit time-consuming. However, once set up it is easy to use and powerful for a school that staff can master quickly. It has more features then we actually use but I hope we will over time.
Read full review Support Rating My Blackboard support comes from the university I work with. They are responsive--eventually... but it takes them sometimes a week to respond to a reported issue. For example, I reported 2 issues last week and one was resolved and I was contacted about one still open option today. That is too long for a tech issue. I have not contacted any support offered directly by Blackboard, which may be a completely different experience altogether.
Read full review Our issue was never resolved so that we could use the software to produce accurate reports. Their tech department looked into the issue several times and could never figure out why our student was off and then they just closed the case. They confirmed we were performing the correct steps to load the data and they confirmed our data looked accurate. Great, but again why was our student count off?
Read full review Implementation Rating Blackboard's Managed Hosting was top-notch in getting us up and running quickly.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Coursera offers a variety of modules in which a team is able to work on then, but [Blackboard Learn] offers more options to understand how are the team members developing and which tasks have offered a harder challenger for them. [Blackboard Learn] also offers a variety of reports that can be generate by a team lead.
Read full review Illuminate DnA offers more flexibility and additional features that our previous Data Director system offered. We were looking for a system that offered an online assessment portal and the ability to create elementary standard-based report cards when we selected the illuminate DnA software. We were impressed with the ability to easily create custom reports and liked the comprehensive student profile page.
Read full review Return on Investment At one of the institutions that I worked for, the ROI was excellent for the number of users we were serving; however, I could not speak to other instances as I was not aware of the overall cost of the contract. Read full review Better handle on student achievement. Clarity around achievements on specific standards. Read full review ScreenShots Blackboard Learn by Anthology Screenshots