@TELedvisors
@gamerlearner

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I don’t think that it is all, but understanding and engaging with the impacts, influences and resistances of change intersects with most of what edtech does - especially moving from pilot to sustainable  @PeterBryantHE

8:33 AM · Oct 22, 2019

Oct 11My university just announced that it’s dumping Blackboard, and there was much rejoicing. Why is Blackboard universally reviled? There’s a standard story of why "enterprise software" sucks. If you’ll bear with me, I think this is best appreciated by talking about... baby clothes! // There are two types of baby outfits. The first is targeted at people buying gifts. It's irresistible on the rack. It has no fewer than 18 buttons. At least 3 people are needed to get a screaming baby into it. It's worn once, so you can send a photo to the gifter, then discarded. // Other baby outfits are meant for parents. They’re marked "Easy On, Easy Off" or some such, and they really mean it. Zippers aren't easy enough so they fasten using MAGNETS. A busy parent (i.e. a parent) can change an outfit in 5 seconds, one handed, before rushing to work.  //  The point is, some products are sold directly to the end user, and are forced to prioritize usability. Other products are sold to an intermediary whose concerns are typically different from the user's needs. Such products don't HAVE to end up as unusable garbage, but usually do.  //  OK, back to Blackboard! It’s actually designed to look extremely attractive to the administrators (not professors and definitely not students) who make purchase decisions. Since they can't easily test usability, they instead make comparisons based on... checklists of features.   //  And that's exactly what's wrong with Blackboard. It has every feature ever dreamed up. But like anything designed by a committee, the interface is incoherent and any task requires at least fifteen clicks (and that's if you even remember the correct sequence the first time).  //  Software companies can be breathtakingly clueless when there's a layer of indirection between them and their users. Everyone who's suffered through Blackboard will have the same reaction to this: try having less functionality! edscoop.com/how-canvas-cam...  //  The grumbling about Blackboard has finally gotten loud enough that schools are paying a modicum of attention to usability when evaluating alternatives. Blackboard's market share has dropped dramatically and this will probably continue. Good.  //  Here’s the kicker, though. It's extremely likely that whichever vendor emerges on top will fall into the same trap. The incentives almost guarantee it. Once profs and students put down the pitchforks, committees will go back to their checklists, and feature creep will resume.  //  Blackboard is 20 years old. If Twitter is around in 20 years, let's see how this prediction holds up. And now I have to go rescue a three-month old from an extremely cute and equally uncomfortable outfit.

Replying to

Twitter is different. Any product that has to convince the users to use it has to try real hard. Any product that has a captive audience doesn't.  Many internal tools suck big time because nobody cares about the frustrations of internal users. "solve it with training" is common

Replying to @random_walker @zeynep

100% true. Blackboard, like most educational software/tech is made for Deanland, where flashy interfaces and lots of buzzwords hide a complete lack of substance. I also think the disciplines themselves do this, emphasizing glib "quantifiable" methodologies to get that deanland $.

Replying to @J_Plus @random_walker @zeynep

This is terrifyingly true with much of the newer, interventions-based online curriculums schools are implementing. Targeted to the admins with lots of data to mine, horrifying for teachers to instruct with.

Replying to @benoror @ryanflorence and 3 others  ... What I mean is that by looking at the code and product features I can tell it evolved towards the same *all-in-one* solution for education institutions. //

It's Conway's law that is projected from Ed institutions bureocracy reflected in product features bloat. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, specially if it ships and sells well, even to the beforementioned middle-men. [Conway's law:
organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. — M. Conway^[2] ]

Stage 2: Innovation Theater. Lots of innovation activities, such as hackathons, design thinking classes, innovation workshops. Folks start to use innovationspeak, but the core business operations are little changed.

Stage 3: Process Theater. Efforts are made to change processes such as procurement, personnel, security, legal, etc., in order to execute on an innovation mandate. As these process changes are divorced from long-term and durable strategic investments, they are as durable as building sandcastles on the beach.