Vista Failing "Blackboard" College Courses 207
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?"
Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it? (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:It was really late for me.. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's really a mess in educational software land. About 2/3rds of the web based edu apps we support on campus work in one browser, and one browser only. Sometimes it's Firefox, sometimes it's IE. Some apps are even pegged to a specific version for no apparent reason. We have to fake different UA strings in different labs just to get this stuff to run.
Don't get me started with the Adobe DRM crap that every edu app has fallen in love with. It's really easy on the users when they need to use two different browsers to get to different parts of the same frickin' website. Ugh.
University of Arizona's Wireless APs (Score:2, Interesting)
http://forum.oscr.arizona.edu/showthread.php?t=29
As of right now, Vista users wanting to surf encrypted have to google and find a copy of the Vista-compatible Cisco VPN Client 5.0 beta (the UA's sitelicense website still only has VPN Client 4.9, which is not Vista compatible) and connect to the UA's VPN over our unencrypted public wireless network.
Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it? (Score:5, Interesting)
* Learning Management System (LMS) software partially owned by Microsoft
http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm [humboldt.edu]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned
Re:Not so simple (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently came across an old CDR with a bunch of games. Most of them seemed to work, whether coded for DOS, Win 3.1 or 95. Except the old Microsoft games. They crashed hard when I tried to run them in current versions of Windows. I assume becasue MS used undocumented hooks to optimise for the then current Windows.
Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sorry, but after experiencing Blackboard in grad school, I would tend shift my suspicion to the incompetent developers and designers behind Blackboard, not the incompetent developers and designers behind Windows.
Re:It was really late for me.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Many schools still rely on Windows 98 machines for some programs, especially primary schools, as the software will only run on old versions of Windows. Some schools still make use of Acorn Archimedes computers because the software was that good. New computers are expensive, and schools in the UK simply do not have the budget to spend on luxuries such as Vista or XP. Schools, certainly in my county, do not get the advantages of Microsoft discounts because the educational authority appears to be sleeping with computer giants such as RM Nimbus or Viglen. The school is only allowed to buy its computers through these suppliers, and do not get a very good deal. The same companies also provide (well, resell I guess) broadband internet access - at an extortionate rate.
There is a third case with software - some software is written by ex-teachers that are very good programmers. Sherston software (http://www.sherston.com/) is one example of quality educational software that does things this way.
Vista == WinME (Score:3, Interesting)
The big question is when Vista will be declared a flop?
Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it? (Score:1, Interesting)
Blackboard Horrors (Score:1, Interesting)
What I remember personally is constant battles to keep all of the servers operational. It was a poorly written java/tomcat app that did not scale, and required 8 running app servers and a dedicated sql box (all dual xeons) just to handle about 250 concurrent connections. (We were testing a Moodle installation, that handled the same load running on an old dell workstation!)
The only reason we used Bb was a *cough* very expensive state contract which we had no control over.
Also lots of instructors arent very computer savvy, and retraining something even as simple as a web app can be cost prohibitive.
As a matter of fact Im looking for a place to take online classes right now to continue my education, and so far my only requirement is that we NOT use Blackboard.
As for Microsoft waffling, they should have just said "Not our problem", as many others here have noted.
They need to just take Bb out back and shoot it anyway.
Re:It was really late for me.. (Score:4, Interesting)
It insisted on Adobe Reader 7.0. Not Adobe Professional 7.0 which I had installed, not Adobe Reader 8, which Adobe had on their website, not Adobe 6 Reader on my laptop.
I hope sealed[media] gets eaten by a grue.
Sloppy coding, indeed. (Score:1, Interesting)
Fast forward about 8 months and the company started rewriting the system from ground up. The morons are still using ActiveX controls and coding everything around Internet Explorer 6. Despite claims that this time it really is platform independent, again, 1/2 the functions of the website still don't work outside of Internet Explorer 6 for Windows. So we have to have THREE web browsers on the Macs just so teachers can do scoring, attendance, and grades: Safari, Firefox, and IE 5. There is no one browser that will work all three features.
We got fed up and called Pentamation (the company that owns eSchool) so we could actually troubleshoot the problems in person on a Mac with Safari and Firefox. We explained to them that they need to stop using Internet Explorer 5 because it hasn't been updated in almost ten years. After asking them to find a Mac with a similar setup, they told us they don't have a Mac to test it on.