By Borke Obada-Obieh
Blackboard is a company that develops learning management systems
for institutions. They offer many software solutions and boasts of having a
very large customer base. Based on their official website, 80% of the world’s
academic institutions that were highly ranked by Times Higher Education, made
use of their solutions as at 2014 [1]. They further explain that their
solutions are being used in 1 of 3 US school districts and they currently have
a subscriber base of 20 million students [1]. It is however unclear what exact
solution is being utilized by such large amount of people.
The University of Ottawa (uOttawa) makes use of a customized
version of one of their software solutions, Blackboard Learn, for the school’s
Student Portal. A user interface evaluation was carried out on uOttawa’s
customised version of Blackboard Learn and a number of usability issues were discovered.
However, it is unclear if these issues are peculiar to uOttawa’s Blackboard
Learn or the generalised version.
The participants involved in the
evaluation were six students from another university who have previously never
used Blackboard Learn. This blog post presents the major problems that were
identified by participants in the user evaluation and also by the researcher. The
problems identified have been grouped based on the usability principles described
in Dr. Timothy C. Lethbridge class notes [2]. The post also illustrates instances of how these principles
were violated, and possible solutions to the problems that were identified.
