Good product for online instruction
February 13, 2021

Good product for online instruction

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Blackboard Collaborate

Instructors have many options to choose from for doing online instruction, but Blackboard Collaborate is the easiest to use in our LMS. With the advent of COVID-19, all of our classes had to pivot to online last spring on very short notice. Blackboard Collaborate allowed us to do that relatively easily.

Pros

  • Ability to share screen/audio
  • Easily accessible through LMS
  • Easily record/play back sessions
  • Polling tools
  • Accessibilty (desktop, mobile app, telephone for audio)

Cons

  • The interface needs a rework—some things are not at all intuitive. A surprising number of students needed help finding the session recordings, for example.
  • Connectivity can be an issue (dropped audio, frozen video, getting disconnected). This is more likely due to the network than to Blackboard Collaborate.
  • Better polling tools.
  • Picture-in-picture to share screen and camera (of the speaker, for example) at the same time.
  • Allowed swift transition to online instruction when COVID-19 hit.
  • A bit of a learning curve for both instructors and students.
  • The ability to record/playback sessions is very good.

Do you think Blackboard Collaborate delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Blackboard Collaborate's feature set?

No

Did Blackboard Collaborate live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Blackboard Collaborate go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Blackboard Collaborate again?

Yes

Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), MATLAB
It's good but could use some improvement in the ease-of-use category. The interface is not bad, but not always the most intuitive, which makes it a bit more difficult to learn. Performance is very good, limited mainly by the quality of the internet connection. Having the ability to use the phone for audio helps with that.
The online training videos are very helpful. They are usually pretty short, which means that they sometimes don't cover all the details I need to see.
It's good for instruction. I could see that it might not be as good a fit for meetings. The ability to share screen and camera (separately) is very helpful. It would be nice if we could share both at the same time (like picture-in-picture, with the speaker over in one corner of the screen).

Blackboard Collaborate Feature Ratings

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