Item: Blackboard Collaborate
Rating: 10
Author: Bridget Powell

Overall Satisfaction with Blackboard Collaborate

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I can't answer as to how it's used organization-wide, as we are a large state university. However, our small department uses it primarily for meetings where we need to share something visual, usually a course. It's very helpful, because it allows us to control access to our courses by being able to demo them rather than grant guest access.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Blackboard Collaborate allows for simultaneous video, chat, audio, and sharing and does so in a very efficient way.
I really like the feature that allows you to record the entire event, and how well that recording captures the session.
It is generally easy to use, once it's open.

Cons

Trying to get started can get very confusing. If you've already downloaded it once, sometimes it doesn't seem to find the previous downloads.
When you're downloading, there's no indication that anything's happening until suddenly a small screen appears. This has caused me and others to start the download again and end up with two different windows open.
Screen sharing can be glitchy - the person sharing can't necessarily see how fast (or how slow) the scrolling is happening on the other end. I usually have a second computer set up so I can "see" as both the facilitator and a participant.

Return on Investment

It's definitely allowed us to gain customers by being able to demo our courses and talk through them.

Likelihood to Recommend

Blackboard Collaborate works well to bring people together for online learning sessions. In my previous job we used it to bring together students from all over the world to participate in group work and discussions, and it works well for that. It can be a little iffy trying to use it to screen or app- share, as you can't always tell what the participants are seeing, and when you have students trying to connect from, for example, a forward operating base in Afghanistan, the connection can be slow.

Blackboard Collaborate Feature Ratings

Comments

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Collaboration at the next level