Higher priced LMS, but if you can budget it, Blackboard Learn is WELL worth the expense!
April 22, 2021
Higher priced LMS, but if you can budget it, Blackboard Learn is WELL worth the expense!

Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Blackboard Learn
- Blackboard Connect
- Blackboard Collaborate
Overall Satisfaction with Blackboard Learn
We use Blackboard Learn as a course management system for providing learning content to our students, facilitating collaboration, and streamlining communications between faculty and students. We use it institution wide. Blackboard Learn allows us to deliver courses to our students 100% online, hybrid or as a means to organize and disseminate materials for in person courses.
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.
Cons
- Blackboard Learn requires cloud-based SaaS configuration which we were not set up for initially. This was an additional step for us before deployment
- Some new release courses lack features available in legacy courses, this tends to be a problem when we roll out upgrades, as we need to extend our testing phase to ensure all courses are functional
- Blackboard Learn is expensive. In comparison to its competition, there really isn't a reason (other than name recognition) that the software should be as much higher priced from it's competition as it is.
- The admin dashboard is key. There are all of the admin controls and settings features you would expect and need from a system like this.
- Ease of course development. From dragging and dropping courses, to importing them from other popular cloud based storage accounts, it is easy to set up new courses
- Assessing in Blackboard. It comes with a strong selection of question types and customizable formulas. Questions are able to be graded automatically (or manually) with options for sharing correct answers and adding explanations. Questions can be randomized and exported for reporting.
- Strong, student friendly LMS is an attractive feature for our incoming students as well as continuing students. This helps our enrollment numbers.
- Blackboard Learn is expensive but also requires a great deal of training time in order to deploy the product and to educate future users. This is a difficult expense due to the differentiation in learning speeds.
- Blackboard Learn has positively contributed to our goals of facilitating collaboration among our online and hybrid learning cohorts.
Blackboard is the all around better fit for our intuition. It provides the "bells and whistles" we require in having a diverse faculty and flexibility in course delivery. The "bells and whistles" aren't cheap, but we have found that budgeting for this large expense has been more than worth it for us.
Do you think Blackboard Learn by Anthology delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Blackboard Learn by Anthology's feature set?
Yes
Did Blackboard Learn by Anthology live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Blackboard Learn by Anthology go as expected?
No
Would you buy Blackboard Learn by Anthology again?
Yes
Comments
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