The Usability of Blackboard Learn

The Blackboard platform is one that is familiar to many students across the country. It is used as an online educational service that helps to create a different and "better" teaching and learning experience. Through Blackboard Learn, teachers and professors are able to post assignments and documents that they use alongside their teaching. While the idea of this service is one that would appear to be beneficial to many, the actual usability of the platform is where things begin to falter.

I tested the usability of the Blackboard Learn through these four categories: Ease of Navigation, Appeal, Ease of Use, and Accessibility.

Accessibility: The Blackboard Learn website for Fordham University is not one that is pretty simple to get to once you know how to do it. It can be accessed through the Fordham portal, or with the web address: www.fordham.blackboard.com. The website address is easy to remember, but it is important to include the school, or else the user will be taken to a completely different website. Once one has access to the website, they can continue to use the service. Blackboard also has an application that can be downloaded on phones and tablets, making it even more accessible "on-the-go". The application is useful and has a lot of the same features as the full website.

Ease of Navigation: Blackboard Learn is easy enough to navigate. It definitely takes some getting used to. The courses that the student is enrolled in are listed to the right of the home page. All of the courses that the user has ever been enrolled in. The courses are shown with their full complete name. For example, my philosophy class is listed as "10638.HPLC1001L01.202020: Spring 2020 - HONORS PHILOSOPHY (HPLC-1001-L01)". This can make it hard to locate at times because the main word "Philosophy" is in between various other numbers and letters. At the top of the screen there is a series of sub-pages for the website. Including "courses, "student help", and "notifications". Each page shows their own information depending on what the user needs. The application on the other hand is a lot more concise and easier to navigate. Everything is labeled more clearly and it takes less clicks to get to the thing that the user wants.

Ease of Use: The Blackboard Learn website has some faults when it comes to how easy it is to use. There is a lot of information shared on a single page, making it more difficult to view everything. There are a lot of tools within the Blackboard Learn platform and it can sometimes be overwhelming considering it is supposed to create an easier experience for learning and teaching. It is relatively simple to upload and turn in documents, as soon as the user is able to find the assignment first. It is difficult because much of widgets or tools that are on the main page often aren't consistently used as much as other tools that take more work to get to (at least in my experience). Each student's and teacher's learning/teaching experience may be different and Blackboard does not allow for that variety.

Appeal: The visual appeal of this platform is quite boring, whereas the practical appeal is understandable. The Blackboard Learn service provides a one-stop place for learning and teaching. Because of its abilities to administer tests and quizzes, post assignments, show grades and have discussions, the service seems like the perfect place for students and teachers. Visually, on the other hand, it does not come across so strongly. For each course, everything appears to be quite cluttered, especially if the professor is one to post a lot of announcements and assignments. All of the text is quite small, making it hard to read and locate what you want.

Conclusion: Overall, the usability of the Blackboard Learn platform is not not too bad. Of course it has its problem, but it gets the job done. It could get the job done better and more efficiently but it works fine for its purpose. To make the platform better, there should be more customizable features, allowing students to change their view so that it works better for each user individually. It needs a reworking on navigation and just an overall redesign to make it function more smoothly. For its purpose, Blackboard Learn makes online learning and teaching a different, but maybe not enjoyable, experience.