Blackboard Instructor

I use both Blackboard and Canvas between four universities and colleges. I was excited when one school provided me with an iPad. I went 95% digital for my on ground courses. I am already teaching and have been for years. The issues I am shaving with this app is mostly grading. Once I open an assignment and use my Apple pen, I have to close and reopen the assignment to get to the next page. This is irritating being an English teacher. I can do this at least once before the assignment does not fully load. Even after rebooting my iPad, it still will not fully load in the box. I did not want to go back to hard copies as being able to grade on my iPad is convenient and less wear and tear on me for not having to carry all those papers. It would be great if someone can check into this and fix it.

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The interface could definitely be easier to use, particularly when trying to look at discussion boards… There’s no clear way to tell whether you have unread posts, the mechanism for going into replies is not intuitive, etc. From the course selection list, the app doesn’t allow you to look at your upcoming courses. While I was trying to design my summer course using the web interface, I was unable to use the app to see what the app experience would be like. That seems fairly ridiculous... to have to wait until my course is officially available to students to know what that course will look like on their mobile devices. There’s no mechanism to use voice or video from your phone to record anything for the class and post it. It’s wildly frustrating to be on the same device as the app record a video or a voice memo to my students, then have to download it to a computer to upload to my Blackboard class rather than just use the app that’s on the same device I’m recording with. Students should be able to do the same to make it as convenient as possible for them to engage with me and one another.

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How can you tell me with a straight face that this is an app geared towards instructors—when it doesn’t even allow instructors the minimal functionality of being able to see (much less edit) student grades??!!! Sorry, but a classroom application for instructors that has no functionality for viewing student grades is an exercise in uselessness that reflects complete incompetence on the part of the developers. Has even one of these developers ever taught a course? I’d vote ‘no’ on the lack of any real functionality in this app. This app is complete garbage. Junk. Don’t even waste your time on it if you are an instructor. I don’t understand, in this day and age, how Blackboard could be so backwards as to release this app. Game developers are absolutely pushing the limits of mobile technology with advanced 3D rendering, etc., and Blackboard doesn’t have the competence to even be able to let an instructor see grades on a mobile. How embarrassing for the developers. More or less an advertisement of how incompetent they are at creating even a halfway decent app.

Logging in with a password manager is buggy (won't work the first time you try to use iCloud Keychain) and doesn't work at all with Lastpass (even when you manually search for the matching item) -1 star. Otherwise this would have been 4 stars. For me as this app has very little utility. The primary thing I check Blackboard for with any frequency is to find out whether any students are badly behind and notify those students. For this the app is pretty useless. For autograde items and items which I have already graded, I can see the average, and for assignments I can see the grades for individual students. There's no way to see individual student grades on quizzes. I can see individual student grades on assignments, but I have to remember which students missed each assignment to see if it was the same students who missed other assignments. Needless to say that doesn't work very well. Please please give us a version of Grade Center that works on mobile, even if it is read-only. Or a Predict app, or a version of Predict that doesn't take 30 seconds to start up.

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I only used this app to send announcements. The browser version always had terrible formatting, but somehow the app version stripped most of the formatting out and made things look good. It was honestly the only good thing about the app. I would type the email for the class in a different program because of how incredibly slow this app is. And then I could copy/paste the email into the app to make it look nice before sending it out. But with the recent update, it now only strips out spacing between paragraphs. The fonts are no longer uniform. The bolding/underlining is still there. It just removes the spacing. And it does it AFTER the email goes out, so I didn’t know until my class got a huge brick of text. I wish I could say I was surprised. But this is what I’ve come to expect from Blackboard.