Advice to Baruch College

If  I were serving as a new media consultant for our College, my top priority would be overhauling the new media communications platform used by professors and students – Blackboard Learn. I’ve already written previously on the severe drawbacks of the software and how it hampers learning. To recap, the five major flaws of the service:

1. Blackboard has a notoriously cluttered interface that makes navigation cumbersome.
2. It’s a Web 1.0 content management system disguised as a virtual learning environment, and one of the most prominent examples of featuritis.
3. The learning curve to publish content on Blackboard is precipitously high for both the professors who have to orient the site, and for the students of varied technical backgrounds.
4. Communication, the main purpose of Blackboard, is not its forte. The hierarchical displays and the thread commenting features are disorienting.
5. Even though most students access Blackboard from multiple platforms, user experience is not adequately synchronized between mobile and desktop.

In addition to the pitfalls, there are also missed opportunities. Blackboard falls flat as a platform for supplementing courses or delivering hybrid/online courses. Any platform these days should use machine learning to adapt teaching to a student’s distinct learning style to maximize results, such as by incorporating adaptive learning services from a company such as Knewton. Despite the fact that the overall curriculum is standardized, individual quizzes and diagnostic tests should be tailored to an individual student’s strengths and weaknesses.

In order to achieve our greater aim of helping students reach their full potential, course software should rise to the occasion. Blackboard needs to be replaced with a cost-effective and unified learning experience across multiple platforms. This kind of technology will most definitely enrich the learning experience of our faculty and students and enable us to have an innovative edge among all B-schools.