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At universities, educational software largely means enterprise-scale, expensive, feature-stuffed "learning management systems." Blackboard has the majority of the market, but professors and students are about as enthusiastic about its various updates, crashes, and bugs as people are with the latest version of Windows (Blackboard scores a whopping 93% "hated" rating on website Amplicate ). Last week, a new alternative was launched--built by students--that looks and works a lot more like the social platforms people actually choose to use in their spare time. The core of the site is a constantly updated social Stream where instructors and students can conduct discussions or easily post rich media. Picture a cleaner-looking Facebook news feed, centered on a single academic theme, or a group Tumblr blog where each picture, question, or video can accumulate its own discussion in the attached comment thread.
The Ingenious Business Model Behind Coursekit, A Tumblr For Higher Education
The Third Bit » Writing Blackboard Plugins
Two of my students (Billy Chun and Darren Jung) spent the term writing a plugin for Blackboard , the Java-based learning management system (LMS) that the University of Toronto is moving to. Here are there experiences: Billy Chun: When first attempting to develop a ‘Hello World’ plug-in for Blackboard, I needed to do some research to find the basic structure of a Blackboard plug-in.
