Vista Failing "Blackboard" College Courses

writertype writes "Although Blackboard is used to communicate between students and professors at virtually all of PC Magazine/Princeton Review's top 20 wired colleges, when run under a Vista environment users can see glitches. Moreover, IT departments told PC Mag that if Blackboard is used with Vista plus IE7, students can't communicate via the software. When asked why, Microsoft ... waffled. Blackboard says they'll have a fix in place by summer. Meanwhile, are there any other common college apps that Vista fails to work with?"

Not so simple

[robinjo]

I've been in the business since before the first Windows versions. Usually I make sure to do software so it works with any Windows version. That should be pretty easy as long as you use standard API.

Over the years I've noticed a trend: If you use Microsoft development tools, you end up having problems with backwards compatibility. Either their compilers so a lot of weird things or MS makes sure to break them so even the programmers have to upgrade.

Internet Explorer 7

[YutakaFrog]

My University uses WebCT a bunch. I was saddened when FireFox 2.0 came out, and it would pop up a window every time I logged in that said the browser was unsupported. Now, they've updated their software and FF2 is good to go. However, the homepage now has the following notice:

The latest version of Internet Explorer does not work well with WebCT. We encourage you to use vesion 6 or download Firefox and use that. We will post a list of knwon issues with this browser once we have them. This will only be temporary until WebCT can resolve the browser issues. Thank you, WebCT Staff

And that has been there a LOT longer than the FireFox alert was. :) Thank you, MicroSoft, for helping spread FireFox.

Re:It was really late for me..

[jimicus]

We have to fake different UA strings in different labs just to get this stuff to run.

Wouldn't it be easier just to have a web proxy rewrite the UA string? I'm 95% sure squid can do that.

Back on the topic of educational software though... ughh. I worked in a school for just one year and it was enough to convince me that the way to sell software to schools is to send every school in the country a flyer proclaiming yourself to be "specialists in the education market" - that way you could make a bunch of sales without having to actually produce a half-decent product.

I was later told that there's a reason for this. Educational software - certainly in the UK - is generally split into two camps.

On the one hand, you've got stuff written by computer people. It's generally reasonably easy to manage, can be rolled out across a network and is not too much hassle. But it's also generally lousy at getting a point across, so it's not very popular with teachers. Bit of a problem when ultimately it's the teachers who are going to work with it.

On the other hand, you've got programs written by teachers who happen to have an interest in computing. It's generally quite good at getting a point across (and is thus popular with teachers) but it was usually written by someone who's never had to think beyond the PC on their desk. So the installation instructions say "Go to every PC, insert the CD and type D:\setup". In extreme cases, you find all sorts of annoyances: like parts of the setup program have been hardcoded to assume it's being installed from CD and the CD-ROM drive is drive D. Calling the software manufacturer and pointing out that this isn't terribly practical when the software is to be installed on a few hundred workstations generally results in an answer of "Oh. Never thought of that. Never mind, it only takes 5 minutes to install."

Multiplying that 5 minutes by the number of PCs which need the software installed is left as an exercise for the reader.

In the interests of fairness, I should point out that this was a few years ago - before XP was released and MSIs became as common as they are today. But I would be astonished if you were to tell me that things have changed that drastically.

So much for Data Analysis

[j_f_chamblee]

It looks like many quantitative applications are currently not going to work on Vista, at least for now. Major statistical analysis, data mining and Geographic Information Systems tools that don't run on Vista include:

SPSS [e-academy.com], SAS [sas.com], MATLAB and SAP [mit.edu] and ESRI ArcGIS [esri.com]

Eh, this is no big deal, right? I mean, who really wants to know about facts and numbers? Especially when you are using a *computer*.

Re:*shrug*

[MaelstromX]

All the cool universities are switching to Sakai [sakaiproject.org], an open source system. We're getting it next school year at Georgia Tech, but tons of other schools [sakaiproject.org] have already begun using it.

Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it?

[ticklish2day]

The APIs are documented on MSDN. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/ [microsoft.com] is free. Have you heard of a little something called the internet?

Re:*shrug*

[hedrick]

Unfortunately Sakai also has a problem with Vista. The WebDAV interface doesn't work. I've looked in detail at the network exchanges and tried tweaking Sakai. As far as I can tell WebDAV just doesn't work reliably in Vista. There are two known protocol issues with the Windows redirector, but even after working around them on the server and making the registry change on the client that is needed to talk to non-MS servers, in many cases Vista never talks to the server. I don't see anything I can do on the server side to fix that.

The same problem existed in XP. However XP had a second implementation of WebDAV, that was part of "network places." It worked, mostly. That implementation has been removed in Vista. I tried to follow up on this with MS at around the time of the release. However they stopped responding. For the moment we're recommending that people running Vista use a shareware WebDAV client.

There may well be issues that need to be fixed by MS, not the application maintainers.

Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it?

[dhasenan]

There hasn't been a good reason so far to provide a consistent ABI for Linux kernel drivers. But the nVidia installer automatically recompiles the shim when necessary, so it doesn't make a real difference.

Re:The icing on the cake...

[torok]

That's not true. "WebCT Vista" was out *years* before Microsoft decided on the name Vista for their next generation of Windows. Not only that, but WebCT was a completely separate company, Blackboard's direct competitor at the time, and it was swallowed up by Blackboard just over a year ago.

Blackboard

[loconet]

I'm a professional web developer. I've worked in the field for 5+ years and can tell a decent web application by just using it for a while. I have recently gone back to University and have gotten the chance to use Blackboard. My school uses it for everything from general announcements, to posting marks, posting of assignments, etc. While it does the minimum necessary job most of the time, it is a mediocre package IMO. The interface is very inconsistent, very confusing to navigate, glitches are experienced by students and teachers alike every term. I have yet to experience a single term in which profs do not have problems posting assignments, documents, etc. Somehow Blackboard always manages to leave half of the class out. The smarter profs make use of their own University web space to create a simple html page where they post their information. Whenever blackboard is involved, it is generally a messy experience.

That being said, why the hell does a web application break with an Operating System update? Is Microsoft at fault here? Did they mock around with how POST/GET variables get sent to the server or how the browser accepts server responses? Are cookies randomly getting erased from IE? CSS/HTML glitches in the new IE rendering the pages useless? Or is this Blackboard's own code depending on some obscure ActiveX/IE functionality that is no longer there in Vista and thus violating the #1 reason why web applications are so useful? - They are supposed to work everywhere, no matter what OS we use! I'm thinking it's the latter.

Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it?

[Viper Daimao]

The article is sparse on technical details, so I've have to guess that the problems is with Vista's new user account privlidge setting where you're running as a standard user all the time (similar to sudo), combined with IE7 running in protected mode. The workaround probably involved moving the blackboard domain to trusted sites and maybe making some changes with the security settings.

Re:It was really late for me..

[Anonymous Coward]

Try moodle. It works fine in every browser. Many schools are switching. http://www.humboldt.edu/~bboard/ [humboldt.edu] and https://ilearn.sfsu.edu/login/ilearn_provost.htm [sfsu.edu]

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