In need of an upgrade
To the Editor:
From a teacher's perspective, Blackboard seems great. It avails the need to do the advanced work necessary to prepare a bulkpack, allows the addition of readings as the semester progresses, obviates the headache of students pestering about when bulkpacks are going to be ready and saves a few trees, among other things.
But "great" is hardly a word that enters the mind when it comes to Blackboard. Blackboard seemingly can't support a large volume of users -- at times when the network is even slightly congested, it takes so much time to load each subsequent folder that by the time you get to your course document, you could have finished reading a hard copy version of the article.
And once you get to any course documents that are posted, the files, if they are scanned (which they usually are), are too small or too blurry on screen to read, leaving no choice but to print each reading anyway.
In addition to taking the student a lot of time to print out each reading, because most computer printers can't print back-to-front, it also wastes two (and sometimes four) times the amount of paper that a bulkpack would have taken, which ends up costing us more money in paper than a simple bulkpack would have.
This computerized "solution" to the wasted time, money and paper of bulkpacks only makes each of these problems worse. And it leaves me wondering what happens when the power goes out, or (perish the thought) the network goes down?
Jeff Graves AMES doctoral candidate
