Blackboard Learn Reviews

Blackboard is a great tool for communicating with students, distributing course materials, and recording student grades. The "one-stop shopping" approach makes it easy for professors to stay organized in each class, and it also makes it easy for students to stay organized. When used well, Blackboard allows you to do everything from communicating with students to uploading assignment sheets to sending class announcements.

As a writing professor, I especially appreciate the SafeAssign feature that checks student assignments for plagiarism. Once I started requiring my students to use SafeAssign, I found that plagiarism attempts dropped off significantly. (So did attempts to recycle papers from one course to another.) In addition, SafeAssign saves me a lot of leg work when students DO plagiarize -- it flags the suspect text as well as the source, so I don't have to hunt it down myself.

For me, Blackboard wasn't intuitive to learn. Even after 7 years of using it nearly ever day during the semester, I had some challenges making it do what I wanted it to do. I often spent far more time than I should have trying to customize things for my courses. But, as long as I stuck to the basic features -- which are also the ones I personally found most useful/beneficial -- Blackboard was a great tool for organizing my courses and keeping students on track.

My assignments and materials are organized in one place. As of the most recent update, it is now much easier to use than it used to be. Assigning assignments and adding details to classes has never been simpler. Now, it's much easier to use than it was before. The process of giving students feedback and organizing my responses is simple. It's also how I communicate with them. As a result, it's easy to refer back to them and remember what I said.

I also like that Blackboard integrates well with other apps. When it comes to presentations, I rely heavily on VoiceThread and Panopto. GoReact and Top Hat are also on my to-do list.

An update to the mobile app is still in order. There is a lot of work to be done on this project. On the web, the user experience was much better.

I prefer Blackboard Learn over other software that I have used in the past and recent events. The simplicity of the system ensures that it is easy to use for all generations, teacher and student, and all of those in between.

Right now, I do not think there is anything I would change.

Blackboard Learn allows me to track the progress of the students. If one of my students is falling behind on an assignment, it notifies me then I would contact the student about their missing assignment. These are the features that I like the most about Blackboard Learn.

Blackboard Learn does not handle large file sizes well. There was an incident where a student of mine couldn't hand in an assignment due to their file size being too big. Following that event, the student had to send me their assignment via email. Blackboard Learn should increase its file size limit in order to prevent this from happening again.

What I like the most about Blackboard Learn is the amazing and complete features it offers to its users.
I use this software for higher education (as a student) and it is very complete and reliable. I can track all my courses, appointments, works, grades, files and many more in the same place, which is perfect for me.
I also like the fact I can communicate with my teachers within this platform and the possibility to activate the email notifications for every course is a great add-up for this software.

What I like the least about this software is the User Interface (UI), as I consider the navigability could be better and the features could yet be more accessible and easier to use.
Other than that, I don't have any other "complaints" about Blackboard Learn.
I may mention that in the beginning of the pandemic, with the introduction of online classes, this software was a life-saver and my institution needed to contact the support team, who was very responsive and agile to solve all the issues at that time.

I like that if you're a power user and your students get into it, this is probably the only eLearning tool you will ever need. It has everything from homework assignments to actual video-conference; besides of the usual tools like forums and work groups. The online exams are very useful, specially if you don't want to manually grade tons and tons of tests.

I don't like the user interface. Most of the tools are one more click away than I think they should. Very useful things like the exams are really powerful, but creating them is so awkward that sometimes you prefer to just handle a document.

I know it extremely well, find it to be easy to operate, think its features are strong and easily accessible, and have had very few incidents with students being totally baffled by it. We switched to Canvas this year, and I rue the day the decision was made.

The GUI for our version of Blackboard was extremely dated (we did not use Ultra, which frankly seems like a Canvas clone). I would offer the following analogy... Blackboard : Canvas :: PowerPoint : Keynote (... and I'm a PC user). It's boxy, somewhat drab, and looks a bit 'late Geocities // Fark.com'-era.

EVEN STILL: I don't mind it - I'd rather have functionality than aesthetics, which is the tradeoff made with Canvas.

DEADLY SERIOUS NOTE HERE: The BB Gradebook has always been, continues to be, and seemingly will forever remain an enormous hassle. It is slow, tedious to adjust, difficult to manage, and user unfriendly.

What I like the most about Blackboard Learn is the easy navigation of looking up my college courses. I am able to see what is due for each class on the calendar. I also love that I can get notifications that something is graded especially if it is for an assignment or test that I am waiting to see my grade.

One thing I don’t like about Blackboard is that there are outages and glitches sometimes and there is no notification about when it will be fixed or if it is ever going to be fixed. Another thing is the interface can be confusing to some people and may take some time to get used to.

Ability to share lecture recordings and instructional material.

The changes are in the wrong direction. Only 1 discussion folder. Moving from ability for instructors to customise the look and feel of a course to more standardization.

What I like most about blackboard is the item analyzer which help us educator to secure that test and assessment given to students are align with intended learning outcome an. I also like the respondus that secure honest and credible exams.

There is also no enough storage. Every upload of documents or videos occupy a huge amount of BB storage, thus we need to procure additional storage.

It's reliable. Rarely needed tech support. It's pretty easy to use most of the time. It meets the complex compliance and integration requirements of higher education.

Lack of customizability. Course templates were generic with little flexibility for how it appears. Also with so many versions and always changing things around, it can be frustrating because you're used to a different version. If you're not in an industry with a lot of compliance regulations (privacy, accreditation etc.) I'd stay away and use something lighter and more flexible.