Learning Management System (LMS) design must address the needs of three (or more) user audiences, including: teachers, students, administrators, and sometimes guardians.
Blackboard dominates the LMS market, through organic design evolution and acquisitions. I was familiar with WebCT… and then Blackboard acquired that product. Blackboard has even invested (and bought out) several Moodle service providers. I’m sorry, but buying the open source competition seems problematic. (I’m biased: I liked Moodle a lot when I last had the opportunity to use it.)
Now, there’s Blackboard Ultra. It’s all about designing for the student experience on phones and tablets.
Ugly Announcements
I use announcements to remind students of deadlines and project milestones. Usually, I do this as a list or outline.
The benefits of announcements in Blackboard include that the content appears online, when students access the course shell, and the announcements are emailed to students.
For some reason, the university configuration for Ultra is centering all text of the emailed copies of announcements. That doesn’t happen to me on another Ultra account, so I’m wondering why this university’s configuration centers everything. Seriously. Paragraphs become these long centered blocks. Even worse, from a usability and experience perspective, lists are centered, so the bullets, numbering, or outlining becomes a mess.
I struggle to read. Why would I want to read an email that’s entirely centered? As a student, I’d give up reading announcement emails.
Keyboard Users Beware
I’m a keyboard user. I don’t want to take my hands off the keys. Don’t make me move my hands and break my work rhythm.
Blackboard Ultra is not keyboard friendly, so I’m using my trackball a lot. The UI emphasizes devices, at the expense of accessibility. It’s “accessible” if you have a lot of patience with mobility challenges. Try to use Ultra without touching a mouse. It’s ultra tedious. Definitely not alternative input or keyboard friendly. Every UI/UX person should be required to test every system without touching an input device.
Tables… By Hand?
The editor configuration at the university no longer permits easy creation and editing of tables. Instead, you have to create an HTML content block and manually code tables. In other words, if your content has any need for tables, that entire content block needs to be coded as HTML. Yes, you can copy and paste from another HTML editor, which is how I work, but most teachers aren’t experts with Web technologies.
I have to believe this is an optional setting. There are too many good editors out there for online content, and most support directly editing HTML. Why in the world would you remove table editing and creation from the editor? When I install an editor plug-in or add-on, I try to configure the editing experience so it reminds users of Microsoft Word. I don’t turn off most features.
Tables need certain features for usability and accessibility, yes. That’s not a reason to stop using tables. Instead, focus on making accessible tables.
The university training, however, skips some of the best practices. WCAG 2.x suggests using the table caption tags, especially for screen readers. Also, Blackboard seems to ignore style conflicts, so only some of the table CSS functions within the shell. That’s reasonable; WordPress and Drupal also ignore some table styling. I would insist on including the caption tag in any training video for tables.
More Thoughts
Online education used to be better for disabled teachers and students. Now, it’s becoming a barrier. Ultra isn’t designed for my needs, so I have to assume it presents challenges to students with cognitive and physical differences.
There aren’t many options, unfortunately. I hope Blackboard fixes Ultra’s flaws but past experience doesn’t give me hope.