This past Fall semester, I taught part-time at Loyola College in Maryland. Loyola College uses the on-line course management system Blackboard, version 5. I used Blackboard for my abstract algebra class and found it to be useful but frustrating at times. A colleague who wishes to remain anonymous gave me this list of reasons not to use Blackboard.

This past Fall semester, I taught part-time at Loyola College in Maryland. Loyola College uses the on-line course management system Blackboard, version 5. I used Blackboard for my abstract algebra class and found it to be useful but frustrating at times. A colleague who wishes to remain anonymous gave me this list of reasons not to use Blackboard.

Why I Won't Use Blackboard

1. The courses are not viewable to the general public even if I want them to be.
2. The courses are not viewable even to Loyola if you are not enrolled. I was subbing for another instructor and could not view the information that was on Blackboard for that course!
3. No one can search the web and find my course site.
4. The gradebook takes too long for data entry.
5. The gradebook cannot handle complicated algorithms for computing grades.
6. It cannot handle viewing graphs or equations well, even for quizzes and such.
7. If you teach multiple sections of the same course, you either have to maintain separate sites or one-by-one add users from all sections to one site. (I was told that Blackboard 6 will allow copying from course to course, but you still have to do it manually.)

For my own course, I created a separate website and used Blackboard only to display grades and store backup copies of course materials that I posted on the main website. I found the Blackboard Gradebook to be very slow to use, requiring multiple mouse clicks and waits to set up even a simple homework assignment. The grading methods allowed by Blackboard 5 are indeed limited. In order to weight homeworks as 35 percent of the course grade, I had to one-by-one assign each of the 13 homeworks a weight of 2.69 percent each. I'm hoping Blackboard version 6 will help with some of these limitations

An alternative to Blackboard recommended to me is WebWork from the University of Rochester Mathematics Department.