In recent days, students have reported several glitches and slowed loading times when using Blackboard, causing inconveniences that affect their ability to submit quizzes and other assignments.
Though Blackboard, like any other technology, has been known to have issues in the past, students reported being unable to access their Blackboard accounts for upwards of three hours and many more reported general lag in the online program.
Students have yet to be made aware by the University whether this activity was an anomaly or one of Blackboard’s known problems, which are listed on the Hopkins student and faculty web portal.
Some students and faculty have begun to question whether Blackboard is the best resource when it comes to teacher-student communication.
“I think that Blackboard has been an effective way for me to learn class materials (in terms of accessing reading assignments and completing on-line assignments, etc),” junior Dennis Hong said. “However, those occasional errors have prevented me from having better preparation for my classes.”
Seeking an alternative to Blackboard, History Professor Pier Larson chose to build his own personal website and email system to be more efficient and less time consuming.
“I did use Blackboard in the past but is very cumbersome to use as a course website and I did not find it intuitive,” he said.
In place of Blackboard, some colleges are now turning to an alternative called Canvas, which is run by the company Instructure that self-describes as a Silicon Valley startup. Currently Instructure employees over 200 employees for Canvas and operates at 400 different schools, including a pilot program at the University of Washington to gauge student and faculty interest. At the end of the school year 79 percent of faculty said they would recommend Canvas to other instructors, according to statistics posted on Instructure’s website.
