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I develop free software because of CUNY and Blackboard

For two reasons, Blackboard is the key to why I develop free software.

The first reason is historical. I first got into free software development because of my work with the CUNY Academic Commons project. As spearheaded by Matt Gold, George Otte and others, the Commons is intended to create a space, using free software like WordPress and MediaWiki for members of the huge community of the City University of New York to discover each other and work together. The project is not pitched as a Blackboard alternative, for a number of reasons (primary among which is that the Commons’s Terms of Service prohibit undergraduate courses from being held on the site). Still, the Commons was conceived, at least in part, out of frustration about the near lack of collaborative tools and spaces in CUNY. And more than anything else, Blackboard (by which I mean Blackboard Learn, the proprietary learning management software that has been CUNY’s official courseware for quite a few years) is the embodiment of what can be so frustrating about academic technology at CUNY: central management, inflexibility, clunkiness, anti-openness. In this way, Blackboard begat the CUNY Academic Commons, and the CUNY Academic Commons begat Boone the developer.

There is another reason why Blackboard is integral to my free software development. It is ideological.

Short version: I love CUNY and I love public education. Blackboard is a parasite on both. Writing free software is the best way I know to disrupt the awful relationship between companies like Blackboard and vulnerable populations like CUNY undergraduates.

Here’s the longer version. I’ve been affiliated with CUNY in a number of capacities over the last decade: PhD student, adjunct lecturer, graduate fellow, full-time instructional technologist, external contractor. I’ve seen many parts of CUNY from many different points of view. Like so many others who have philandered their way through CUNY’s incestuous HR departments, my experience has rendered a decidedly love/hate attitude toward the institution. You can get a taste of the what CUNY hate looks like by glancing at something like @CUNYfail. The love runs deeper. Those fortunate enough to have “gotten around” at CUNY can attest to the richness of its varied campus cultures. In every office and every department on every campus, you’ll meet people who are innovating and striving to get their work done, in spite of a bureaucracy that sometimes feels designed to thwart.

And the students. CUNY is the City University of New York, the City University. It belongs to New York, and its history is tied up with the ideals of free education for New York’s residents. While the last few decades have seen the institution (as a whole, as well as a collection of campuses) evolve away from these ideals in various official and unofficial ways, it’s impossible to step into a CUNY classroom without getting a sense that CUNY still serves as a steward for New York’s future. CUNY is too huge and its population too varied to make general statements about the student body, but I’ll say anecdotally that, of all the universities I’ve been associated with, none even approach the level of racial, economic, and academic diversity that you find on a single campus, to say nothing of the system as a whole. CUNY is (to use a lame but apt cliché) a cross-section of New York: her first-generation Americans, her first-generation college students, her rich and her poor, her advantaged and her vulnerable. (See also Jim Groom’s I Bleed CUNY, which makes a similar point with a lot less abandon.)

Public education is a public trust, maybe the most important equalizer a state can provide for its citizens. CUNY, with the population of New York City as its public, could demonstrate the full potential of public education in a more complete and visible way than perhaps any other public university. It’s for this reason that it breaks my heart and boils my blood to see CUNY money – which is to say, student tuition and fees – poured into a piece of software like Blackboard.

In virtue of their age, undergraduates are inherently a vulnerable population, and CUNY undergraduates – reflecting as they do the full demographic spectrum of New York City itself – are doubly vulnerable. Many CUNY undergraduates go to CUNY because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t go to college at all. This imposes certain moral strictures on those responsible for managing and spending the money paid by CUNY students in tuition and fees. Wasting CUNY money is a far worse crime than wasting, say, shareholder money in a private company. Shareholders have freedom; if they don’t like your management, they vote with their feet/wallets/brokers. CUNY students, by and large, do not have the same freedom; it’s safe to say that, for most CUNY students most students, big-ticket NYU and Ivy Columbia are not reasonable alternatives. CUNY students are, in this sense, captive, which means that their hard-earned tuition money is captive as well. Thus it is a very bad thing to spend that money on things that aren’t worth it.

And Blackboard is not worth it. Vats of digital ink have been spilled expounding Blackboard’s turdiness, and this is no place to rehash all the arguments in depth. A short list, off the top of my head:

  • The software is expensive [EDIT 9-21-2011: See this post for more details on cost]
  • It’s extremely unpleasant to use.
  • It forces, and reinforces, an entirely teacher-centric pedagogical model.
  • It attempts to do the work of dozens of applications, and as a result does all of them poorly.
  • Blackboard data is stored in proprietary formats, with no easy export features built in, which creates a sort of Hotel California of educational materials
  • The very concept of a “learning management system” may itself be wrongheaded.
  • As recently reported, the software may be insecure, a fact that the company may have willingly ignored.
  • Blackboard’s business practices are monopolistic, litigious, and borgish

In short, Blackboard sucks. Blackboard supporters might claim that some, or even most, of the criticisms leveled above are false, or that they apply equally to other web software. Maybe. And I certainly don’t mean to downplay the difficulty of creating or assembling a suite of software that does well what Blackboard does poorly. But the argument against spending student money on something like Blackboard goes beyond a simple tally of weaknesses and strengths. As Jim Groom and others have argued for years, shelling out for Blackboard means sending money to a big company with no vested interest in the purposes of the institution, which in the case of CUNY is nothing less than the stewardship of New York City’s future, while the alternative is to divert money away from software licenses and into people who will actually support an environment of learning on our campuses. Frankly, even if Blackboard were a perfect piece of software, and even if its licensing and hosting fees were half of what it costs to hire full-time instructional technologists, programmers, and the like to support local instances of free software; even if these things were true, Blackboard would still be the wrong choice, because it perverts the goals of the university by putting tools and corporations before people. The fact that Blackboard is so expensive and so shitty just makes the case against it that much stronger.

As long as our IT departments are dominated by Microsoft-trained technicians and corporate-owned CIOs, perhaps the best way to advance the cause – the cause of justice in the way that student money is spent – is to create viable alternatives to Blackboard and its ilk, alternatives that are free (as in speech) and cheap (as in beer). This, more than anything else, is why I develop free software, the idea that I might play a role in creating the viable alternatives. In the end, it’s not just about Blackboard, of course. The case of Blackboard and CUNY is a particularly problematic example of a broader phenomenon, where vulnerable populations are controlled through proprietary software. Examples abound: Facebook, Apple, Google. (See also my Project Reclaim.) The case of Blackboard and its contracts with public institutions like CUNY is just one instance of these exploitative relationships, but it’s the instance that hits home the most for me, because CUNY is such a part of me, and because the exploitation is, in this case, so severe and so terrible.

On average, I spend about half of my working week doing unpaid work for the free software community. Every once in a while, I get discouraged: by unreasonable feedback, by systematic inertia, by community dramas, by my own limitations as a developer, and so on. In those moments, I think about CUNY, and I think about Blackboard, and I feel the fire burn again. For that, I say to CUNY (which I love) and Blackboard (which I hate): Thanks for making me into a free software developer.

The I develop free software because of CUNY and Blackboard by Boone Gorges, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Related posts:

  1. Dude, Where’s My Blackboard Contract?
  2. 2011
  3. BuddyPress plugins running on the CUNY Academic Commons
  4. The CUNY Academic Commons is hiring a developer!
  5. Blackboard hack: Merging classes from multiple pages

Post a comment — Trackback URI RSS 2.0 feed for these comments This entry (permalink) was posted on Monday, September 19, 2011, at 8:11 am by Boone Gorges. Filed in dev.wpmued, edtech, wordpress and tagged #projectreclaim, Blackboard, CUNY, CUNY Academic Commons, free software, mediawiki, open source, undergraduate education, Wordpress.

45 Responses to I develop free software because of CUNY and Blackboard

  1. spacer David Bisset says:

    Nice post B. Dedication is something lacking in the world, and good to see that applied to public education (my wife is a teacher).

    September 19, 2011 at 8:20 am | Permalink | Reply
  2. spacer J C says:

    Interesting. I’ve had similar experiences with bad software like this at a public high school, a public university, and a private college. I think a big part of the issue is that the model of education on which these institutions all operate is flawed. Educators have to spend a lot of their time putting up with bureaucratic crap, including lame attempts to make them use software like Blackboard. They spend much of the rest of the time repeating lectures about the same material, interrupted only occasionally by real interaction with students. Additionally, administrators at many educational institutions view technology as only a liability, rather than a means of decreasing costs like a businessperson would. For example, the public university I attended charges $100 extra per credit hour for online courses. That’s right; a course that doesn’t require a classroom, facilitates reuse of lecture recordings and other content, and uses the same “learning management system” as every other course somehow costs $9000-12000 extra (3 credit hours, 30-40 students), at least in their minds. University students are also pushed to buy textbooks, when the same information is available cheaper in online resources. Fees that every student has to pay for things like sports, and that frequently are not covered by grants to assist low-income students, are another problem. Changing the software used by existing education systems is not enough.

    September 19, 2011 at 12:54 pm | Permalink | Reply
    • spacer Boone Gorges says:

      Changing the software used by existing education systems is not enough.

      Agreed – it’s not sufficient. But I do think that it might be necessary, if only because the relationships between public institutions and software vendors are an emblem and enabler of larger systematic problems. Thanks for your comment!

      September 22, 2011 at 4:56 pm | Permalink | Reply
  3. spacer Jeff Schroeder says:

    Thankyou for your work! I see something like what you’re working on, and what Sal[1] is working on as the future of education.

    [1] www.khanacademy.org/

    September 19, 2011 at 1:28 pm | Permalink | Reply
  4. spacer Ben Winston says:

    I totally agree with you; I’m thankful to all those big corporate machines pumping out closed software, if only for the inspiration to create something more open, and by extent, better.

    As for the Blackboard software, I have no personal experience. However, the college I attended also hated the software with a passion (most likely for the reasons you mention here), and when the learning management software they used was bought by Blackboard, they began exploring some other, open-source opportunities. They introduced both Moodle (moodle.org/) and Sakai (sakaiproject.org/) as possible alternatives, and ultimately picked Moodle. Both of these are open source and dedicated to a more open education system. Also, I believe the cost is much less than Blackboard (I think the foundations will host the LMS for a reasonable annual fee, or the institution can host it themselves with the server overhead cost).

    Thanks for the great read!

    September 19, 2011 at 1:31 pm | Permalink | Reply
  5. spacer Mindy says:

    Go, Boone!!! I am honored to have worked with you, once upon a time.

    September 19, 2011 at 3:34 pm | Permalink | Reply
    • spacer Boone Gorges says:

      Thanks for stopping by, Mindy :)

      September 22, 2011 at 4:56 pm | Permalink | Reply
  6. spacer Linda Harasim says:

    This is such a great post. I feel heartened. Hopefully it will stir up other developers and folks with technical know-how, and engage you to work with we who are on the education design and implementation side. We need you and we need to work together. Great, awesome solutions are possible but corporate Blackboard, nor the confused moo Moodle will never get us close. These approaches are without vision, commitment or knowledge of how to support effective terrific learning.

    I have been working in online education since around 1983–am of one of the inventors—coming from the side of educational design and pedagogy (and a major researcher in what works and how.

    I think that WordPress has some really great potential. Thanks to those of you who are exploring new educational paths, and remember that pedagogy is key to successful technology.

    I hope to hear from folks in this blog. How terrific to hear this chorus of voices that is damning these crappy elearning software vendors!
    Good for you,
    Linda

    September 20, 2011 at 12:59 am | Permalink | Reply
  7. spacer Will says:

    Ever heard of Piazza (www.piazza.com)? A lot of professors seem to be having success with using piazza as a forum for their class.

    September 20, 2011 at 2:47 am | Permalink | Reply
  8. spacer Croce says:

    I have been using BlackBoard for my classes for the last 2 semesters. Mainly uploading syllabus, handouts etc, with the idea of students accessing the material whenever they want to.

    For this simple function, it’s not great (take s a lot of time to upload multiple documents), but it’s not bad either (when and if it’s done, it’s there and can be re-used next semester). Uploading extra material for students to get something else beyond the classroom (TED talks, blogs, videos) results in an obscure section of the online course, with minimal clicks- the hassle of navigating in BB turns many students off.

    At the end of the day, the important thing as you said is about CUNY investing correctly and I fully agree with you on this, they spend a shitload of money on bad ideas.

    And that’s only half of the story; many of us offer to do free service to promote CUNY as a whole, one way or another but inside politics do not allow for a change in status-quo. The only other way to do it is without CUNY’s help.

    September 20, 2011 at 6:14 am | Permalink | Reply
  9. spacer Brian Hanifin says:

    You do great work Boone! Keep it up, don’t get discouraged, we believe in you! :) I found your site because of your terrific Ning to BuddyPress importer. I used it on a test site, and then users started donating money to cover the costs of paying Ning. So the project got put on the back burner. But I really appreciate having that option should we need it.

    My son’s Elementary school is technologically and linguistically progressive. They teach Mandrin and Spanish to K-5 grades. They use digital whiteboards, laptops, and iPads in the classrooms. And while the administration uses Blackboard Connect to send Email newsletters parents, at least his Kindergarten Mandrin teacher uses Moodle, hosted by San Diego State University to share homework assignments. Although, his English teacher apparently uses the District’s Schoolwires website to upload homework PDFs. It is nice the teachers are free to explore different software for their needs.

    It appears someone hid Blackboard from their “Open Book” site. Your above “expensive” link does not return any results, and even a search for “black” contained in the vendor name does not return any results.

    September 21, 2011 at 11:09 am | Permalink | Reply
  10. spacer Brian Hanifin says:

    Note: the following comments are intended to encourage you to solve your problem, not discourage you. Please view them as such. :)

    You proclaimed your frustration with Blackboard, but did not recommend an alternative. It doesn’t matter how much Blackboard software costs if there is no alternative. Perhaps you would find your open source project time more fulfilling if you spent it creating a Blackboard alternative?

    I am not directly involved in an academic institution, so for selfish reasons I would prefer you to continue working on BuddyPress. :) However, until you have a compelling alternative to Blackboard you will not have any chance at convincing the administration to change software… right? Or perhaps there a project that has a decent start that you could help mold into a better alternative?

    Thank you for inspiring me to get back to work on my Open Source app project. :D

    September 21, 2011 at 11:34 am | Permalink | Reply
    • spacer Boone Gorges says:

      Thanks for your comments, Brian.

      I am peripherally involved in the development of https://github.com/scholarpress/buddypress-courseware, which is a BuddyPress courseware add-on. (I was the mentor for the Google Summer of Code project where it was first developed.)

      I also happen to think that working on social software like BuddyPress is, in a sense, better than working on dedicated edu software, for two reasons. One, social software affects more people, and similar arguments to the ones advanced here about CUNY and Blackboard could be made about individuals and Facebook, with the exception that with Facebook you’re not spending money but are handing over your photos and other intellectual property. Two, social software like BP poses a viable alternative to dedicated LMS-type software. So, while I take your “put your money where your mouth is” challenge in the friendly spirit in which it was intended :), I have to say that I am putting my money about as much where my mouth is as possible.

      September 22, 2011 at 5:12 pm | Permalink | Reply
  11. spacer Aram Zucker-Scharff says:

    I could not agree with you more. Blackboard is a terrible system and a terrible company and the money that many universities waste on the system is shameful.

    That being said, the problem that we face if we want to get rid of Blackboard is huge. Larg

    September 21, 2011 at 1:29 pm | Permalink | Reply
  12. spacer Aram Zucker-Scharff
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