OUR VIEW: New Blackboard or old, it needs to be used
With the old adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” we look to the new system, Instructure Canvas, that will be replacing Blackboard in 2012. After learning about this new program though, maybe Blackboard is broken and we just didn’t know any better.
The current Blackboard program has not been updated in over a year because the company knew it was going to be decommissioned. No wonder it seems ghetto to anyone who has used it. This new program is supposed to be more user-friendly and easier to communicate with other classmates. Teachers will be able to send out messages and students will be able to receive that message through whatever method they want, be it texting, e-mail or Facebook notification. Some would say this is just going to intermix into our personal lives, but the new program gives us a choice, so it can still just be a typical e-mail if that is what we choose.
One nice thing about being able to choose how we want professors communicating with us is that instead of professors only using our university e-mails they get through Banner, the ones that some of us check maybe once a week, we will get everything they send out in a form we will be checking. No more waking up early to get to class only to find out once we get there it has been canceled.
Something that will always be a problem is professors not using this new program. Students won’t be able to utilize anything if half of their classes are still not being supported. If we can’t get professors to use Blackboard now, what makes anyone think they will use Instructure? New or not, if professors aren’t implementing it in their classrooms, the system is useless to students. If the school really wants to make things easier for students, they would require professors to use them.
As students, consistency is our best friend. It won’t matter what kind of a program USU picks up if professors continue to stick to their old ways and not embrace something that could potentially save everyone a lot of time. Hopefully faculty will take advantage of the training workshops being set up for Instructure and realize we aren’t living in 1995. Technology is definitely evolving, it just makes sense that as a university, including our professors, we evolve too.