So, Blackboard 9 has an Assignments feature, Calendar, and Tasks.
You might think, that if I created an Assignment, and gave it a Due Date, maybe it would automatically show as a Task and on the Calendar. Maybe, from the Calendar, you could automatically click to go to the Assignment where the handout and instructions are.
But you’d be wrong.
Okay, let’s dial back my expectations. Calendar and Tasks are both about helping students manage their time, so maybe Tasks will automatically be put on the Calendar even if there is no integration with Assignments.
Still wrong.
Oh hey, the new course home page offers direct reminders to Calendar and Tasks. That’s cool, but wait— Gee, Calendar only shows stuff in the next 7 days. And Tasks shows a list, but you have to click More to see the due dates.
Seems sub-optimal.
Hey, how about a “download calendar events and import into my calendar” button. JUST KIDDING! Blackboard would never be that useful.
Despite knowing how screwed up this is, I decided to enter all the assignments as Tasks, and the major due dates in the Calendar. More crappy decisions made by the Blackboard designers:
- all new tasks default to Low Priority. Really?
- default shows 6 tasks per page. WTF? Plenty of room on the page.
- doesn’t list My Tasks in date order, but in creation order. Too bad I skipped Essay One first time around, hope my students aren’t depending on this bullshit system.
Damning with faint praise: BB 9 does appear to have improved something such I’m willing to even press the little buttons to experiment with these features, instead of just logging out as soon as possible. On the other hand, I’m avoiding doing syllabi, so it didn’t really jump a high bar there….
Fucking Blackboard.
Prone to Laughter 
6 January 2010 at 3:23 am
I’m a charter member of the I Hate Blackboard fan club, so I really enjoyed your post. OTOH, apparently Northern Clime has switched to an even worse CMS.
6 January 2010 at 6:34 am
I can’t believe there is a worse CMS. Although, @jliedl sure hates something called WebAssign, but that seems related to grades. But BB does have a WebAssign feature.
Supposedly my school is pondering Moodle to save money. Even if it’s crap, at least it’d be free crap instead of expensive monopolistic crap.
8 January 2010 at 5:13 am
Just tried to set a Task as completed. Does not work. FUBB. (Fuck you, Blackboard)
19 April 2010 at 6:03 am
Blackboard 9 is an amazingly crumby system. They added an unnecessary extra step to the process of uploading files for assignments. A substantial number of my students are now failing to click the Attach File button. I have to keep sending reminders that their files didn’t get uploaded. So they get ticked off, and I can understand how they feel.
When you sort the rows in the Grade Center, the sorting gets lost after you grade a student’s assignment. However it doesn’t revert to the default sorting, it goes into some other sorting based on unknown criteria. Bottom line, you have to sort the rows every single time if you want to continue with that sorting.
With previous versions of Blackboard, you could get the date an assignment was submitted. No more unless there’s some feature that’s not at all obvious. I asked Dr C about it, but received no response.
I’m beginning to think about going to an open source system. Our local tech support people won’t let me add people who are not enrolled at my school, so that would be a way to get around that. It would be a lot of work though.
1 September 2011 at 7:26 am
Totally belated, but in Bb 9, by doing a File Download All (the thing that creates a zip file of all assignment attachments), I do get a screen that shows when each attachment was submitted. Don’t know if that helps.
10 September 2010 at 10:50 pm
I HATE blackboard so much.
I just had a mental breakdown because of it. I hate hate hate hate hate it.
I hate that I have to trust a computer and the web to take care of my papers and my assignments. I miss the old days where you took your tests with a number 2 pencil and you stayed up all night typing a paper to physically hand it in to the prof. You dont know how many times I have spents weeks at a time on a paper and then submitted it to blackboard (like our prof told us to do) and blackboard deleted…AND lost it…and i got an F.
I hate blackboard so much.
21 December 2010 at 8:39 am
Yes the Calendar and Tasks are both about helping students manage their time,post is superb to read.
1 June 2011 at 9:05 pm
Thank you, thank you, thank you for this post. Good to know I’m not alone! We’re just switching from WebCT CE 8 to Blackboard 9 (supposedly because blackboard.com insists). In WebCT assignment do automatically link to the calendar if you select that option. In WebCT you can have a calendar event cover multiple days (such as several days to take a n exam in a web class). In BB, apparently I have to enter each date separately. AND I can’t link the event to the review sheet or other materials. And I can’t have more than one column, so my students are forced to scroll a lot (I know they won’t). Why did Blackboard buy WebCT if not to steal all it’s good features?
Moodle BTW is a nice system – simple, easy to set up and run on your own. I’ve been using it for years b/ca WebCT didn’t have wikis. If BB keeps driving me crazy, I’m going to run my own set up of Moodle and just not use it.
22 July 2011 at 5:11 pm
I’m in. My disgust for Blackboard is growing and growing. So many of the changes we need are so simple. I just was moved off of Blackboard Vista (the old WebCT) by my university, and Assignments had a little check box that you clicked to show them on the Course Calendar.
31 August 2011 at 4:05 pm
Yep – I’m in the club. I actually loved BB8, but this BB9 crap is for the birds and I hope they are buzzards who eat it alive. The calendar is useless, the to-do list is useless, the task list is misleading and causing my students to say even more often “I didn’t know anything was due!” I hate you BB!
15 January 2012 at 9:57 pm
I would be embarrassed to charge money for a product this bad. What it truly shocking is that this is the ninth version.
1 March 2012 at 12:24 am
I work at a university in the UK with an IT department that INSISTS there is no other option except Blackboard.
It is the biggest pile of unusable shite ever to have had the misfortune to have been brought into existence. Utter, utter, utter crap.
Staff hate it. Students hate it. But our IT geeks seem to love it. And the institution’s moronic senior managers (whose technological savvy peaked in something like 1972) simply believe whatever crap the IT guys tell them (i.e. “there is no alternative”).
I and my colleagues are pulling our hair out, but aside from a smart bomb through the front door of the IT department, there seems no solution to the cycle of crap IT decisions our institution is trapped in.
19 July 2012 at 6:55 pm
I also work at a UK university, and my experience is incredibly similar… (Same university, maybe?). The IT geeks / cretins here also can’t see beyond the last sales visit by a lacklustre IT rep hawking some shoddy “solution” with the latest 1990s UI. The view IT communicate to the even bigger cretins in senior management is: “There is no alternative to Blackboard. Nothing. Else. Exists.”
The only hope seems to be to develop a bio-weapon that rids the planet of dumb-as-shit university IT staff.
As you can see, with no prospect of any practical solution to the problems caused by BB and similar IT-led nightmares, day-dreaming about extreme measures is all we’ve got left…
12 December 2012 at 4:53 am
I’m so happy to see I’m not the only one so frustrated by this piece of crap software. The calendar is obviously an appointment-calendar module that has been ported over from some CRM program or something with no thought of how it might be useful in a pedagogical environment. The number one clue are the required start and end times for every event, which render it totally useless.
The biggest cluster for me though is the pathetic reporting features. Again, a clue to their clueless is the fact that the three of the four export options are for static formats, and that is obvioudly what the reports are designed to do is provide pretty pictures and pies charts. Again, its skirts sre showing. I’m betting it’s a barely adapted module from some marketing program. Of course what we need is way to export data that can be manipulated in a spreadsheet or database program, and while that is theoretically possible, BB9 makes it as difficult as one could imagine. Problem one is all the useless visual formatting — merged cells and the like — that must be stripped before one can even think of sorting or operating on the data. I could go, but I’m obviously preaching to the choir.
As for nothing else existing, my experience was that BB8 and even WebCT at least knew what they were trying to do. They many not have had the authoring capability of BB9, but they seemed to have been designed by someone who knew what teachers actually do.
10 September 2013 at 6:37 pm
It’s September 10, 2013, and in the 3 1/2 plus years since this post Blackboard is just as bad as ever. I haven’t even messed with the Calendar and Tasks, but I’ve run into plenty of painful problems of my own. I have literally been astounded several times at the ineptitude that went into making this program, but the most amazing part is that no matter how many times my jaw drops, there always seems to be one more boneheaded design decision, one more missing feature, one more unnecessary inconvenience.
7 December 2013 at 9:55 pm
4 years later and it still… wait.
Really? Calendars and tasks? That is NOTHING in the scheme of Blackboard Suck. SafeAssign just deleted all my students’ papers, along with the (stupid and shoddy) plagiarism reports The big problem with BB is that NOTHING IS EXPLAINED. What is that column on the left where checkmarks appear? It’s not labelled. By trial-and-error you can find out that it erases files. And then the files are gone. What does the “Download all submissions” button do? I have no idea, but it doesn’t download all submissions, or even any submissions.This is vampire-ware, sucking the life out of any place that uses it.
You want to know the secret of BB’s “success”? Look at their address– it’s in the lobbying district of Washington DC. They do everything by influence-peddling, and nothing by creating competent software.