Blacklist Blackboard
As a lecturer at ASU, I teach four classes — more than 200 students — with no teaching assistants. I am hired on a yearly contractual basis and have been told to wait until June 30 to find out if I’ll have a job in July, even though I’m already on the fall schedule to teach four more classes. I have a lot to complain about, but what has compelled me to write this letter is my frustration with Blackboard.
This week, I went to a computer-training course and was shocked to learn that a function I have been using for two years here doesn’t work well: e-mailing class announcements to students!
I try my best to keep my students updated on relevant course issues and Web links by typing announcements in Blackboard, and checking the box that says “Send announcements to student e-mail immediately.” Then, I get frustrated when students ask me questions and curtly reply, “I answered that question already on e-mail, didn’t you get it?” They mumble that maybe their spam filter ate it.
I apologize. I was told that this function doesn’t work properly, that only about one out of 10 emails actually are sent, that the problem has been under investigation, yada yada.
So, I have been sending pertinent e-mail to all my hundreds of students that they rarely get because the computer program is flawed. The problem is known and under investigation, yet the flaw has not been properly documented on any of the help screens I could find, and the innocent “e-mail this to all students” box quietly remains unquestioned. At the very least, can’t this box be disabled?
I have little power to change the complex structures of the interweb’s systems of tubes or the arcane mysteries of the educational industrial complex. So, let me offer the workaround I was told: “Check Blackboard often.”
Jeffrey A. Ow
Lecturer
