And while I’m in blogging mode, I thought this comparison of Blackboard and Moodle, effectively the two leading VLEs in the sector, was interesting. Of course it’s only one case, but it suggests while both seem adequate to the job, Blackboard seems to be somewhat ahead on ease of use. That’s quite significant, since a VLE won’t be used at all if colleagues find it difficult to use.
Personally, I’ve no strong feelings one way or the other about which VLE we should use, if indeed we should use one at all. I do think the framework that VLEs provide is quite helpful, especially if one is not a particularly confident user of technology, but we certainly shouldn’t be confined by them. If there’s a product that does something better than Blackboard, (or Moodle for that matter) and we can resource it, and it’s universally accessible, (as far as that’s possible with any technology) then we shouldn’t discourage anyone from using it.
Interesting, we’ve just been shown that diagram in the Blackboard Conference.
I had a feeling it might find its way on to a screen there! Hope you’re enjoying the conference.
Other VLEs are available! Canvas is my current favourite.
There’s also http://www.coursekit.com/ which looks quite nice (and simple).
Indeed there are lots of VLEs out there. and, if we were planning a change we should evaluate all of them.
There again, there is something to be said for having a large community of users to draw on. I certainly wouldn’t have been looking at BB9.1 so closely this year if Blackboard hadn’t responded to the kicking they got from early adopters of 9.1 at the Durham Users Group meeting in January 2010. (This year, the feeling from the same people was that the early problems had been resolved and it was now more or less stable)
Wow, that is one complicated page of diagrams.
Does Blackboard 9 (does Moodle? Do any “VLE”s?) perform any better in terms of allowing direct links to individual pages or bits of content, compared to the current version of Bb? C.f. Alex’s vitriolic post at: http://lncn.eu/nu4
Er. Well. It sort of does. Try this one – http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/webapps/cmsmain/webui/_xy-90351_1-tid_pITo7pIT
If you out something in the content store and give it a “pass”, it creates a rather nasty looking, but public URI (like that). I seem to remember someone from Blackboard saying that the reason for the complex URI was to do with security – you might want to give an external examiner access to a site, for example, but you may not want the great unwashed coming across the site by accident.